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- Hacker News
- 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
- 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
- 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 - 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 - 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