#When your brain rots

If 2013 is Oxford's word of the year was "selfie", in 2016 "postistina", and in 2021 "vax", it is a completely logical continuation of this sequence - "brain rot" (brain rot). It is a word whose use has become widespread in the last year, which is more and more common in the conventional media, and which experts from Oxford University Press (Oxford University Press) decided to declare 2024 as the year.

The term "brain rot" was coined by Henry David Thoreau, an American who first called for civil disobedience in the mid-19th century. Thoreau, explaining that in relation to the government we have both obligations and rights, refused to pay taxes because he did not agree with the government's decisions on participation in the Mexican-American War and did not support slavery. He used the term to indicate that the intellectual level of citizens is declining - undemanding, simple and unequivocal ideas are more valued. Despite all that Thoreau brought to political theory and practice with his persistent commitment to limit the arbitrariness of government, this term of his remained quite unpopular for 170 years. But the meaning is still similar today. As explained by Oxford University Press, it is used to express concern about the impact of an excessive amount of low-quality, trivial and banal online content, especially on social networks. And while brain rot is often used as a joke at its own expense, the effects of long-term exposure to social media content can indeed be linked to the deterioration of people's intellectual abilities and mental state - something that is noticeable and universal across much of the planet.

And while the first "whistleblowers" and critics of social networks and the tricks used by their creators received all sorts of labels and quick judgments such as "raising moral panic", in the meantime hundreds of studies have been published that directly linked the use of social networks and numerous negative consequences.

FOCUS IN THE AIR

"We have forgotten how to be alone with our thoughts. We are constantly interrupting ourselves," explains Dr. Anna Lembke, head of the Clinic for Dual Diagnosis of Addiction at Stanford University. Digital devices, especially phones, constantly interrupt us - messages, activities from social networks, emails, calls, advertisements, news... everything is designed so that we use phones as much as possible. Dr. Lembke adds that since the advent of smartphones, we rarely concentrate on long-term tasks or enter into a creative flow.

And although a very distorted and imprecise research has been circulating for almost an entire decade that during the first 15 years of this century, the human attention span decreased from 12 to 8 seconds, while it is a solid 9 seconds for goldfish, the situation may not be like that, but it has changed. Speaking about cognitive decline, Professor Earl Miller, a neuroscientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explains that the human brain is not really designed for "multitasking", i.e. performing several tasks at the same time. In fact, he can focus on one thought or two at most at a time. What we consider to be multitasking, that "mythical activity" as some researchers call it, is actually moving from topic to topic and returning to them again - juggling, that is, fragmentation of focus. However, this leaves consequences for the efficiency of the brain, and one of the better-known studies on student learning showed that just the occasional text message that they received reduced their performance by 20 percent.

"Newsfeed", that first page on the social network that we browse endlessly, is itself extremely fragmented not only because we have different interests, but also because it has been given such an algorithm: political news, followed by a forecast of a storm, a new Zara coat, someone's cat, a photo from the winter, a selfie, a DIY video... and everything in a circle. Our brain "finds" all that information in less than a minute.

John Graffman, head of cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explains that lack of task depth (relation to what we see on a social network) and multitasking (scrolling through a variety of content) may seem satisfying, but train in the long run. avoiding deep focus. The detrimental impact of the use of social networks on academic achievement has been demonstrated in a large number of studies, and the first more concrete researches began to appear as early as 2013.

THE DOPAMINE CYCLE

Fragmentation of attention might not be so terrible if we did not spend so much time on the Internet and if we were not "forced" to stay on social networks. As explained by Dr. Lembke, who is the author of the book Dopamine Nation from the year 2021, we have been living immersed in dopamine for a long time, and we see its most obvious trace in the constant reaching for digital devices.

Dopamine is a complex chemical substance that the body itself produces and that has many roles in the body. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter and hormone, and it is loudest as a motivator. It is the one who craves on our behalf and who drives us to certain behaviors in search of pleasure. And when we talk about various forms of addiction, it is our main problem. The evolutionary role of dopamine is to be secreted from certain neural pathways in the brain when something beneficial for us happens. For example, when a person came across a tree full of sweet fruits a few million years ago, when he met a member of the tribe, when he found a convenient shelter or a sexual partner, the brain secretes dopamine and the person feels pleasure. A few million years later, we still think of a juicy sandwich and a handsome man, but now the pleasures in life are abundant and constant. In the case of social networks, we are attracted by many elements: there is social contact, pleasant colorful contents, endless scrolling and the possibility that the next post you see will be extremely pleasant, that someone will "like" our post, leave us a comment or send us a message.

Social networks keep us in a latent state of anticipation, and dopamine in mood and motivation. When we get to that exciting moment - a message, image, content that interests us - we instantly feel pleasure, dopamine rushes for a moment, but in the next second it tells us: more, I want more! And while we are "sitting" on one of the social networks, we are overdosed on dopamine, very eager for the next "reward", tired of "scrolling", and our brain is as excited as it is numb.

When we log out, all that dopamine we're used to suddenly disappears. Even other motivations - such as a sexual experience with another person, juicy food or live chat - are less available in real life and require more engagement. The social network, as well as online pornography, video games and some other content are a quick fix for our dopamine cravings and that's why many spend far more time on them every day than on food, conversation and sex combined.

"Addiction is a spectrum disorder," says Dr. Lembke, and this also applies to addiction to digital devices and social networks. For some people, social networks don't really bother them, while for others they have turned their lives upside down. "It gets into philosophical questions: How does the time I spend on my phone affect my ability to be a good parent, spouse or friend in subtle ways?" says Anna Lembke.

DECAY

A number of neuroscientists and social psychologists, however, state that most people are nevertheless resistant to many of these challenges and that for most the benefits of technology outweigh the harms. However, this does not apply to young people and especially to children. Dopamine with its "more, I want more" needs makes us focus on immediate gratification and is controlled by the limbic brain, the one in the central part that processes emotions, not the prefrontal cortex that solves problems, plans, makes decisions and is in charge of rational things. That limbic brain enjoys being immersed in images of cats and coats from Zara.

In teenagers, however, although the brain has reached full size, the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed. That's why adults consider their reactions and decisions frivolous, to say the least. Social networks, which require that teenager (and in the US, for example, the average teenager spends 10 hours a day on the phone) to click, like, post and scroll excessively, activate them on an emotional level. Jonathan Hite, social psychologist from New York University and author of the book Anxious generation, states that the influence of social networks on mental health is already clearly recognized among people born since 1996. This is the generation, according to Hite, which has been on the Internet since 2010 and which in the next five years has felt all the charms and consequences of social networks, including the fragmentation of attention in its full glory and what Oxford calls brain rot.

"It's very different from how life used to be, when we had to endure much more trouble," concludes Dr. Lembke, adding that we lose the ability to delay gratification, solve problems, and deal with frustration and pain in various forms.