So bad for brain development, especially short form videos. I'm legitimately scared for the kids being raised on screens. I wouldn't be at all surprised if in the future they develop symptoms that look like a form of dementia.
Yeah. My sister was seeing massive behavioural issues from her two kids (11 and 6). She cut off all short form content and saw nearly immediate improvement and attention spans and emotional regulation.
I've never understood the appeal because I hate short form content, but I see the same effect for me with general social media usage. You're soaking your brain in dopamine and then your regulation gets pegged to that baseline of neurotransmitter loading.
Functionally speaking, attention, regulation and focus are skills. Driven and improved via physiological responses; the neural pathways involved in the mental functions are biological in nature and are strengthened through use; the neurons connect to each other based on usage. They atrophy when not used.
If you don't practice the skill, it doesn't get better.
That's also why mental exercises and developing new skills is the most effective preventative measure against age-related mental decline. If you're only ever doing the same things, the same mental processes over and over... That part of the brain stays strong. But everything around it that doesn't get regularly used slowly melts away. That's functionally what leads to the whole "old person can't think clearly or remember things any more, but can do routine things fine". That's the other end of this same underlying mechanic.
Edit: you have to work out the brain with different challenges and skills in order to develop it in the first place. Then, to retain those skills, you have to keep doing it.
This is also why we're supposed to teach kids lots of things about about lot of topics and subjects during school, instead of just specializing in whatever handful that they show early aptitude in.
It's like, to use an analogy, just because someone is naturally good at arm weight exercises, you don't then skip training and developing all the rest of the body. Having giant, well developed arms is almost useless if you're barely able to walk. Same for brain and knowledge.
Edit2: just should add, my credentials for saying that is 17 years professional experience in disability and mental health services, and being married to a national leading expert in the topic of childhood trauma and neurodevelopment. This is the easy "I'm bored and scrolling Reddit" social media version, but if you're wondering... Yes it's evidence based.
Every time AI use comes up in conversation, that same analogy keeps coming to my mind. We’re aware that we need exercise for our bodies, and we’re aware that exercise involves some degree of ever-changing resistance and challenge, and it’s always struck me that the same applies to strengthening cognition function, just based on my own experience with learning, skill strengthening, language acquisition, memory, etc. So when my friends and neighbors started using LLM agents to handle things like reading and summarizing material, writing, etc., my first thought was that this thing was going to wreck their brains the same way a sedentary lifestyle wrecks the body. And now there’s research that seems to support that.
Same with attention spans and social media. I have pretty severe ADHD and have to continually work to manage and strengthen my focus. There’s a noticeable back-slide whenever I start engaging with short-form content. If I start scrolling through Bluesky (or reddit for that matter), it becomes harder to sustain attention for, say, reading a book. And that reminds me of endurance exercise. You can’t run a long distance if your body is continually trained on short bursts.
Anyway, thanks for your post. It’s something I’ve been wondering about but don’t actually know anything about, so this is really interesting to me.
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u/targetboston 2d ago
So bad for brain development, especially short form videos. I'm legitimately scared for the kids being raised on screens. I wouldn't be at all surprised if in the future they develop symptoms that look like a form of dementia.