Books vs. 'brainrot' debate

A viral social thread turned a familiar complaint into a sharper claim: short-video feeds are hollowing out attention, and books are the fix. (corp.oup.com) The phrase “brain rot” was already big enough that Oxford University Press named it its 2024 Word of the Year on December 2, 2024, after more than 37,000 public votes. Oxford defined it as the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state through overconsumption of trivial or unchallenging material, especially online. (corp.oup.com) The audience for that argument is large. Pew Research Center reported in December 2024 that 46% of United States teens said they were online “almost constantly,” 90% used YouTube, and about six in ten used TikTok and Instagram. (pewresearch.org) Reading is moving the other way. The National Endowment for the Arts said in 2024 that the share of 13-year-olds who read for fun almost every day fell from 27% in 2012 to 14% in 2023, while average reading scores also slipped over that span. (arts.gov) The science behind the viral claim is narrower than the thread made it sound. A 2024 Association for Computing Machinery paper found that heavier short-form video use was linked to poorer sustained attention in an online survey, but its longer field experiment did not find significant changes on most sustained-attention tests when people changed how much they watched. (dl.acm.org) Other recent studies have reported similar limits. A 2025 paper on ScienceDirect said longer short-video use was associated with addiction-like use and weaker attention control, but the authors said its cross-sectional design could not establish causation. (sciencedirect.com) Some experimental work has found short-term effects after scrolling. A San Diego State University report in August 2025 said a graduate research team using eye-tracking found that even a few minutes on TikTok before reading long-form news reduced concentration among college students. (sdsu.edu) The case for books is also more specific than the thread suggested. A systematic review published in 2023 found that reading fiction and watching fiction can support parts of social cognition, including empathy and theory of mind, but results varied by the person, the material, and whether discussion or other follow-up activities were involved. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) More recent work has pointed in the same direction without settling the issue. A 2025 study in Motivation and Emotion reported that exposure to literary fiction, but not popular fiction, was positively associated with recognizing emotions in other people. (link.springer.com) Platform companies have pushed back on broad claims of harm and emphasized safety tools instead. TikTok said in May 2025 that it was expanding its Mental Health Education Fund and rolling out guided meditation exercises in the app for all users. (newsroom.tiktok.com) So the books-versus-“brainrot” thread landed in a real gap between heavy short-video use and falling reading habits, but the research still describes a mixed picture: strong correlations, some short-term effects, and much less proof than the viral posts claimed. (pewresearch.org)