Brainrot, From One Who Knows!

Throughout the time of Homo sapiens, from the discovery of fire to today’s modern age of technology, the human mind might as well be the most valuable commodity. However, memes and so-called ’brain rot’ are infiltrating this bastion of evolution. What may have started as an innocent scroll for five minutes can descend into a flood of clips, losing your hours; upon finding yourself watching the twentieth Italian brain rot or ‘rizz’ meme, you might just wonder if your brain has been replaced by a non-sentient entity, subconsciously responding to meme stimulation. While this all feels very surreal, a vast amount of cognitive science supports and explains why this happens.

During a recent lecture, the mere mention of the numbers six and seven caused a ripple of laughter. Even when entering the library, it is common to hear words such as “rizz” or “sigma” blaring out. The issue is real and is directly affecting St Andrews students; one minute you may be focusing on a tutorial, the next your brain has decided to remind you of a meme phrase instead. 

Meme culture has indirectly influenced societal matters. Your ability to understand and use certain references — whether a distorted meme, screenshot, or audio cue — now influences your societal position, revealing an individual's age and humour.

The more ‘brain-rotted’ an individual has become, the more they have slipped into the online landscape. This process is normal and closely mirrors how we all pick up slang or even the natural development of language and words. However, the advent of doomscrolling is making these processes happen at an increasingly alarming rate. 

This barrage of content arrives in front of you faster than it is possible to look away, and it is this speed that causes a vast number of consequences. 

One of the most powerful culprits behind brain rot is your brain itself, with all its quirks and subtleties. Your brain inherently latches onto repeated rhythmic sounds; this part of your brain is also responsible for processing language. The phonological loop, a key component of working memory, is very susceptible to short repeated and rhythmic sounds, something brain rot is so specialised at producing. This was initially intended to recall warnings, instructions, or important clues; instead, it is replaced with terms such as ‘girl dinner.’

Visual cues work in the same way, through manipulation of the brain's attentional bottleneck. The continuous onslaught of fast-paced, low-effort, often AI-generated clips causes the brain to switch modes. These pockets of stimulus condition your brain. Therefore, your brain is constantly hungry. The more repetitive and easily consumable the material, the better absorbed and memorised it is.

We seek brain rot for a variety of reasons, one of the most intriguing comes from the cultural climate we live in. At times of heightened societal stress, absurdity and surreal humour may in fact provide a release by helping regulate emotions, reframing stressful scenarios. It is, therefore, no coincidence that brain rot and these ever-so-damaging memes are emerging in such quantities at a point of such turmoil, when it is effectively feeding an emotional ‘comfort’ loop.

A simple duck in sunglasses or a nonsensical sentence gives your mind a pressure release valve, a way to turn the overwhelming into something funny. This, in tandem with you and your friends sharing the same brain rot clip, directly contributes to your shared, weird language, a unique form of expression that helps you stay connected and bonded … who knew brain rot could make you and your friends even closer! 

To better emphasise the danger of brain rot, it is easiest to compare it in principle to a virus; similarly to a virus, brain rot and memes mutate, replicate, and adapt. Memes adapt to current trends and mutations spread through a new type of transmission — culture.

Through the consumption of fifteen near-identical videos, your brain absorbs them as a cluster, blocking potentially useful brain bandwidth.

Brain rot really is just a partition of a hive mentality. Everyone who consumes develops a near-identical mental template. Whilst this does not damage the brain, it does, in fact, start to rewire it and encourage the reward feedback loop for scrolling this type of content.

Just maybe, in the ever-changing world of brain rot, we are all potentially much smarter than we realise. We are simply letting our minds wander, outsourcing our spare capacity and attention to this ‘hive’ and somehow, in a very strangely human way, it works. 

Image from Wikimedia Commons