Watching TikTok Videos and Instagram Reels Deactivates the Brain's Cognitive Control Network
An anonymous reader quotes a report from RathBiotaClan: Millions of people finish short video after short video every day; a new brain-scan study shows that the very act of finishing a clip they like temporarily quiets the brain regions that normally help them stay focused and weigh longer-term goals. When people watch a short video they enjoy enough to finish, two brain regions involved in…
Millions of people binge-watch short video clips on platforms like TikTok and Instagram daily, a study from Zhejiang University reveals the surprising effect it has on brain function. Functional MRI and proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (H-MRS) techniques were used to scan the brains of 56 young adults while they watched these entertaining videos.
The research team discovered that the two brain regions responsible for cognitive control - the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) - showed significant deactivation when participants watched videos they enjoyed enough to watch to completion. Cognitive control is essential for balancing immediate pleasures against longer-term goals, and impairments in this system have been linked to various mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, and addiction.
Short-video platforms are designed to present rapid, algorithmically curated streams that encourage continuous, low-effort consumption. Previous behavioral research has associated internet addiction and smartphone addiction with weakened self-control, and neuroimaging studies have documented disruptions in reward and cognitive-control circuits in individuals with behavioral addictions.
This study is the first to directly test whether watching entertaining short videos suppresses the brain's cognitive control regions, and it also explores the neurochemical factors that may explain the variability in this suppression among individuals.
Written by urgent.news from Slashdot's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
