Program: 01 | Brain Rot: Is there any proof your phone is destroying your attention span?

Ange Lavoipierre: B-R-A-I-N-R-O-T. De-fi-ni-tion. Oh good, they've spelled it for me.

AI Voice: Brain rot is a slang term referring to both internet content deemed to be of low quality or value and the supposed deterioration of a person's intellectual state resulting from excessive consumption of that content. It describes a state of mental fogginess, reduced attention span and...

Ange Lavoipierre: Okaaay, that's enough.

Hi, I'm Ange Lavoipierre, the ABC's national tech reporter, and this is Brain Rot, a series from Science Friction about how the internet firehose and everything that comes from it is reshaping our brains. Today, episode one, in which we ask, are our attention spans really getting shorter or are sentences just getting longer?

Mic Moshel: So if you sort of think about something like a TikTok platform, 30 seconds is really pushing it.

Ange Lavoipierre: To put it another way, is Brain Rot real and do we have it?

Vox Pop: I feel like I've just got nothing going on in my brain. I'll be watching Netflix and also watching Brain Rot at the same time. It's like reducing vocabulary, I think. And I'm not able to actually put my phone aside and work or study.

Ange Lavoipierre: How do you know when it's gone too far?

Vox Pop: Brain's just decomposed, I guess. It's just gone, it's no longer processing information.

Ange Lavoipierre: If brain rot is real, is technology to blame? Because every major breakthrough since the printing press has triggered a fresh wave of panic. We're in one right now. It's the inescapable fear that social media, endless scroll and smartphones are rotting our brains, specifically our ability to pay attention for more than six seconds at a time. So today on Brain Rot, we're asking, is that fear justified?

(Music)

I want you to cast your mind back to August 2016. Donald Trump has never been the US president. In fact, just about everyone is pretty convinced he's about to lose the election in three months' time.

We're only up to season six in Game of Thrones … we are learning a lot about Brexit. There's growing anxiety about a global pandemic, but not the one you're thinking of. And Instagram has just launched a new feature called Stories.

Anna Seirian: I actually very clearly remember the day Instagram Stories came out. I remember looking at my friends and saying, well, that's it for Snapchat.

Ange Lavoipierre: This is Anna Sarian. She's in her mid-30s, which makes her, like me, a millennial. And as a millennial, she was exactly the kind of person that platform was designed for.

Anna Seirian: It felt like for the first time it was really easy to just have kind of an infinite scroll because of Instagram Stories.

Ange Lavoipierre: Anna is also a content creator and the founder of Internet People. It's a digital media company set up to help creative entrepreneurs navigate life online, ideally without burning out.

Anna Seirian: I've always been an early adopter of technology. Early to Instagram, early to Snapchat, early to Facebook. 

Ange Lavoipierre: For some reason, though, Instagram Stories was different to the other platforms and not in a good way.

Anna Seirian: I remember it got so bad at a certain point that I would leave my phone in the glove box in my car. I remember the first time I did it to kind of sulking down to my car on my lunch break and pulling it out and thinking, this is addict behaviour. I can't believe this is what it's come to. And yet it got worse. The big thing for me with COVID was it coincided with me starting to make content on TikTok. And so for about two years, I was posting anywhere between one to three videos every single day.

Ange Lavoipierre: On top of posting, Anna's daily screen time had blown out to as much as 10 hours.

Anna Seirian: I'm starting to engage with that dopamine chase of just always being there, always being on. But it felt like there was a very steep drop off the cliff where all of a sudden I felt horrible. Like I started wondering what was happening to my brain and where my attention span was going and starting to question, is it me? Is it the apps? What's really happening here? 

Ange Lavoipierre: And if you've ever been even half that hooked on screens, you already know there's a cost.

Anna Seirian: I definitely lost hobbies. I lost my creativity. I lost the ability to just sit and paint or draw or play an instrument or read a book. And even when I would try to sit down and read a book, if I had my phone next to me, I would end up on my phone. Like that's a curious thing. I can't even set the intention to be off my phone and stay off my phone.

Ange Lavoipierre: The received wisdom at this point is that tech is giving all of us, not just Anna, goldfish brain. And hearing her talk about it, you can see why. But outside of anecdotal evidence, is there proof? And not to change the topic, but what even is attention anyway?

Mark Williams: That's a really difficult question to be honest.

Ange Lavoipierre: It is, but we've found the right guy to answer it. This is Dr Mark Williams. He's a cognitive neuroscientist and a professor of psychological sciences at Macquarie University.

Mark Williams: So there's sort of two types of attention that we talk about. There's the internal drive. So it's us trying to attend to something, which is what hopefully your listeners are using to listen to us, rather than get distracted by the things around them. And then there's the external things like noises and movements and colours, for example, will capture our attention and drive it towards something else.

Ange Lavoipierre: Okay, so two types of attention, internal and external. Another way to think about it is voluntary and involuntary. But they're lighting up much more than just two parts of your brain.

Mark Williams: You've got the high level areas, which is that internal drive, and then areas like the prefrontal cortex and the frontal lobes, which actually we have control over and we drive ourselves towards those things. But then there's also low-level areas like our visual areas, occipital lobe, auditory cortex and so on, which get driven by the external things. So there are a whole bunch of different areas that are involved. It's a pretty complex concept that we use for this very simple word.

Ange Lavoipierre: There's a lot going on. So attention can be a pretty fragile thing. And Mark Williams says smartphones, especially notifications, were more or less designed in a lab to hijack it.

Mark Williams: There's four things that we're really captured by and they are noise, sound, colour and faces. And of course, the phones are really good at it because they'll set off a beep as a notification and then if you turn down the beep, then they'll vibrate, which gives you the movement. So, you know, they've used two of those four things to actually try and capture our attention. And so you can't ignore that. So when your phone beeps or buzzes or does anything like that, or your email on your laptop or any of those things, you automatically attend to it and you can't stop that from happening.

Ange Lavoipierre: And every time that happens, it's creating extra work for our brains, not to mention stress.

Mark Williams: Our attention gets grabbed basically and then we have to pull it back to the thing that we actually want to do. So that actually uses resources in our brain and those resources aren't unlimited. And so each time we do that, we're getting more and more tired. We're wearing out our attention mechanisms. So we then have more trouble attending to things.

Ange Lavoipierre: So you're not imagining it. Not only that, when we measure brain activity using an electroencephalogram or EEG, that effect is visible.

Mark Williams: It's a really nice and easy way to demonstrate the effect on the brain. The brain oscillates at different frequencies and we can tell what state the brain is based on those frequencies. And alpha is a really nice one because it shows when you're relaxed and you're concentrating and you're feeling good, basically. It's when we get a lot of good work done, if you like. That's one indication of the flow state, for example. And so we can get people to relax and so they go into this alpha and we can see the alpha waves. And then when the phone buzzes or dings or does any of those things, that alpha just goes away. It just disappears. And other frequencies actually pop up, which suggests that you're actually feeling a little stressed because you want to know who was that or what was that about. And that's showing that you go from this really relaxed state to this quite stressed state as soon as you hear a buzz or a ding from your phone, which is a huge concern.

Ange Lavoipierre: And look, the world is full of noises and sounds that break our attention. And it has been since the dawn of time. So it's not just notifications. But the difference between being interrupted by your phone as opposed to a plane flying overhead or your partner asking you a question is how often that happens.

Mark Williams: The effect is exactly the same. It's just your wife wouldn't be calling to you constantly as you're walking around the streets or driving your car, interrupting you 100, 200 times a day.

Ange Lavoipierre: Whereas your phone might. In fact, it probably does. A 2024 survey found on average Americans check their phones more than 200 times a day. We don't have the same data about Australians, but it's safe to assume we're not too different. 

Mark Williams: So they're just beeping at us constantly and causing disruption in our lives constantly.

Ange Lavoipierre: So that is what we're up against. And when I say we, I mean every person on earth with a smartphone. But not everyone's capacity to pay attention seems to be taking the same hit. A guy named Mic Moshel has been looking at some of the more extreme cases of what he calls disordered screen use. 

Mic Moshel: So disordered screen use refers to the broad range of these activities that are used in some sort of addictive sense. So that includes internet gaming disorder, gaming disorder, smartphone addiction, social media addiction.

Ange Lavoipierre: Mic is a neuropsychology registrar and PhD candidate at Macquarie University. And last year, he led a meta-analysis of existing studies to investigate the cognitive differences in the brain of a person with that more extreme use.

Mic Moshel: Often, and you can see this reflected in news stories, there's a real confusion and sort of inconsistency when it comes to people talking about the cognitive impacts of disordered screen use. You see some news reports that will say that gaming boosts some cognitive performance. It increases cognitive skills. You see others that say that the gaming industry has caused the advent of the rise in ADHD. 

Ange Lavoipierre: And if you're wondering whether you are one of those more extreme cases that Mic is talking about, it boils down to four main patterns of behaviour. Conveniently, all beginning with a C.

Mic Moshel: Compulsion, cravings, consequences and control.

Ange Lavoipierre: So the first C is feeling compelled to use a device or social media. Like when you see a message notification and it absolutely can't wait until after dinner, so you check it under the table as subtly as possible. The second is having intense cravings, like the time I accidentally left one of my two phones at home and felt weirdly naked all day. Then there's experiencing negative consequences, like on Tuesday when I screened my boss's call because I was halfway through a time to challenge on Duolingo. Although it could have been worse. I did call her back. And control, or more specifically, a lack of it. The feeling that you don't have much of a say in your own behaviour anymore.

Mic Moshel: If you feel that you sort of satisfy all four of these, or even three of these, there's potentially some cause to reflect on whether there might be something disordered or problematic in your relationship to these technologies.

Ange Lavoipierre: And we get into this later in the series. There is a whole episode on the topic of addiction. But in the meantime, the main message is that while screen addiction isn't yet an official diagnosis, there is an emerging body of scientific evidence that it is real. And so are the consequences of spending a gazillion hours a day on your phone. As part of their meta-analysis, Mic Moshel and his team looked at 34 studies assessing the cognitive difference in those extreme cases.

Mic Moshel: What we found was that when you compare people with disordered screen use compared to controls across all cognitive domains, there's a, what's called in psychology, a small to medium effect size. Which means that there's this reduction overall in terms of cognitive performance with individuals with disordered screen use.

Ange Lavoipierre: Okay, so a small to medium sized effect. But the effect is real. Mic Moshel looked at a whole range of cognitive skills. And the main casualty was... You guessed it. Attention.

Mic Moshel: And specifically when we look at the tests that people are performing worse on, they're usually on tests of sustained attention. So your ability to hold attention for some period of time.

Ange Lavoipierre: That's not all. Something called executive function is also a weak spot. And it turns out executive function is, as the name suggests …

Mic Moshel: … pretty important. It's your sort of higher order thinking skills. Things like problem solving, planning, organisation, holding back from mistakes, the ability to control impulsive action. So those were the two cognitive domains that were significantly affected, with attention being the highest and executive functioning being under that. 

Ange Lavoipierre: The good news is that many cognitive skills Mic was looking at were actually no different for excessive screen users.

Mic Moshel: We didn't find any significant differences in processing speeds, how quickly people think, in working memory and in IQ score. But again, these were the least well studied.

Ange Lavoipierre: So it's good news with a grain of salt. But we'll take it. As for those problem areas, our attention and executive function, Mic Moshel stepped us through exactly what those differences look like. He says there are specific parts of our brains that are actually underactive.

Mic Moshel: Usually the part of the brain that's thought of as being responsible or a key player in attention is the frontal part of our brain, so the prefrontal cortex. And it's also, it plays a reflective part as well. It's able to make long-term decisions. It's able to plan. And what seems to be happening in the brain is that this part of the brain, when it's engaged in disordered screen use across time, becomes underactivated.

Ange Lavoipierre: At the same time, other areas are doing more.

Mic Moshel: We have this other part of our brain, usually associated with the amygdala, and this is responsible for impulse control. So if this part of the brain is deregulated, it becomes really impulsive, often implicated in substance use disorder, alcohol use disorder, general addictions. But if it's well regulated, then we're able to control our impulses a lot better.

Ange Lavoipierre: So on the one hand, the prefrontal cortex, a big driver for both attention and long-term decision making, is slacking off in the brain of an excessive screen user. Meanwhile, their amygdala, the bit that manages threat perception and stress responses, has gone into overdrive, tanking their impulse control. And that combination also happens to make it much harder to put down the phone.

Mic Moshel: These sort of work in unison. So the impulsivity increases the urgings. Disordered screen use becomes more habitual, more automatic over time because it's less regulated. And the reflective part of our brain, the part that pays attention, gets increasingly under-activated. It's less able to reflect on the sort of behaviours that we're engaged in.

Ange Lavoipierre: So you do get very good at paying attention, but really only to one thing. Your screen. It's a bit like a muscle. If you do hundreds of push-ups, you will get better at push-ups. But your deadlift does not improve. And some of us are getting really good at push-ups.

Mic Moshel: So if you sort of think about something like a TikTok platform, you're exercising your attention because you're paying attention to something. But the attention that is being exercised is a very, very limited level of attention. It's something to the degree of 10 to 30 seconds. And 30 seconds is really pushing it.

So then when it comes to the activities like sitting in a classroom or like paying attention in a conversation or like holding your attention to work on a problem for a given amount of time, such as 5 minutes, 10 minutes, half an hour, an hour. Your attention is now weakened and you just haven't practiced that faculty of attention.

Ange Lavoipierre: This isn't just theoretical either. Mic Moshel says the differences are visible on brain scans.

Mic Moshel: This is something that has been found with a range of neuroimaging tools, most popularly the fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging, where you can see changes in the brain as a result of these addictive behaviours. Specifically in the prefrontal cortex and under activity and in the areas I was speaking of, the amygdala and parts of the impulsive system and over activation.

Ange Lavoipierre: So that is what's going on in the brain of a disordered or excessive screen user. But there's nowhere near as much research when it comes to less extreme cases. And the caveat here is that we don't know for sure whether excessive screen use is actually causing these differences in brain activity. It's just a correlation. It could be that people with shorter attention spans and heightened impulsivity are actually predisposed to excessive screen use and not the other way around. Either way, Mic says the link is worth paying attention to.

Mic Moshel: So it is a sort of a complicated thing to try to understand what leads to what. But I think I sometimes think it doesn't need to be as complicated as that. If we understand it sort of doesn't matter in some sense what leads to what. If we know that we can apply something to fix a problem, the sort of intervention is what's important rather than what led to what. And the intervention for problematic screen use can often be quite straightforward. So if we can break the loop, then that's sort of the important thing rather than what started the loop, I suppose.

Ange Lavoipierre: What we do know is that lots of us feel like our attention is shot as a direct result of our screen time.

Vox Pop: I was brushing my teeth this morning and I was flossing and brushing and I had reels in one hand. And then I went to the bathroom and I still had reels in my hand. And then I showered and I had reels. And I was like, oh, that's not good.

Vox Pop: What have your phones done to your attention spans? Destroyed it. Completely destroyed it. Yeah, it's gone. It's really bad. I can't even watch a YouTube video that's more than five minutes long without putting on two times speed.

Vox Pop: I've tried to do so many different things, like turn my phone into being completely black and white. I just changed the settings and then that didn't work because then I was just still rotting my brain, but I was slightly less entertained.

Vox Pop: I feel like I'd have to be off of it for a while to get attention span back.

Marion Thain: I'm Professor Marion Thain and I'm Professor of Culture and Technology at the University of Edinburgh.

Ange Lavoipierre: Back in 2021, Marion and her colleagues at the time from King's College, London, surveyed more than 2,000 people about their phone use.

Marion Thain: We're endlessly being told in the media that our attention spans have shrunk to less than the size of that of a goldfish. But we wondered sort of how people actually felt about this and what their perceptions were.

Ange Lavoipierre: One in two respondents felt as if their attention spans had shrunk. But not everyone is losing sleep over this.

Marion Thain: 42% of the sample was what we called positive multi-screeners. So those were highly engaged tech users who were fairly relaxed about any concerns, but did have some concerns about attention spans. But they weren't super worried about the effect tech was having on their cognitive abilities.

Ange Lavoipierre: So those are the positive multi-screeners, which I reckon is probably me. Then there are the people who aren't really using tech that much and so for obvious reasons are pretty relaxed about its effects on them.

Marion Thain: About 17% were what we called the disengaged and untroubled group. They were both relaxed and also uninterested in both the opportunities and the challenges of new media.

Ange Lavoipierre: Basically, there's not as much pessimism here as we sometimes assume. And Marion says there are silver linings we're missing as a result. 

Marion Thain: So for example, are the younger generation, much as we like to bemoan how the younger generation is always worse than our generation and they're worse at everything and it's all going to the dogs. But are there also things that a younger generation are learning to do, modes of attention that they're practicing, that could be actually incredibly beneficial and really valuable?

Vox Pop: For one, our media literacy is so much better right now. My mom will be like, look at this car drifting perfectly through these cones. And I'm like, yeah, mom, the shadows are going through the car. Like that's just not it's not a real car. So we're getting so good at like recognising AI, which I think is really important for like where we're moving into now.

Vox Pop: I think we're wittier, like our attention span is less so we have to be on our feet thinking about, you know, funny comebacks that are like relevant.

Vox Pop: Yeah, I think we're more like self-referential, but I think that that's funnier. And I think that if everyone knows all the same jokes, we're able to build on them in such creative ways.

Marion Thain: Maybe we as older generations can't see that because we're very much, you know, of our own times. And I think we need to be more alert and more responsive to look for where we can get the potential gains in terms of shifts and evolution of how we attend, as well as being concerned about what we might be losing in that transition.

Ange Lavoipierre: So remember at the start of the episode when I said that the invention of the printing press had triggered a similar kind of panic? It's true. But the part I left out is that some of those fears turned out to be well founded, at least according to Mic Moshel.

Mic Moshel: They thought that there would be a problem with memorisation. So if we could read, then we don't need to remember. And they were mostly right. We've gone from being able to remember hours long oral stories because we no longer need to cultivate the faculty of memory ever since writing was introduced.

Ange Lavoipierre: It's a pattern throughout history. The same thing happened with radio, comic books, video games, you name it. And while some of the concern was justified, as Mic says, most people would look back at each of those examples and conclude that as a species, we probably gained at least as much as we lost. So is this moment and what feels to us like a seismic shift in technology actually more of the same? Or is it in a league of its own? Is this time different?

Mic Moshel: I think the difference with what we're seeing now is the rapidity and scale of development. When you look at the games that most people are interacting with now, they usually are coming from, especially with these bigger technology companies, billion dollar corporations that spend a lot of time integrating very addictive features, using decades of research into behavioral psychology and cognitive psychology to keep people hooked for longer and more intensely. When you introduce the Internet, when you introduce AI, all in the context of an attention economy, in a similar analogy with the printing press, what you're displacing is no longer just a particular memory faculty, but really almost every cognitive skill we use.

Ange Lavoipierre: Marion Thain agrees that there is something unique about this moment.

Marion Thain: Whatever word Socrates was reading in ancient Greece, it was almost certainly not limitless. And I think what we're seeing now with social media is literally that limitless capacity to just keep on scrolling. And that, I think, is the thing that actually really scares people about where we are today.

Ange Lavoipierre: So if this time is different, the scale of the impact might be too. Even if, as Mic Moshel says, we don't have the full picture yet.

Mic Moshel: We all use these technologies, but I think for the majority of us, we don't satisfy these criteria for disordered screen use or for the DSM or ICD criteria of Internet Gaming Disorder, Gaming Disorder. But yet all of us, almost everyone I speak to, including myself, feels that we are interacting with these technologies in some way that we're unsatisfied with. So I think that's a bit of a gap in the research field that should be looked at.

Ange Lavoipierre: You'll be pleased to know Anna is no longer clocking 10 hours a day on a screen.

Anna Seirian: One weekend, I just decided I'm going to delete TikTok and Instagram and threads and whatever other social media apps are lingering on my phone. And oh my, it was so eye opening. It was also really sobering in a lot of ways to realize how isolated and disconnected I'd become because it wasn't second nature to reach out to friends and hang out anymore. Part of that is the cultural shift that happened as part of the pandemic and the increased usage of our phones. But I had to really sit with the isolation that I had created for myself. And so there was a lot of shame in it as well and a lot of discontent, a lot of grief, too, of like how much of my life am I losing to my phone? And so on the other side of it, though, it also felt incredible to all of a sudden see, oh, here's all this time that I never say that I have. Here's all of the motivation and the clarity and the creativity and the inspiration. It all just kind of came rushing back to me. And I also remember very clearly the feeling of waking up in the morning with my phone completely turned off was so freeing.

Mic Moshel: When we speak about the future with screens and with technology, that's fine. But we have to be looking into that future with the possibility of being able to function as human beings. At the core of any activity that is important for anything, it requires attention. It requires empathy. It requires the ability to problem solve over complex questions that require a long-term ability to plan. So regardless of the world we're moving into, we can't walk into it with a blindfold. We have to be intentional about our steps because there is a precipice, and it can be walked over completely blindfolded. So the skills you will need in the future won't change. You will absolutely need attention and you'll absolutely need the ability to exercise executive control or higher-order problem solving. So how can we do that? Acknowledging that we're moving into a world with increasing technology, while also understanding that there are some very basic cognitive skills that make us human, that make us insightful, that make us empathetic, that give us what makes us human.

Ange Lavoipierre: That's it for this episode of Brain Rot, which was made on the lands of the Gadigal and Menang Noongar people.

Our producer is Fiona Pepper, our senior producer is James Bullen and our sound engineer is Brendan O'Neill. In episode two … 

Kelly: If you'd asked me a year ago, I'd have said there's no way that I could have an AI companion that I genuinely felt romantic feelings towards. But it feels like almost the first adult relationship I've ever been in.

Ange Lavoipierre: We meet Kelly, who's dating an AI, to find out how technology is changing human relationships. You can follow the podcast on the ABC Listen app. Just search for Science Friction. My name's Ange Lavoipierre. Catch you next time.