Twenty years ago, a normal person would endure two and a half minutes concentrating on something.
Today, barely forty-seven seconds. Something has quietly broken inside our heads as we swiped our thumbs up thousands of times a day.
It has a name, it has brain scans that confirm it and it has a word that the most prestigious dictionary in the world chose to define our time.
Why does your mind feel like an old rag after an hour on your phone?
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
If you’ve ever shut down TikTok with the feeling of having eaten three bags of chips with your brain, you’re not alone.
You’re not imagining it either.
In late 2024, Oxford linguists chose “brain rot” as Word of the Year, after its use skyrocketed 230 percent in twelve months.
More than 37,000 people voted. Almost all of them were young. And almost all, ironically, voted from the same phone that was rotting their brains.
The expression is not new. It was coined by an American philosopher in 1854, when electricity did not yet exist.
In his most famous book, written on the shores of a lake, he wondered why no one bothered to cure such brain rot that, according to him, was much more fatal than potato rot.
Almost two centuries later, generation Z and generation Alpha have rescued the word to laugh, half jokingly, half scared, at what happens to them when they consume too much absurd content. Sketches of talking toilets. Memes generated by artificial intelligence. Fifteen-second videos that they will not remember tomorrow. The curious thing is that the word has gone viral on the same networks he accuses.
Behind the joke, however, there are laboratories working very seriously.
A meta-analysis published a few years ago in one of the most widely read psychiatric journals in the world cross-referenced the MRI scans of 718 people.
The conclusion disturbed neuroscientists: Those who used the internet in problematic ways had less gray matter in the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex.
These are precisely the areas that shrink in people addicted to cocaine or alcohol. Other studies have found accelerated cortical thinning over three years in intensive social media users, and measurable reductions in the nucleus accumbens, the heart of the reward system.
One of the best-known voices in this field is that of a Stanford psychiatrist specializing in addictions who explains it bluntly.
The smartphone, he says, is the modern hypodermic needle that injects dopamine into the human brain. Every like, every notification, every funny video that ends just as the next one begins, releases a small chemical discharge.
The problem is that the brain has memory. To compensate for so much artificial pleasure, the natural production of dopamine drops. And then the trap appears: you need more stimulation to feel the same, and when you close the app, you feel empty.
He estimates that it takes a whole month of digital fasting for those circuits to return to their baseline. The first two weeks are the worst. Irritability. Insomnia.
That anxiety that people confuse with depression and that is actually withdrawal syndrome.
Meanwhile, a professor of Computer Science in California had been measuring how long our attention lasts with a stopwatch for two decades.
His data are devastating. In 2004, the average person spent 150 seconds staring at a screen before switching.
In 2012 it dropped to 75. Since 2016, the figure has stabilized at 47 seconds. Half the time, we don’t even get to 40. He documented three consequences: we make more mistakes, we take longer to finish tasks and we feel more stress, because each jump requires the brain to reorient itself and exhaust it.
The Popcorn Brain
Some researchers have dubbed this state popcorn brain.
The metaphor is a good one: a mind that explodes in a thousand directions, unable to sit still enough to finish a chapter of a book or continue a long conversation without taking out its cell phone.
A few months ago, a scientific journal published the first formal academic definition of brain rot. The list of effects is long and recognizable: impairment of working memory, cognitive overload, emotional desensitization, negative self-concept, compulsive behaviors and the famous doomscrolling, that practice of swallowing bad news until you give up.
The most vulnerable are, as always, those whose brains are still under construction. The prefrontal cortex doesn’t finish maturing until age 25, and a social psychologist at New York University has become the loudest voice on the subject.
He maintains that between 2010 and 2015 something unprecedented happened. Teens swapped their flip phones for smartphones connected to high-speed internet, opened accounts on Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, and mental health indicators plummeted en bloc.
In the United States, college depression rose 134 percent in a decade.
Anxiety, 106 percent. Teenage girls were hit the hardest.
This researcher does not mess around.
He proposes four rules: no smartphone before high school, no social networks before the age of 16, mobile-free schools and much more outdoor play without adult supervision.
Australia has already listened to him.
As of December 2025, no one under the age of 16 can open an account on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, or X. Platforms that break the law face millions of dollars in fines. France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece and Spain are studying similar measures.
None of this, it should be said, is a unanimous panic. Cambridge researchers have been reminding us for years that the correlation between screen time and adolescent well-being, once analysed with statistical rigour on large samples, is small. Comparable, they say, to the effect of eating potatoes or wearing glasses. The main association of psychologists in the United States has also been careful: networks are not intrinsically good or bad, the important thing is who uses them, how and for what.
What does seem clear is that empty content works in the mind like ultra-processed food in the body. It fills, saturates, engages and does not nourish. The good news is that the brain has plasticity.
Long reading.
Walking without headphones.
Face-to-face conversations.
Sleeping without your mobile phone on the bedside table.
Recipes for curing brain rot look suspiciously like lifelong recipes for better living.
In short, Oxford chose brain rot as Word of the Year after its use shot up 230 percent. Science confirms real changes in the brains of intensive network users: less gray matter, reduced attention from 150 to 47 seconds in twenty years, anxiety and depression skyrocketing in adolescents. Australia has banned minors under the age of 16 from the networks. The solution, according to experts, is less screen and more slow life.
References
Firth, J., Torous, J., Stubbs, B., Firth, J. A., Steiner, G. Z., Smith, L., Alvarez Jimenez, M., Gleeson, J., Vancampfort, D., Armitage, C. J., & Sarris, J. (2021). Structural gray matter differences in problematic usage of the internet: A systematic review and meta analysis. Molecular Psychiatry, 26(4), 1200 1209.
Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin Press.
Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine nation: Finding balance in the age of indulgence. Dutton.
Mark, G. (2023). Attention span: A groundbreaking way to restore balance, happiness and productivity. Hanover Square Press.
Orben, A., & Przybylski, A. K. (2019). The association between adolescent well being and digital technology use. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(2), 173 182.
Oxford University Press. (2024). Brain rot named Oxford Word of the Year 2024. https://corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024/
Parliament of Australia. (2024). Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024.
Thoreau, H. D. (1854). Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Ticknor and Fields.
Yousef, S., Papinczak, Z. E., Gardner, L. A., Champion, K. E., Stockings, E., & Newton, N. C. (2025). Demystifying the new dilemma of brain rot in the digital era: A review. Brain Sciences, 15(3), 283
