The first thing students like Justis Walker do when they wake up is open Instagram and start scrolling through Reels. Phones resting mere inches from their faces, images of dancing fruit and AI-generated videos of Shrek fighting Lebron James project onto students’ bleary-eyed faces, injecting their brains with the proverbial “rot.”
The “brain rot” phenomenon is a leading factor in the mental health crisis among young adults with its dopamine-inducing tendrils reaching from beyond the screen and into daily life. Brain rot was even named Word of the Year by the Oxford University Press in 2024.
“Brain rot is a type of meme culture. People have inside jokes online, just like any other interpersonal relationship,” Walker said. “They might [be reminded] of a certain place where something funny happened — little things.”
Walker is a second-year student at the University of Iowa and described some of the biggest social media trends in recent years as brain rot. Words like “rizz,” “huzz,” or “skibidi toilet” are sayings that have spread across social media but originated in comedic TikToks or Instagram Reels.
Words like these have to elicit a reaction in order to gain the traction they end up garnering, according to Walker. The more provocative or buzzy the brain rot saying, the more likely it will catch on.
“Cat videos easily go viral because when you see a cat, you feel affection. The same thing happens with funny videos because you laugh at them,” Walker said. “That’s why rage-bait is becoming more prominent. It’s just about what gets people talking — what makes people feel something.”
This ethos is what the internet has run on since its invention. Memes and viral jokes have always been passed around — the form is what has changed. Despite recently entering the cultural vocabulary, the term brain rot has been around since 1854 when Henry David Thoreau coined the term in his book “Walden.”
After abandoning the material world, Thoreau lived a peaceful life, in nature and documented his experience in “Walden.” Transcending modernity, Thoreau bemoans the mental decline of those still taking part in contemporary life asking, “Will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
Even at its inception, the term referred to invaluable thinking. In this digital age, invaluable thinking translates to social media posts. The term reentered the zeitgeist in 2020 when Reels and TikTok gained popularity.
UI third-year student Ben Benton believes the rapidity of brain rot is largely responsible for the uptick in this content. Benton compares these quick-cut videos to the appeal of “fail” videos.
“Both are humorous because they give a sudden outcome to a situation that you didn’t necessarily expect,” Benton said.
Much like the buzzwords that get thrown around in brain rot content, there is a shock value in the structure of the videos. Anyone who has been on the internet can tell you trends come and go. Benton believes the brain rot trend may just be another in a lineage of viral videos like fails or Vine skits.
Diluting humor to shorthand language and bitesize videos meant to do nothing but pacify the brain with patterns of quick dopamine hits is where the rot part becomes concerning. After any extended screen time, it’s common to feel lethargic despite not moving at all. This lethargy is compounded by overstimulating scrolling through brain rot content.
Researchers deem any sort of online content that negatively influences cognition or mental health as brain rot. Negative news posts are considered brain rot despite not fitting the trendy format. These posts are put out in the same snappy, constant flow as comedic ones, and an overexposure can lead to seriously distressing feelings.
Even though brain rot video content doesn’t directly deal with negative subject matter, the post-scroll feeling can be eerily similar. Overstimulation of any kind can lead to problems with problem solving, decision making, memory, and organization.
The parts of the brain that influence these functions can be physically altered by grey matter — the rot is literal, and it’s seeping into nondigital areas of life. In October 2024, brain rot mascots A.J. and Big Justice joined The Rizzler on “The Tonight Show.”
If all of that sounds foreign to you, that is likely a good sign.
These viral Costco shoppers who have been the stars of countless brain rot videos were invited to perform their internet gimmick on the same show celebrities frequent. This episode blurred the lines between internet star and celebrity, setting a precedent for the normalization of seeing the figures from our phones in real-world scenarios.
If the real-world effects of internet brain rot seem dire, one article from The Atlantic in 2008 may offer some hope. The publication released a story titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and raised similar concerns to those expressed by professionals about brain rot.
As new forms of digital tools and entertainment emerge, so too do concerns for what dangerous impacts could linger around the corner. This cycle isn’t exclusive to the internet, though.
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“Film went through a similar phase in the early 1900s. People were assuming that going to see movies was going to have a detrimental effect on people,” Zachary Vanes, a graduate student at the UI teaching classes in the Department of Cinematic Arts, said. “There is this perennial idea that the amount and type of media you consume is going to influence how you think and behave.”
While Vanes does believe there is stock in the possibility that brain rot content could be influencing how young people’s minds work, he finds it to be more of a scapegoat than the root cause.
“I think a lot of things, like attention spans, are related to the hours that we are expected to work and the culture that we live in,” Vanes said. “The media comes after the culture.”
Vanes pointed to recent remakes of animated Disney films as a signifier of film following the culture. At a point where people want easy-to-swallow content they don’t have to think about, film studios are looking for ways to cash in.
“The industry has always sort of relied on things that are tested. If something works, like princess movies, they’re going to keep making them until they can’t. The idea that profit is more important than anything else is most prevalent. Right now, they are catering to brain rot spectators,” Vanes said.
While brain rot has already permeated the film industry, Vanes does not see the potential risks of brain rot slang. He finds abbreviations and shorthand to be a natural function of communication.
“There’s a process known as chunking where what you hear consolidates in a sort of chunk that you can access through memory. Shorthands simplify the process,” Vanes said.
From a student’s perspective, shorthand is so ingrained in how young people communicate that Walker believes brain rot does nothing new to further complicate things.
“I feel like it is a form of creativity,” Walker said. “To make something very unique within itself. We all have a good idea of what professional language is It depends on who you’re talking to. Linguistics is not something that is set. It’s always evolving and always changing.”
Walker believes even the most staunch critics of brain rot terminology won’t need to worry for long. Just as soon as a phrase like “Kamala is BRAT” makes its way from TikTok, to Instagram, and then Facebook, it will already have been replaced.
“Meme culture is part of the media,” Walker said. “Things come and go, and memes die and rise.”
The revolving door of the internet shuffles in new trends every day, but only some of them end up taking off so far as to influence language and film. Given the unpredictability, Vanes can see a future where brain rot is hailed as an art form.
“Right now, we think that TikTok is affecting our brains, but 20 years from now, we might encourage our children to watch TikToks because it’s good for them,” Vanes said.
The popularity of brain rot could be the source of many consequences — some good and some not. Whether videos of people dancing while pointing at text boxes above their heads continue to enrapture the culture or become replaced by some inconceivable next step in Thoreau’s original brain rot theory, self-moderation on the internet is as important as ever.
“Media is defined by the power that we give it,” Vanes said.