"High-frequency SFV [short form video] use was consistently associated with attentional disruption, reduced executive functioning, and emotional dysregulation."
"Neuroimaging results revealed reduced activation in the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) and Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) regions ... when participants viewed personalised TikTok videos."
"(The Anterior Cingulate Cortex) is involved in certain higher-level functions, such as attention allocation, reward anticipation, decision-making, impulse control (e.g. performance monitoring and error detection), and emotion."
very worrying study, essentially its a digital->neurochemistry chasm crossing substance that uses the 2 senses.
all more reasons to heavily discourage the usage of short form content , we might require regulations against what is essentially an invisible drug that rapidly replicate and distribute itself among the masses.
Full social media ban would be easier and more effective imo. Public spaces would come back to life in no time at all if social media was heavily curtailed or banned entirely. This would be an obvious win for everyone involved outside of the terminally online and corporations benefiting from their lack of self control.
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.
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.
> "Matt Mayberry, who works at a California startup called Dopamine Labs, says it's common knowledge in the industry that Instagram exploits this craving by strategically withholding "likes" from certain users. If the photo-sharing app decides you need to use the service more often, it'll show only a fraction of the likes you've received on a given post at first, hoping you'll be disappointed with your haul and check back again in a minute or two."
(Dopamine Labs is now boundless.ai, only one example, the reward hacking mentioned is everywhere in socials, adult content, sports betting, for reward maxxing)
Either the person was making something up, or he just didn't understand how hyperscale apps work toward eventual consistency rather than having everything propagated the instant you press the button.
Tiktok is also well-known for giving brand-new users/first-time posters a TON of artificial boosted exposure tuned for follower and engagement growth of the content they post, to give them hope and dreams of becoming an influencer before eventually tuning down the algorithm to normal levels.
Ask anyone who ever posted on tiktok - "when i first started I got a ton of new followers and likes! "
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.
You think people in their 50’s run the world? That’s adorable. Meanwhile people are living longer than ever, still going strong in their 80’s. You think they just retired or something?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Worthwhile to note that “TikTok” here just means the format, not the platform. YouTube has its “shorts”, Facebook, insta, X, et all engage heavily in milking your doom scrolled eyeballs for time and profit.
I uninstalled basically all of these EXCEPT youtube, and that's what I struggle with sometimes now. I find so much great long- and medium-form content on Youtube that I want to keep it around. But I have to admit that I can sometimes fall down a time-wasting rabbit hole with shorts.
The Youtube app now has a "shorts feed limit" under "time management" that will limit your access to the auto-scroll shorts feed to a certain amount per day. Worth checking out!
I try to pressure people into just turning off the absolute majority of the social media / algo type recommendation stuff on youtube. I still "use" youtube, but my experience is night and day compared to the typical usage, I have my sidebar with a handful of creators i care about, tiny blue indicator next to their name if they have a new video i haven't seen, just like the normal UI. I think this portion is vital, it removes the "clickbait image" meta on youtube, I have to make the first move and say "I wonder what {user} posted".
So i pretty much see, search bar and that text sidebar on my main screen for youtube. Its absurd seeing the standard youtube ui, after using it like this for a couple years now. This also just really really tightens who i follow. If i find myself clicking through to their profile and seeing what they posted and deciding not to watch, i consider that a waste of my time and after a handful of times i might just unfollow entirely.
LLMs and social media is 500+ PHD behavioral psychologists working together to make you do things at any price so they can make as much money as they can - in fact, if they don't try to make as much money as they can, everyone involved will be fired.
To me this is one of the final forms of our current laissez-faire capitalism - we are literally taking away our own agency in the name of "freedom" (of capitalists to maximize returns).
I get the TikTok addiction, but before that it was fb, before that was the tv, before that the newspaper/magazines, before that the books, before that table games etc
I don’t know it seems that regardless of the technology the brain needs dozing off from reality.
Hmm... this doesn't quite add up. Do we have brain scans showing that critical thinking centers of the brain turn off when people read books or play table games?
In my personal experience short form content is easier to get sucked into for hours on end than those other ones and something I’m more likely to regret participating in. (Learning this early I stopped so I’m not the biggest consumer of it and may have an atypical opinion compared to 1-2 billion people actively watching tik tok for hours a day.)
Exactly, should the "control regions" being deactivated be something that is activated all the time, or is that associated with burnout, or chronic stress?
Oh you have not played backgammon. You cannot imagine the sheer amount of man-hours we have invested as a species to moving checkers on a piece of wood.
I think there is something distinctly unique between dozing off from reality by letting your mind wander or twiddling your thumbs, and scrolling short form video.
The hyper normalization on technology fueled escapism is the difference.
Everyone had freedom to pick their poison so to speak. Now? All tech and screen based.
Hyper-social normalization always falls apart. It's unnatural; modern human biology evolved for thousands solving problems mostly in isolation. Tech fueled distribution of material goods humans need to survive is great as it removed risk to biology. But social normalization sucks.
Whether the socialized motive is appease gods by living up to scripture, keep a job/build career make money, or validate it just normalizes people and if we all know the same shit, why discuss anything with them? We already know the same shit.
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.
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.
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.
Watching a 2 hour movie is perceived as difficult?
> I'm fine not having the same attention span as people who had to less stuff to do hundreds of years ago.
Maybe, if we're really generous, there's a reasonable version of this argument that you've failed to adequately communicate here... But it really seems like you're trying to say that a short attention span is a good sign of progress, or something?
I know HN and SV in general has a culty addiction to contrarianism, and it rarely elicits more than an eye roll from me. Framing a short attention span as anything other than a bad thing is wild to me, and I honestly don't know how to respond to something like that (or if my sarcasm detector is off). Do we need scientific studies to show that goldfish brain == bad?
I was being glib because “attention span” is a poorly defined concept that people are more interested in deriding than understanding, as you demonstrate with your comment that we don’t need science to know that it’s bad. I’m specifically criticizing the tendency to ascribe virtue to tediousness while passing it off as psychology.
After a lifetime of having to prove that my ADHD doesn’t make me a drag on society, call me skeptical of people who insist they know what makes a brain objectively worse than another based on vibes. It’s one thing to discuss the impact of tuning an algorithm to be addictive, it’s another to make a claim that a preference for one form of media over another is a Problem.
Ironically, I’m a pretty heavy reader and find it funny that people treat reading like some paragon of mental discipline when it’s just the media that I find stimulating. I absolutely have a much shorter “attention span” than most people who primarily consume short form video.
People with long attention spans can still focus on things that take very little focus, like short-form videos. But people with short attention spans have a hard time focusing on things like books, or even movies. So having a long attention span opens up more intellectual avenues for you, without restricting any.
Yes, there's always some puritan attitudes involved in how we talk about this. But I do feel that people who can't read a book because of attention issues are missing out on something.
This is vibe psychology. I owe my entire career to a short attention span that drives me to constantly learn about new ideas, technologies, and hobbies.
> This is vibe psychology. I owe my entire career to a short attention span that drives me to constantly learn about new ideas, technologies, and hobbies.
This is a narrow minded view. Just because something works for you doesn't mean it is something we should optimize for.
All great intellects we study today were the polar opposite of this.
Today I found out that half my traffic on my apps are coming from bots. I am considering leaving the online world. Its becoming a hostile unpleasant place. This article report only fuels my devotion.
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.
And that's leaving aside the question of what it would affect. Elasticity/learning? Would it result in forgetting, or losing skill? Apart from the problem that I (and others with me) have with the "area X does Y" school of neuro-cognition, measuring changes in activity does not measure changes in connections, synapses, or tissue.
It is possible that inhibiting certain brain areas for a longer period will change e.g. cognitive skills. There is enough literature on losing skills after inactivity. But this approach can't bridge the gap.
It makes more sense to observer TikTok users' behavior over time. That can give more information about the actual effects, although without nice, colorful blobs.
> And that's leaving aside the question of what it would affect. Elasticity/learning? Would it result in forgetting, or losing skill?
You can't get any of that from this study.
fMRI results are easy to manipulate into sensational news stories because deactivating a brain region sounds like a bad thing. Those brain regions are not always-on. Their activity declining during a task doesn't mean they start to atrophy or degrade.
The only thing it means is that those brain regions are not as active during that task. Tasks activate different parts of the brain depending on what they require. All of the extrapolations on top of this result are people projecting on to science they don't understand.
yeah I don't feel qualified to comment on the study in particular but from personal experience the sort of 'loss of consciousness' does track.
When I realize I've spent an hour doomscrolling in an algorithmic feed, I don't feel like was 'all there' paying attention that whole period, it sort of washes over you and occasionally it rouses your attention and you pop out of unconsciousness to consume a little nugget of 'content' and then dive back in. It feels not worth it to spend so much time 'away' for a negligible amount of entertainment.
Video games or a book feels way different, like I'm also going under, but I'm going somewhere else, to a place that was crafted by another human with aim of it being worth my time.
As a personal rule I never scroll down to watch next video and never watch any video containing large captions in the center - those things just zombie me outright.
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"
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.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 44.4 ms ] thread"Neuroimaging results revealed reduced activation in the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) and Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) regions ... when participants viewed personalised TikTok videos."
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.27.25334540v...
"(The Anterior Cingulate Cortex) is involved in certain higher-level functions, such as attention allocation, reward anticipation, decision-making, impulse control (e.g. performance monitoring and error detection), and emotion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterior_cingulate_cortex
all more reasons to heavily discourage the usage of short form content , we might require regulations against what is essentially an invisible drug that rapidly replicate and distribute itself among the masses.
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.
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.
> "Matt Mayberry, who works at a California startup called Dopamine Labs, says it's common knowledge in the industry that Instagram exploits this craving by strategically withholding "likes" from certain users. If the photo-sharing app decides you need to use the service more often, it'll show only a fraction of the likes you've received on a given post at first, hoping you'll be disappointed with your haul and check back again in a minute or two."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28763413 also speaks to this.
(Dopamine Labs is now boundless.ai, only one example, the reward hacking mentioned is everywhere in socials, adult content, sports betting, for reward maxxing)
There were investigations into it after that the conclusions was that nobody believed it or could replicate it: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/01/does-instagram-withh...
Either the person was making something up, or he just didn't understand how hyperscale apps work toward eventual consistency rather than having everything propagated the instant you press the button.
Ask anyone who ever posted on tiktok - "when i first started I got a ton of new followers and likes! "
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-...
I would like to re-state my belief that we are all easily programmed meat machines. Accepting this fact is important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert
Propaganda artists know this all too well.
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.
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.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.08.12.503715v1
It’s task-specific.
Zoning out doesn't change the energy consumption of the brain that much.
https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S136...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39809687/
The Youtube app now has a "shorts feed limit" under "time management" that will limit your access to the auto-scroll shorts feed to a certain amount per day. Worth checking out!
So i pretty much see, search bar and that text sidebar on my main screen for youtube. Its absurd seeing the standard youtube ui, after using it like this for a couple years now. This also just really really tightens who i follow. If i find myself clicking through to their profile and seeing what they posted and deciding not to watch, i consider that a waste of my time and after a handful of times i might just unfollow entirely.
I found it surprising how little depth the video had
To me this is one of the final forms of our current laissez-faire capitalism - we are literally taking away our own agency in the name of "freedom" (of capitalists to maximize returns).
Less brain, no thinking. Me thinks
I don’t know it seems that regardless of the technology the brain needs dozing off from reality.
The brain craves it. Needs it, though? I mean, aside from sleep.
Also, books, TV, board games, newspapers didn’t disappear. So it’s compounded in some ways
Reading is obviously healthier than scrolling tiktok.
Why reading mein kampf is healthier than looking at random funny videos?
Both are addictive. The one is more dangerous than the other, demonstrably. Don’t get me started on religious books.
Sure, and the body needs to be fed, but it still matters what and how much you feed it.
Everyone had freedom to pick their poison so to speak. Now? All tech and screen based.
Hyper-social normalization always falls apart. It's unnatural; modern human biology evolved for thousands solving problems mostly in isolation. Tech fueled distribution of material goods humans need to survive is great as it removed risk to biology. But social normalization sucks.
Whether the socialized motive is appease gods by living up to scripture, keep a job/build career make money, or validate it just normalizes people and if we all know the same shit, why discuss anything with them? We already know the same shit.
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.
> I'm fine not having the same attention span as people who had to less stuff to do hundreds of years ago.
Maybe, if we're really generous, there's a reasonable version of this argument that you've failed to adequately communicate here... But it really seems like you're trying to say that a short attention span is a good sign of progress, or something?
I know HN and SV in general has a culty addiction to contrarianism, and it rarely elicits more than an eye roll from me. Framing a short attention span as anything other than a bad thing is wild to me, and I honestly don't know how to respond to something like that (or if my sarcasm detector is off). Do we need scientific studies to show that goldfish brain == bad?
After a lifetime of having to prove that my ADHD doesn’t make me a drag on society, call me skeptical of people who insist they know what makes a brain objectively worse than another based on vibes. It’s one thing to discuss the impact of tuning an algorithm to be addictive, it’s another to make a claim that a preference for one form of media over another is a Problem.
Ironically, I’m a pretty heavy reader and find it funny that people treat reading like some paragon of mental discipline when it’s just the media that I find stimulating. I absolutely have a much shorter “attention span” than most people who primarily consume short form video.
Yes, there's always some puritan attitudes involved in how we talk about this. But I do feel that people who can't read a book because of attention issues are missing out on something.
This is a narrow minded view. Just because something works for you doesn't mean it is something we should optimize for.
All great intellects we study today were the polar opposite of this.
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...
It is possible that inhibiting certain brain areas for a longer period will change e.g. cognitive skills. There is enough literature on losing skills after inactivity. But this approach can't bridge the gap.
It makes more sense to observer TikTok users' behavior over time. That can give more information about the actual effects, although without nice, colorful blobs.
You can't get any of that from this study.
fMRI results are easy to manipulate into sensational news stories because deactivating a brain region sounds like a bad thing. Those brain regions are not always-on. Their activity declining during a task doesn't mean they start to atrophy or degrade.
The only thing it means is that those brain regions are not as active during that task. Tasks activate different parts of the brain depending on what they require. All of the extrapolations on top of this result are people projecting on to science they don't understand.
This could equally be reported as tiktok puts the mind at ease.
Or tiktok reduces brain activity related to anxiety.
"Related to" is a term that seems to be capable of supporting an unlimited load.
While this podcast episode is not about this particular research, it could have been.
https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/17378968-...
When I realize I've spent an hour doomscrolling in an algorithmic feed, I don't feel like was 'all there' paying attention that whole period, it sort of washes over you and occasionally it rouses your attention and you pop out of unconsciousness to consume a little nugget of 'content' and then dive back in. It feels not worth it to spend so much time 'away' for a negligible amount of entertainment.
Video games or a book feels way different, like I'm also going under, but I'm going somewhere else, to a place that was crafted by another human with aim of it being worth my time.
I have deleted my Tiktok account 5 times. No longer a user.
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.
edit: Oh someone changed the title of the post now too.