This is your brain on brain rot. Any questions?

Raise your hand if you have ever:

1. • Found yourself obsessively watching an endless loop of short-form videos for hours on end.

1. • Stayed up late at night mindlessly scrolling through your social media feeds with no real goal in mind.

1. • Functioned as a walking encyclopedia of meme knowledge while being utterly unable to recall what you had for dinner last night.

Did you run out of hands to raise? If so, you may be suffering from “brain rot.”

What is brain rot?

Dubbed 2024’s “Word of the Year” by the Oxford University Press, brain rot refers both to the state of your mind after consuming vast quantities of unchallenging online content and to the content itself. That is to say, content that is brain rot also causes brain rot. Brain rot can be anything trivial fed to viewers online — from intentionally ridiculous cooking hacks, to videos of cute cats, to AI-generated social media posts about your favorite celebrities — that figuratively turns the consumer’s brain to mush. While watching or reading such content does not actually cause one’s gray matter to deteriorate to the point of decomposition, it does, in fact, trigger various physiological responses in the body. Let’s take a deeper look at the very real effects of brain rot.

What happens to your physiology with brain rot?

Picture it: you should be sleeping, but instead, you’re lying in bed, doomscrolling: mechanically swiping your thumb across your phone as a steady stream of images, words, and impressions funnels into your brain. You know you should put the phone down, but you can’t seem to resist the urge to watch one more video or check your For You page one more time. What is going on?

In short, your brain is programmed to keep you alive. When you do something positive and important for your survival, it releases a hit of dopamine, the “feel good” neurotransmitter chemical that sends messages from your brain to the rest of your body. This teaches you that the behavior is positive and should be repeated. For example, when you feel happy and satisfied after you eat, that’s your brain sending out dopamine rewarding you for that behavior and teaching your brain to engage in that act again. But sometimes, certain triggers can confuse the brain. Brain rot is one of those triggers.

What is the anatomy and physiology of the dopamine reward system?

To understand how brain rot happens, we must first examine and understand a key player in causing and intensifying brain rot: the brain’s dopaminergic reward system.

Dopamine is a type of neurotransmitter that plays a critical role in motivation, cognition, and most importantly, in the link between behavior and punishment. Dopamine is produced in the midbrain, primarily in the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area (VTA). The dopaminergic neurons carry reward signals to other parts of the brain via the dopaminergic pathways. These pathways activate different regions of the brain, including the striatum (mediating reward response), the prefrontal cortex (responsible for decision making, among other tasks), amygdala (where emotions are processed), hippocampus (the area associated with memory and attention), and other limbic system structures.

The main purpose of this reward system is to determine whether a stimulus is to be promoted or avoided and decide which stimuli should be prioritized. Natural rewards that trigger the dopaminergic pathway are behaviors generally necessary for survival and maintenance of the body, such as eating and drinking.

What is the impact of brain rot on the brain and reward system?

When the dopaminergic reward system is working properly, your brain receives the message that the thing you’re doing is positive and feels good, which motivates you to do that thing again. However, this reward system doesn’t differentiate which of those “feel good” stimuli actually benefit you and which do not. Therefore, the system can get corrupted by things like certain substances or behaviors that trigger your brain to release higher levels of dopamine than would normally be released by a natural reward. Scrolling through social media is an example of a behavior that can trigger this type of high dopamine release. Over time, repeated exposure to elevated levels of dopamine causes the brain to become less sensitive to it. In other words, the brain will require higher levels of dopamine than before to meet the same threshold of feeling good. This can increase the risk of addiction: Your brain may crave more hours of phone scrolling or more extreme content to achieve those same “feel good” emotions.

Brain rot is not limited to producing only emotional and behavioral responses. Research suggests that an overexposure to brain rot can lead to actual physical changes to the brain as well. For example, excessive consumption of brain rot has been linked to a possible influence in brain plasticity, the ability to grow and change neural networks. This neuroplasticity enables you to learn new things, enhances cognition, and helps you recover more quickly from brain injuries. Guess what does not do these things? Brain rot.

In addition, brain rot has been linked to an actual reduction in the volume of gray matter, a type of brain tissue. One study found that excessive online video gaming, often considered brain-rot behavior, shrank gray matter in subjects’ orbitofrontal cortex, which is a part of the prefrontal cortex. The result: Gamers had marked trouble with executive functioning skills, like impulse control.

And those aren’t the only effects of brain rot. Studies are still being conducted to determine the full scope of how consuming vast quantities of low-quality digital content affects us, but so far, most evidence points to it having a negative impact on the whole of our nervous system. This is far from a comprehensive list, but brain rot has been linked to:

1. • Reduced attention span

1. • Behavioral addiction

1. • Impaired social and emotional intelligence and emotional regulation

1. • Social isolation

1. • Sleep disturbances

1. • Impaired cognitive functioning in children

1. • Disrupted brain development in toddlers

How to prevent brain rot

So what can we do to combat the effects of brain rot? Thankfully, we are not powerless. Guarding against brain rot involves a lot of the same behaviors associated with maintaining overall general good brain and body health. If you find yourself in danger of entering your third hour of doomscrolling through social media feeds with no end in sight, remember that you can take back control by:

1. • Limiting your exposure – Set firm screen-free times during the day or schedule your brain-rot consumption during limited windows. Set an alarm to remind you to stop. If bedtime scrolling is an issue, leave your phone somewhere other than in your bedroom overnight.

1. • Eating better – Focus on consuming foods that boost your brain health like those rich in omega-3 fatty acids. Boost your energy by cutting back on processed foods and those high in sugar.

1. • Exercising (your body) – Get moving! You’ll increase your blood flow and improve your energy levels. Bonus points if you can get outside to do so: Exposure to sunlight and nature has been shown to have a positive effect on brain health.

1. • Exercising (your brain) – Try new things! Learn to play the piano, watch a foreign film, or discover the joys of bird watching. Studies have found that exposure to new experiences and information positively impacts neuroplasticity.

1. • Practicing mindfulness – Combat the negative impact of brain rot on your attention span with some mindfulness meditation practices that help improve your focus on the here and now instead of constantly pursuing “what’s next?”

1. • Socializing with actual humans. While connecting online may be preferable to not connecting at all, nothing is an adequate substitute for spending time with others in person. Socialization has been linked to improved attention, better memory, stronger neural networks, and overall better brain health.

The content in this post is from Primal’s 3D Real-time module. To learn more about this or other Primal learning resources, please fill in the form here and our team will be in touch.