everything you think you know about brain rot is a lie

[00:00:00]You deserve to know the truth. Everybody is talking to you about this idea of brain rot, and I keep seeing it all over my feed, but I wasn't sure what it really was. So, I went away, I read the science, I read the research, and I'm going to tell you what brain rot really is, what it isn't, what you need to be scared of, what you should be doing, and what is just plain fear-mongering that isn't useful to anybody. So, if you care about preserving your brain, about becoming more intelligent, and about preserving your ability to think critically, to come up with new ideas, to formulate opinions without just taking in what the algorithm feeds you, this is the one video that you really, really need to watch. We need to start in ancient Greece.

[00:00:40]Socrates thought that writing would melt our brains.

[00:00:44]Socrates thought that the transition from everything being spoken and having to remember spoken word to being able to rely on written-down scripts, on pieces of tablet or paper or whatever it is that had information on them, that that would absolutely destroy our brains.

[00:01:00]That that would cause us to be lazy, to be completely unable to come up with new ideas.

[00:01:05]And then, after Socrates and the writing, novels, when books came out, they were said to melt particularly women's minds. We wouldn't be able to handle it. We'd go insane. Our brains would rot. They would fry.

[00:01:18]And then, after that, comic books. TV was dubbed the idiot box. It was thought that TV was going to turn us all into idiots, that we were not going to be able to form our own opinions. When video games came out, that was an even bigger moral panic. Now, social media and AI, we're getting the same moral panic. Everybody's saying this is going to destroy our brains.

[00:01:39]The reason I'm telling you all of this is to establish the fact that we as humans are skeptical of new technology by nature.

[00:01:46]We think that it's going to make our lives measurably worse, and we think that it's going to damage our brain.

[00:01:52]Because it is new, because it is novel, and a lot of the time because we don't fully understand what its consequences are going to be.

[00:01:59]What I'm not going to say is that that means that our current moral panic doesn't mean anything.

[00:02:03]Because actually, particularly if we look at the latter part, the TV, video games, they have had very negative consequences for large swaths of the population. And we're starting to see a lot of data that shows that social media and that the use of chatbot AI, particularly things like ChatGPT or like character.ai, these are also having negative consequences for the people who use them.

[00:02:27]So, I want to start by saying we're naturally skeptical of these technologies, but also that these technologies are shown to do some bad things. This matters methodologically, simply because it should just lower your prior, right? Just because people are skeptical of a new technology doesn't mean it's bad for you. So, don't take everything as being like, "Oh, this is the worst thing that has ever happened."

[00:02:45]Humans [snorts] are just naturally a bit skeptical. What the evidence does not support, and this is what you really need to internalize, is brain rot is not your brain getting damaged.

[00:02:56]There is a big difference. So, watching a lot of short-form video or constantly outsourcing your cognitive load to artificial intelligence, this is doing something in your brain. It's not damaging your brain. It is rewiring your neural pathways. Your brain has this property, you've probably heard of it, you probably know it, and I'm just going to touch on it briefly, known as neuroplasticity, which basically means the structure of your brain physically changes by you doing different things.

[00:03:22]So, if you do something for the first time, it's going to be very, very difficult because your brain doesn't have a neural network, it doesn't have this sort of like pathway in your brain that makes it easy for you to do this action, to go from, "Okay, I want to do this action." to action complete. The more you do that particular action, the easier it is for you to do it because neurons will wire together that make that pathway between thinking you're going to do the thing and actually doing the thing much smoother and much more efficient. The more you do it, the stronger those wires, that wiring is, the stronger those neurons are sort of connected together, and the easier it is for you to do the thing. So, if you're constantly reading long novels, if you're constantly writing big essays, then you're going to get better at doing those things. You're going to become more articulate, more well-reasoned, more able to form your own opinions.

[00:04:04]If you neglect to do those things, then you don't have those strong neural pathways that allow you to do them.

[00:04:11]You're going to find it really hard to have sustained attention, to form your own opinions, to be able to build up constructive arguments, and to be able to think critically. If you're constantly looking at short-form content, then your sort of desire for short-term dopamine, that's going to increase. Your brain is structurally changing to reward what you do more of, to make what you do the most easier. And if you're constantly picking up short-form social media, if you're constantly picking up your phone, it becomes easier, you crave doing those things, and you find it much harder to do other things. That's not necessarily damage, that is just a rewiring of neural pathways in your brain because your brain has this property of neuroplasticity. So, neuroplasticity can be best thing ever, but it's also the reason that people are saying that we have brain rot. And I hesitate to use this word rotting because you're not really rotting, you're just being conditioned. So, short-form content runs on variable ratio reinforcement. This is the same things that makes, for example, slot machines really, really addictive. And it's basically that you get dopamine hits on this very quick cycle because you're anticipating the fact that you might win. And to your brain, winning is getting a video that you find funny, that you find educational, that you find entertaining. That's like a little win.

[00:05:16]You get this little boost of dopamine in anticipation of the next win. And it might be that you scroll through 10 rubbish videos, but your brain is constantly thinking, "Oh, well, the next scroll, the next scroll is going to be the good one." And so, you keep going.

[00:05:27]And that's just classical conditioning.

[00:05:28]The real cost of this isn't that you can't pay attention because you're paying a lot of attention to your phone. It's that you can't pay sustained attention to things with particularly delayed gratification. So, studying now for an exam whose results you're going to get in a month, that's delayed gratification. You don't get that instant reward that you get from hitting a nice cool new video. And so it becomes hard for you to engage in this sustained attention over time. And the mechanism that you should be genuinely worried about is boredom.

[00:05:58]So, the big problem is that we have basically deleted dead time from our lives. So, when you are walking to school, walking to class, walking to the shop, when you are at the gym, when you are in the elevator, whatever it is, we're filling these moments with a little scroll. And that is reducing dead time. Dead time is so important to your brain because dead time offers you the opportunity to actually kind of consolidate your thoughts.

[00:06:24]To be able to come up with new ideas, you use your default mode network, which is the ability of your brain to basically imagine things, to come up with new ideas, to make new connections, to make new links, to digest the memories that you've been taking in throughout the day. If you're constantly filling your day with stimulation, you're not allowing your brain to engage in that consolidation whatsoever.

[00:06:42]Filling every gap with input actually reduces your output because your brain doesn't have time to plan and schedule and just think through things.

[00:06:50]And that can be one of the reasons why you feel so stressed and tired all the time, simply because your brain is always engaged. It's always on. You're not giving it the opportunity to really do the consolidation that it needs to do. Because the problem is conditioning and not damage, that means you can recondition to get better and to be able to do those things that you basically conditioned yourself to be unable to do. There are three things that you should be doing if you genuinely care about reducing brain rot or more accurately, reconditioning your brain to be able to engage in sustained focus and sustained attention over time.

[00:07:24]The first thing that you want to do is deliberately reintroduce boredom. I'm going to be so candid and say that I had a bit of a kick up the ass the other day when I realized that actually I was auditing my day and I thought to myself, "Goodness me, I don't have a time when I am not giving myself input. When I'm not listening to a podcast or watching a video or doing something, I'm trying to consume, consume, consume, but I'm not giving my brain the ability to actually think over what it is that I'm consuming. So, I am in the process of deliberately reintroducing boredom into my life. I've stopped listening to music and podcasts when I'm walking, and I walk for maybe like 30, 40 minutes a day, so that's 40 minutes now that I've got for my brain to just think through things. I'm going to try and not listen to music at the gym. I've yet to try this out because I really like listening to music at the gym, but I want to see whether doing that can actually help me feel a bit more clear afterwards, gain that clarity, gain that ability for my brain to actually step back and plan and think about things. The second thing is to protect single tasking, basically to do one thing and then move on to the next because if you're constantly switching between different ideas, then again, that is reducing your ability to sustain focus over time, but it's also just giving your brain reinforcement of the dopamine cycle where you're constantly looking for something that's going to give you that next hit. If you're constantly switching between tasks, that's kind of mimicking the scroll mechanism on your phone, whereby you're kind of trying to get a new hit of success or a hit of productivity from constantly flicking between things.

[00:08:47]The trap here is that if you're constantly flicking between lots of different things, you're not really getting anything done to the peak of your ability because there's a thing known as attentional residue. Basically, it takes you about 23 minutes to refocus once you start a new task, and if you're switching between tasks less than 23 minutes, you're never reaching full cognitive capacity. The third thing is to reset your baseline with low stimulation on purpose. So, if you know that you wake up and you scroll on your phone, wake up and read a book.

[00:09:15]If you know that you scroll on your phone before bed, put your book on your bedside table and read it before bed.

[00:09:20]If you know that you're going to be scrolling, for example, on the tube or you know that you're going to be scrolling whilst you're walking, lock your phone for a little bit. Turn your phone off. Like you can introduce these frictions, and you can lower your baseline of stimulation. The big thing here is that a lot of the time you're picking up your phone simply because it is what you've trained your brain to do.

[00:09:39]Just condition your brain to go straight to pick up your phone when you have dead time. And that's not a bad thing. You're not, you know, morally flawed for doing that. That's just you've trained your brain into doing it. But the wonderful thing is, because of neuroplasticity, you can train your brain out of doing that. You can train your brain to just be.

[00:09:56]And to be present and to not pick up your phone all the time. And what I found for me is it helps either if I can to switch my phone off fully because then even if I pick it up, like I'm doing this subconsciously. I'm doing this automatically. And if I see that it's turned off, it actually flicks me into the moment and I think, oh, why am I picking up my phone? Like there's no reason for me to be on my phone right now. I put it back down and I get back to work. If I can't turn my phone off, for example, I need notifications on or I'm expecting a call, I'll put an object physically on top of my phone. So, there's like this paperweight next to me right now and just before when I was planning out my videos, I had this over my phone. Why?

[00:10:29]Because it means that if I'm automatically going to my phone, I I can't. I have to pick up an object and that makes me rethink again, do I really need to be on my phone? But if I get a notification or I do actually need to be on my phone, I can pick it up with intention and pick up my phone with intention. So, your brain isn't actually rotting. You're conditioning your brain away from what you want to do.

[00:10:49]And you can recondition your brain to do what you want to do.

[00:10:52]That is the magic of neuroplasticity and I hope this video has made you recognize that you might be on the wrong path in the moment and you might be optimizing for the wrong thing.

[00:11:00]But this is a bit of a stopgap and you can now, from now on, be optimizing for the right thing. If you found this video helpful, then please do subscribe to my channel. I'm building out so much more interesting neuroscience content at the moment around productivity, around philosophy, around how your brain really works. And this YouTube channel is going to be the central hub for absolutely all of it. So, do subscribe, share this video with any of your friends that you think would benefit from watching it.

[00:11:26]And as always, I will see you in the next video.