The term primarily refers to low-value internet content and the effects caused by spending too much time consuming it. Example: “Watching too much TikTok is rotting my brain.”
Online discussion of Brain Rot has become so widespread recently that some social media users have begun making parodies of people they believe embody Brain Rot.
TikTok user Heidi Becker has posted several videos in which she can be seen rapid-fire stringing together one internet tidbit after another for the camera.
“Yooo oh my god fit right in, pop off king!” she says at the start of a recent video that has garnered more than 200,000 likes.
Other parts of her monologue include “feeding my golden retriever,” a slang term for a person who comes across as friendly, goofy, or harmless, and “I really love hot girls walking around, and I really love having dinner with girls,” references to everyday activities that TikTok has gendered and renamed.
It's not a compliment to accuse someone of having a rotten brain, but some people take a bit of pride in admitting that condition. Recently, BuzzFeed challenged its readers to take an internet trivia quiz, under the headline “If You Pass This Brain Rot Quiz, Your Brain is 1000% Rotten.”
“One of the easiest ways to tell if social media is destroying someone's brain is to see how frequently they reference internet slang,” influencer Joel Cave wrote in a recent TikTok post. “The fact that the internet has ingrained itself into our brains to the point where people can no longer control what they say and are forced to blurt out whatever memes they see most often is just incredible to me.”
Some social media accounts are dedicated to creating “brain-rotting content,” which has become its own subgenre of entertainment. TikTok user “Fort History” dubs clips from movies and TV shows in modern internet lingo.
“Hey Rizler, it's just me and you today,” Phil says to his son Luke in the sitcom Modern Family.
“Okay, I'll be right down,” Luke replied.
Taylor Lorenz, author of “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Internet Fame, Influence and Power,” considers “brain rot” to be synonymous with the term “broken brain.” Both online terms apply to people who have been so warped by what they've seen online that they “have lost the ability to function in the real world,” said Lorenz, a former New York Times reporter and current Washington Post columnist.
A badge of honor?
The term “brain rot” first appeared online in 2007 and was originally intended as a joke, but its popularity has been linked to growing awareness of a disorder that researchers at Boston Children's Hospital call “problematic interactive media use.”
Michael Ricci, a pediatrician who founded the hospital's Digital Wellness Lab, said the condition his patients call Brain Rot is “a way of describing what happens when you spend so much time online, shifting your awareness from the real world to this online space, filtering everything through the lens of what's posted and what you can post.”
Dr. Rich adds that many of his patients seem to view their brain decline as a badge of honor. Some compete for screen time the way they compete for high scores on video games. They joke about it, but they know their compulsive internet use is affecting them, but not enough to stop it.
“Even though they are experiencing brain decline, they don't use that as motivation to get away from it,” Dr. Rich said.
Joshua Rodriguez-Ortiz, an 18-year-old high school senior from Billerica, Massachusetts, said he's heard the term more and more over the past two months.
“I think people are starting to realize that TikTok has consumed our lives so much that it feels like brain rot, because people are constantly scrolling through TikTok and there are so many niche references from TikTok,” he said.
He referenced a recent viral video titled “Tik Tok Liz Party,” which showed a group of young people dancing to Kanye West songs at a Sweet Sixteen party.