This Study Shows What Shorts Are Doing to Your Brain

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Speaking on attention spans and people afraid to have social interactions, well, I've seen this uh claim pop up wow, several times over the past year um that Tik Tok, I don't know why they didn't include Tik Tok in this cuz it started with Tik Tok, but of course they're all the same. Tik Tok, YouTube, Instagram Reels could be harming your attention span according to a new study.

[00:00:25]Researchers found heavy short-form viewers go scored lower on focus and impulse control tests. So, I started seeing this circulating a while back and I couldn't actually find any academic papers on this, any research whatsoever in any of any kind. I would just constantly see imagery like this or memes or info graphs claiming this. I mean, common sense tells us this has got to be true, right?

[00:00:55]But I personally want to see the study and I would hope you would want it, too.

[00:00:59]So, let's see this time if we actually get a study.

[00:01:05]Here we go. It comes from China's Zhejiang University showed that short-form video content is directly impacting viewers' attention spans.

[00:01:14]Brain rot might actually be a real thing, not just Gen Z slang according to research published in the scientific journal Frontiers. The 2024 study started to make waves online 2 years ago.

[00:01:26]2 years later thanks to its harrowing findings which show that consuming short-form videos negatively affect your brain's attention span and executive control. So, I didn't find this and I've been looking I've been looking for like actual data, right? For more or less a year since I started seeing these memes spread.

[00:01:47]The study consisted of 48 participants made of 35 women and 13 men with an average age of 21.8 years. All participants reported regular use of social media and consumption of short-form content.

[00:02:01]They completed assessments and questionnaires about their tendency toward addictive short video use, as well as a self-control scale that measured their capacity for behavioral self-regulation. They also underwent more scales that measured their impulsivity, stress, mind wandering, attention control, and anxiety and depression.

[00:02:17]After that, they took an attention network test consisting of 192 trials that measured how they maintained vigilance, spatial focus, and executive control via EEG. Those who reported higher instances of consuming short-form content were more likely to have less self-control, scored lower on the test's focus section, and showed weaker activity in the frontal midline region of the prefrontal prefrontal cortex, the core of the brain's focus and control center, which is really alarming especially considering uh that your prefrontal cortex, I believe, continues to develop until around the age of 25.

[00:02:55]So, imagine the impact that this is having on growing minds.

[00:03:02]These results suggest that an increased tendency towards mobile phone short video addiction could negatively impact self-control and diminish executive control within the realm of attentional functions, the study reads.

[00:03:15]This is the latest study of this kind.

[00:03:17]There was also a 2025 study from American Psychological Association which showed a similar correlation between social media use and attention and inhibito- inhibitory control. I got to find this one cuz, like I said, I actually um I'm I'm glad that there are some actual studies coming out cuz the last time I tried to find any, they just existed in the form of memes.

[00:03:41]Oh, so this is just from November.