‘Perhaps the safest way to approach the digital world, where we now spend most of our time, is to listen to our own minds and bodies.’ Photograph: Peter Cripps/Alamy View image in fullscreen ‘Perhaps the safest way to approach the digital world, where we now spend most of our time, is to listen to our own minds and bodies.’ Photograph: Peter Cripps/Alamy Opinion Social media Zuckerberg says the science isn’t settled. But the harms of short-form video on the brain are starting to show Caty Enders Recent social media lawsuits have addressed concerns about mental health. But what about its cognitive effects?
A few years ago, when I’d just started graduate work, I was waiting with a grandmother finishing a questionnaire I’d handed her about her 19-year-old granddaughter who was in the testing room next door. They were participating in a study that used brain imaging to look at adolescent development. The older woman had a soft southern accent and a warm laugh.
“Cellphone use,” she said, gesturing at a question about how much time her granddaughter spent on her device. “When is she not on it? And my younger granddaughter, she just turned 18 – I mean, I think she’d die if you took the phone away from her.”
I told her that’s what I studied – “well,” I said. “Mostly social media.”
“Social media!” She shook her head. “Sometimes I think that’s the worst thing that ever happened to us.”
In the years since, that sense of broad, far-reaching harm has worked its way from our collective consciousness into thousands of high-profile lawsuits currently making their way through US courts. Last week, yet another began in New Mexico, focused on user data and the Cambridge Analytica scandal . In October, teenagers in Los Angeles will argue that Meta, YouTube and Snap caused serious mental health issues.
The most high-profile suits have focused on adolescent mental health, child sexual exploitation and, to a lesser extent, data privacy.
But in the years I’ve been researching how digital media is changing us, I’ve been increasingly concerned with how little we know about its cognitive effects, particularly those of short-form video, the format that now dominates every social media platform.
Read more The vague sense that we are being cognitively hollowed out, dulled and diminished by our latest technology is captured in the term “ brain rot ”, recognized by the makers of the Oxford English Dictionary as the 2024 word of the year. And the more researchers look at it, the more it seems to describe distinct cognitive changes that are now being borne out by science.
The literature is still limited, but the most recent meta-analysis, published in Psychological Bulletin, examined the roughly 70 quantitative studies focused on the mental health and cognitive effects of short-form video. The majority of this research comes from China, where platforms are heavily regulated. Still the authors found an association with negative cognitive changes – stronger, in fact, than the association with poorer mental health.
The strongest relationships were with attention and impulse control. But relatively few studies looked at anything else, such as memory, decision-making, language or reasoning. In that analysis, the available research on memory amounted to a single study.
Whether individuals described their use as compulsive – or something they couldn’t control – predicted the worst cognitive outcomes.
Mark Zuckerberg and other social media executives have repeatedly…