Among the many aspects of online life accused of rotting our brains, a certain folk psychology holds that short-form video is an especially egregious driver of the decay. In an interview last month promoting his new film, in which a London couple move their tech-dependent kids to a barn without electricity, Andrew Garfield described himself as addicted to an Instagram feed full of “weird ceramics” and Japanese craftspeople. “I’ve given all of those hours to nothing,” he told Variety. “It’s genuinely enraging because we don’t have as much control over these impulses as we should.” Even Steve Chen, one of the co-founders of YouTube—home to many a recycled TikTok on its Shorts—has said that he’s wary of his kids watching too much short-form video, because of the damage it does to attention. Sometimes, when I emerge from the dark vortex of a scroll gone too long, I worry that my thoughts will permanently become as flighty as my feed.
But here’s the tricky part: Very little research exists on what short-form videos are doing to the human mind. This lack of data gives cover to tech executives, who, when faced with the potentially harmful effects of their products, can cite the difficulty of establishing any one app or feature as the cause of a person’s unraveling. Short-form video in particular is a marker of how far behind cognitive research is, compared with the relentless pace of new technology. What available studies hint at so far is at least worthy of unease, and the not-knowing is only making things worse.
Research on short-form videos and cognition is difficult to conduct. Studies on human subjects tend to be slow and expensive, and academics are wary of spending years investigating apps that could be irrelevant by the time their results are published. Plus, the federal government hasn’t prioritized funding research on potentially addictive behaviors, including gambling and social-media use. The industry could help fill in the gaps by funding or even leading research, especially given that American social-media platforms have exclusive and valuable data. But companies are not particularly motivated to bankroll research that could show detrimental effects of their wildly profitable products. So far, they have largely chosen to keep internal research private.
(Data points do creep out. In 2024, for instance, a sloppily redacted complaint in a lawsuit against TikTok revealed some of the company’s internal research, which allegedly found that compulsive usage of the app “correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety.” At the time, a spokesperson for TikTok argued that the documents were outdated and that the quotes in the complaint had been cherry-picked.)
Complicating things further is the fact that much of the publicly available research on short-form video is flimsy. In a study conducted at China’s Zhejiang University that went viral last month, 56 young adults clicked through a series of short videos (not on social media) as they lay in an MRI machine. Two brain regions involved in executing cognitively demanding tasks were found to be more active when participants swiped away from videos before they were midway through, versus when they stuck around until a video’s end. Prominent social-media accounts, including one for the prediction market Polymarket, promoted the study as more proof that TikTok is making us smooth-brained. One news outlet ran the headline “Instagram Reels & TikTok Make You Dumb & Depressed.” But the study, multiple neuroscientists told me, said nothing about short-form videos, intelligence, or depression—instead, it found that brain areas involved in taking action lit up when a participant chose to take the action of skipping to the next video. Besides, the study lacked controls, equated finishing a video with enjoying it, and never established the baseline that supposedly video-addled brain activity was being compared against. (The study’s corresponding author did not respond to a request for comment.)
Stronger studies are much rarer. But they do point in the same direction as many Americans’ intuition: Increased short-form-video use appears to be associated with poorer impulse control, mental-health outcomes, and attention capacity. Researchers at the University of Bristol concluded last year that the constant context-switching inherent to watching short-form videos may degrade prospective memory: the ability to recall something you had previously intended to do. Caty Enders, a doctoral student at the University of New Mexico, has also found that students who used TikTok at a high volume had more issues with both working memory (the information you need to keep track of what you’re doing in the moment) and episodic memory (a form of long-term memory that stores past personal events, such as what you did for your tenth birthday). A 2024 study conducted at Sigmund Freud University, in Austria, found that participants who reported watching more than four hours of short-form videos a day exhibited neurological activity that indicates cognitive abnormality.
Take all these findings with a grain of salt, however. Even the highest-quality studies on short-form videos tend to be limited in their explanatory power. They’re usually small and preliminary. And Keith Robert Head, a researcher at Capella University who recently published a review article on short-form video and attention, could point me to just four good studies on the topic that had been conducted in the United States. Most of the existing research comes from China, and Enders cautioned me against applying findings across the two countries, given that social-media platforms in the U.S. are subject to much less government control and are capable of accessing more user data and personalizing feeds to a greater degree.
Psychologists and neuroscientists have reasoned that short-form video is probably an especially potent and dangerous type of social media because the constant stream of non sequiturs and bright visuals is so overstimulating, and because there’s no upper limit to how long you can spend scrolling. But no one has established whether the negative effects of short-form video are because of something specific to the medium or the fact that spending hours on TikTok displaces healthy habits such as sleeping—in which case, the videos would be no more inherently harmful than binging Friends. Participants in a study Enders conducted on TikTok use and memory spent an average of 133 minutes a day on the app. “If you do anything every day for 133 minutes, it will change you,” Enders said.
Uncertainty around any technology’s effects not only relieves pressure on tech companies to make targeted modifications but also leaves governments to decide policy without sufficient information. Some countries have already instituted blanket social-media bans for minors based on imperfect data—not an ideal basis on which to restrict civil liberties. And everyone else is left with the ambient and unsure sense that the apps they use are terrible for them.
The fact that so many people perceive a problem with short-form video may be reason enough for alarm. Luiz Pessoa, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland who spoke with me about the shortcomings of the recent viral study, thinks that an attention epidemic is clearly at hand, despite scientists’ limited understanding of it. He and his teenage daughter often watch the highlight reels from Formula 1 races, and when they do, she’s also looking at her phone. “It’s obvious we’re multi-, triple-, quadruple-tasking in ways that at least 20, 30 years ago we weren’t,” he told me. You don’t have to be a neuroscientist to have reason to suspect your brain can be stretched only so thin.
The post This Is Your Brain on Short-Form Video appeared first on The Atlantic.
