I recently watched this video by HowTown on the scientific debate around “brain rot”, and I found it both interesting and a little unsettling.
The video cited a University of Munich study on prospective memory (or, our ability to remember future intentions) using a task-within-a-task experiment. Participants pressed N for real words and M for fake ones, but when the words “blue”, “purple”, or “green” appeared, they were asked to press Q, W, or E respectively.
After a 10-minute break spent either resting or consuming short-form content (Twitter, YouTube, or TikTok), participants repeated the test. Performance on the basic word task stayed the same across groups, but prospective memory suffered noticeably for one group: those who scrolled TikTok.
As a regular scroller of short-form videos, this hit a bit too close to home. I’ve felt my attention and memory waste away over the past few years, and it’s hard not to connect that to how I spend my downtime. Out of curiousity on whether I could observe the same effect in myself, I decided to build a small quiz (based on the details of the study, and the wonderful demonstration by HowTown) to test my own prospective memory.
A task-within-a-task experiment. Identify real and fake words while remembering to press specific keys for color-coded terms.
After playing around with it for a while, I found that I would hit an almost perfect score every single time, even after bleaching my brain with TikTok and Reels for 10 minutes. I’m not sure exactly how scientific this actually is, but it’s relieving to know that my brain works fine at this particular task. I’ll still forget that I needed to pick up the mail a minute after I mentally committed to it, though. Fun, right?
And yes, I blurred out the details of the study while you’re taking the quiz. No cheaters. Also, happy new year!