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- Hacker News
- Small-n fMRI studies tend to have issues with replication because of how noisy and difficult to use fMRI machines are. I would take this research more as an indication that more research is needed, as opposed to the be-all and end-all of how short-form video interacts with the brain.
(Caveat: I have no expertise with neuroscience or using fMRI machines. I'm mostly basing my comment off pre-replication crisis fMRI experiments that failed to produce useful data upon scrutiny.)
by mvlipwig - Blipverts you say.by MBCook
- I never made that connection, and I am old enough to have seen Max Headroom when it came out. Thank you.
I would like to take this opportunity to state one of my core beliefs: we are all easily programmed meat machines. Accepting this fact is uncomfortable, but important.
by consumer451 - Yesterday someone showed a TikTok video where a friend of him was interviewed on the street. The question was, “What is your best fighting stance?”
I found it surprising how little depth the video had
by huijzer - Why only TikTok videos. Other contenders are Instagram reels, Youtube Shorts, Snapchat, etc.
BTW its Social Media as per studies
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12329480/
Whole bunch of research,
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/?term=Social+Media
But, my point is its normal Every generation behave differently. We shouldn't judge it even via these studies.
by gagan2020 - The title of the linked article is "and Instagram reels".
edit: Oh someone changed the title of the post now too.
by rightbyte - I don’t have tiktok now, but years ago I downloaded it (i think before it was called musically), I used it for a day or two, and I remember after an hour or so of using it I get nauseous like how you might get on a boat, not severe enough to puke but still not comfy that you need to go for a walk or something to feel better. I deleted it and never used it again. And I don’t use any mainstream social media either since all bow have these shorts, if it’s not text based like rss or hn, it will be YouTube on videos at least 20min duration.by tamimio
- I don’t know why no one talking about the importance of GABA and glutamate in the study. To me that’s the most fascinating and important part. They found that the children with higher GABA had a harder time switching off this circuit. GABA is essentially equal to sleepiness, depression, and fatigue. It’s the most widely used inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain.
And on the other side, we have glutamate, which is excitatory you can associate this with mania, insomnia, just generally higher energy. These kids were more able to stop the scrolling.
Both these neurotransmitters are going to be controlled a lot by a genetics, but also a lot by diet. GABA and glutamate enter convert into each other through glutamate decarboxylase and it needs vitamin B6, pyridoxine, to do this.
by Noaidi - Isn't much of all this the modern couch potato and same as many research done being glued to the TV? It's channel surfing.by jzer0cool
- It's a lot worse. It's like comparing a bow and arrow to an M-16. Yes they both shoot projectiles, but...
The quantity is endless. You can run out of channels, sweep through them a few times, give up, and get bored, while doom scrollers give you an infinite stream of faux-novelty. It's entirely possible to scroll for eternity and never run out of what at least seems, to your limbic system, like information and social stimulation.
The content is generally much lower quality than TV. Even really bad dumb TV is high art compared to a lot of what's on the doom scrollers. It's hyper-optimized for narrow addictiveness and literally nothing else.
There's a closed feedback loop optimization system in place. The site knows you're scrolling. It knows how fast, where you pause, in some cases even where your eyeballs are going. It knows what makes you interact. It knows what you watched before you stopped watching vs what you watched and kept watching. It also has tons of third party data on you and sensor data that often even includes your location. It can optimize its addiction mechanism in a personalized rapid feedback closed loop way that television could never achieve.
It's like a smart drug that tries to keep you hooked. Imagine if the heroin had a learning algorithm that adapted its chemical structure in real time to keep you from quitting and it was powered by fleet-wide learning cross all heroin molecules in the world.
by api - Headlines like this are tiring because they're always a vast simplification of an epidemic that has a much more complicated series of social and psychological causes than a simple "it turns ur brain off"by hbn
- It used to be that reading books made you an intellectual. In the age of TikTok and shorts being able to watch a movie for 2 hours makes you an intellectual.by avgDev
- Reading might not make you intellectual, but if you read because you thought it made you intellectual, it definitely made you insufferable.by CuriouslyC
- Have you seen how they watch movies in China? Collectively, with hundreds of real-time comments flying over the screen.by mstaoru
- by 2OEH8eoCRo0
- I’d posit that we just puritanically glorify anything perceived as difficult, regardless of the correlation with “intellect.” I’m fine not having the same attention span as people who had to less stuff to do hundreds of years ago.
- What if I watch a movie in 56 two minute clips while someone extrudes playdoh in the corner?by Waterluvian
- The brain is incredibly energy hungry so it evolved to detect situations that don’t require full attention and activates the Default Mode Network. This happens when you’re zoning out to pretty much anything, and indicates that you’re essentially in “low power mode”.
My question here is whether the framing of the content in question “shutting off brain regions” is an honest one compared to what I said above. fMRI is amazing to be sure, but what it tells us is limited.
So without endorsing crap content on any way, I’m very skeptical of this article’s conclusions based on the study in question.
by EA-3167 - According to this paper from 2025 "The metabolic costs of goal-directed cognition are only 5% greater than the ongoing costs of resting neural activity and homeostasis.".
Zoning out doesn't change the energy consumption of the brain that much.
https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S136...
by pier25 - the article does note:
"The researchers caution against reading the deactivation as evidence of impaired cognitive function. As they put it in the paper, “this deactivation should not be interpreted as a failure of cognitive control capacity.” Instead, the team argues the pattern likely reflects an adaptive shift toward low-effort, automatic processing during passive, low-conflict viewing."
my take: if the study authors could qualify a subject's liked videos, they could qualify a subject's liked activities, and study activation thresholds prior to and post short form content exposure. this would provide a better substrate from which to draw such conclusions.
but I don't need a study to tell me that short form content fries the brain ... it fries my brain!
- This framing seems like the correct one, but I think that just like being physically sedentary leads to weakness of muscles and joints and health problems, so being mentally sedentary could also lead to a mind that is weakened in the long term, though the weakness could likely be reversed with exposure to exercise.by im3w1l
- I would postulate that it's even worse than this, given that default mode network activity is proven to be essential for a healthy mind. This is when engage in useful thinking even when we're not "doing anything".
I think screen activity/tiktok keeps us in some kind of purgatory where we can neither fully engage nor fully disengage.
by mapkkk - This "low power mode" is a myth, the brain pulls a pretty constant amount of power (about 20% of metabolic energy), and most power isn't consumed by the action potential/neurons firing, but rather in keeping the neuron ready to fire.
And the regions involved in the default mode network are actually some of the metabolically most active regions in the brain, involved in memory consolidation, future simulation, theory of mind, and self-narrative; among other things.
by sva_ - I haven’t read the study, but I’ve read the comments so far.
I wonder if this mechanism is the same mechanism that impacts, say, swipe-focused dating websites, as well? And Twitter feeds with super-short messages. A lot of the most viral modern tech has been bite-sized content feeds of various types.
by t-writescode - Leetcode became popular along the same time line.
Coincides with GenZ aging into adulthood after being educated in the debunked "3-cueing" or "whole language" reading education model. So far 40 states have pivoted away from it as states that switched first saw reading comprehension improve.
Whole lot of social experimentation without informed consent being put on people by 50+ year olds who run the world and never had to jump through the same thought policing.
Psychiatrist argues Americans have lost their grit for irrational reality we are forced to live in and actually are snowflakes: https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/02/how-we-...
by aw00gah - It's about the same amount of time that attention is given to any focus, most of those are less than a SFV length.
It really makes sense now. Emotional dysregulation comes into play and now I wonder that it's not just me who is quietly angry (at Match Group) all the time while still addicted to swipe based dating apps.
by DeluluDon - They definitely all play off emotions and have their own way to tapping into addictive behaviors. Youtube doom scrolling, reading endless reddits, etc. Lots of apps trying to get you hooked.by defilan
- They are all reward hacking, but tiktok is audiovisual immersion, dating apps are romantic validation and twitter is outrage/information foragingby CGMthrowaway
- dlPFC deactivation is observed in a lot of immersive tasks. There are a lot of tasks that do this. Playing video games, as one example https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/4-431-26797-2_11
Interpreting fMRI results like this article does is almost always wrong. Different activities produce different patterns of brain activity. You could put someone in an fMRI machine, have them do virtually any activity, and then write a headline saying that doing that activity turns of key brain regions that are important for something. The trick is that all brain regions are important for something. Having them be less active during a task doesn't imply that it's good or bad. It just shows you which parts of the brain are involved in that task.
This blogspam article isn't great. The study at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192... has more details, like the fact that those brain regions come online while viewing other less-preferred videos. The results aren't really indicative of anything by themself. It would have been more interesting if they compared to something, like watching a long involved movie or playing video games, but they didn't.
Also this post is coming from a fresh account that only spams links to this blog. Maybe the mods will want to switch the link to the actual study instead: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...
by Aurornis - Agreed, link should definitely be changed (or just the post removed)by demibabs