What is brain rot? The idea behind the word of the year

Brain rot is slang for two things at once: trivial, low-effort online content, and the dull, scattered state of mind people say they feel after scrolling through too much of it. Oxford University Press named it its word of the year for 2024. It is a cultural label, not a medical diagnosis. Research links heavy short-video use to weaker attention, but mostly shows a correlation, not damage to the brain.

In short

• The phrase is old, first recorded in 1854, but it spread in the 2020s as young people's own joke about their screen habits.
• "Brain rot" names both the content (endless, nonsensical clips) and its supposed effect (a foggy mind that struggles to focus).
• Studies find that heavy short-form video use goes with poorer attention and self-control, but they can't yet say how much is cause and how much is the kind of person who scrolls most.

What does brain rot mean?

Oxford's dictionary defines it as "the supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging." It adds a second sense: something likely to cause that deterioration. The word "supposed" matters. The dictionary records how people use the word, not a finding that it happens.

In practice the phrase works in two directions:

Sense	What it points at	Typical use
The content	Clips that are repetitive, surreal or deliberately meaningless	"That video is pure brain rot."
The effect	Feeling foggy, restless or unable to focus after heavy scrolling	"I've got brain rot from my phone today."

Much of the content is made and enjoyed by the same people who joke about it. Oxford University Press pointed to the animated Skibidi Toilet series and "only in Ohio" memes as examples, and to slang that grew out of them, such as "skibidi" for nonsensical. A related word, AI slop, names the flood of cheap machine-made content that feeds the same feeds.

Where did the word come from?

The phrase is much older than the internet. Here is how it got from a philosopher's cabin to a dictionary's shortlist:

When	What happened
1854	Henry David Thoreau writes in Walden: "While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot," criticizing a taste for trivial ideas over demanding ones
2007 to 2010s	Twitter users apply it to dating shows, video games and time spent online, and its use slowly grows
2020s	It becomes a meme on Discord in 2020, then spreads on TikTok among Gen Z and Gen Alpha, often about the very videos they are watching
2023 to 2024	Oxford measures a 230% rise in how often the phrase is used
2 December 2024	Oxford names it the word of the year, after a public vote of more than 37,000 people

Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, read the choice as a sign of self-aware humor: a generation spreading a warning about social media through social media itself.

Does scrolling actually rot your brain?

No study shows that watching short videos causes physical damage to the brain. The literal image of rot is a metaphor. What researchers have studied is whether heavy use goes with weaker attention, memory and mood, and here the findings are real but limited.

One of the largest reviews is a 2025 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin, "Feeds, feelings, and focus". It pooled 71 studies covering 98,299 people. More short-form video use was linked to poorer cognition overall, with the strongest links for attention and inhibitory control, the ability to stop yourself acting on an impulse. Heavier use was also linked, more weakly, to poorer mental health, most of all stress and anxiety, but not to body image or self-esteem. The links held for both young people and adults, and across platforms.

A worked example shows how to read those numbers. The review reports a correlation of r = −0.38 between use and attention. A correlation runs from −1 to 1, where 0 means no relationship. Squaring it gives the share of the differences between people that the two measures have in common: 0.38 × 0.38 ≈ 0.14, or about 14%. That is a meaningful link for a behavior study, yet it leaves about 86% of the differences in attention explained by other things. And because most of the studies measured both things at one moment, the link could run either way. Short videos might wear attention down, or people who already find it hard to focus might be drawn to them.

An earlier review, "The 'online brain'" in World Psychiatry in 2019, reached a similar shape of conclusion. Frequent media multitasking was linked to worse sustained attention, probably because people got worse at ignoring distractions, but some studies found no harm, and with the internet so young, its authors wrote, the long-term effects had yet to be established.

Still argued

How much short videos harm attention is argued among researchers. One side reads the consistent correlations, and the design of endless feeds built to hold attention, as enough reason for concern, especially for children. The other side points out that most studies are correlational, rely on people's own reports of their use, and often find that "problematic" or compulsive use matters more than hours spent. Experiments that change people's use, rather than just measure it, are still few.

Why would a feed leave you feeling foggy?

Part of the answer is how feeds are built. Each swipe might bring something funny, shocking or dull, and that unpredictability keeps people swiping, much as an uncertain reward does in many learning experiments. Dopamine, the brain messenger involved in learning what is worth pursuing, is often blamed in popular writing, though "dopamine overload" is a simplification of how it works. The other part is plain displacement. Time spent scrolling late at night is time not spent sleeping, moving or talking to people, and short sleep alone is enough to make anyone foggy the next day.

The brain does change with habits: practice strengthens some pathways and lets others weaken. That is ordinary learning, not rot. It means habits of attention can be trained in either direction.

What do people do about it?

The best evidence comes from experiments that changed people's phone use. In a 2025 randomized trial reported in PNAS Nexus, people used an app that blocked mobile internet on their phones for two weeks while keeping calls and texts. Their average screen time fell from 314 to 161 minutes a day, and sustained attention, mental health and well-being all improved. The researchers credited the gains partly to what people did instead: more time in the offline world, more social connection and more sleep, along with less media and a stronger sense of self-control. Of the 467 people who agreed to take part, only 119 kept the block on for at least 10 days, so the results describe people willing and able to stick with it.

Smaller steps follow the same logic: turning off autoplay and notifications, keeping the phone out of the bedroom, and setting a time limit on the apps used most. Working in fixed, focused stretches, as in the Pomodoro technique, gives attention practice in the other direction. None of this needs the word brain rot to be literally true. It only needs people to notice how they feel after an hour of scrolling, and decide whether that is how they want to spend it.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: what are the two senses of "brain rot", and which one does research actually test?
• Why does a correlation of −0.38 between use and attention not show that short videos cause poor attention?
• What did the phone-blocking trial suggest people did with the time they got back?

Sources

• 'Brain rot' named Oxford Word of the Year 2024 — Oxford University Press, 2024
• Feeds, feelings, and focus: A systematic review and meta-analysis examining the cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use — Psychological Bulletin, American Psychological Association, 2025
• The "online brain": how the Internet may be changing our cognition — Firth et al., World Psychiatry, 2019
• Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being — EurekAlert, on Castelo et al., PNAS Nexus, 2025
• Brain rot — Wikipedia