Study: Watching TikTok videos deactivates key cognitive brain regions
Scientific study reveals TikTok videos deactivate key cognitive brain regions
A brain-scan study of 56 young adults found that watching short videos they liked deactivated the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, regions involved in cognitive control. The deactivation was specific to these regions, as the visual cortex remained active. The researchers caution that this does not indicate impaired cognitive function, but rather an adaptive shift to low-effort processing.
this deactivation should not be interpreted as a failure of cognitive control capacity.
- Aurornis
dlPFC deactivation is observed in a lot of immersive tasks. There are a lot of tasks that do this. Playing video games, as one example https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/4-431-26797-2_11
Interpreting fMRI results like this article does is almost always wrong. Different activities produce different patterns of brain activity. You could put someone in an fMRI machine, have them do virtually any activity, and then write a headline saying that doing that activity turns of key brain regions that are important for something. The trick is that all brain regions are important for something. Having them be less active during a task doesn't imply that it's good or bad. It just shows you which parts of the brain are involved in that task.
This blogspam article isn't great. The study at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192... has more details, like the fact that those brain regions come online while viewing other less-preferred videos. The results aren't really indicative of anything by themself. It would have been more interesting if they compared to something, like watching a long involved movie or playing video games, but they didn't.
Also this post is coming from a fresh account that only spams links to this blog. Maybe the mods will want to switch the link to the actual study instead: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...
- t-writescode
I haven’t read the study, but I’ve read the comments so far.
I wonder if this mechanism is the same mechanism that impacts, say, swipe-focused dating websites, as well? And Twitter feeds with super-short messages. A lot of the most viral modern tech has been bite-sized content feeds of various types.
- avgDev
It used to be that reading books made you an intellectual. In the age of TikTok and shorts being able to watch a movie for 2 hours makes you an intellectual.
- hbn
Headlines like this are tiring because they're always a vast simplification of an epidemic that has a much more complicated series of social and psychological causes than a simple "it turns ur brain off"
- jzer0cool
Isn't much of all this the modern couch potato and same as many research done being glued to the TV? It's channel surfing.
- gagan2020
Why only TikTok videos. Other contenders are Instagram reels, Youtube Shorts, Snapchat, etc.
BTW its Social Media as per studies
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12329480/
Whole bunch of research,
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/?term=Social+Media
But, my point is its normal Every generation behave differently. We shouldn't judge it even via these studies.
- mvlipwig
Small-n fMRI studies tend to have issues with replication because of how noisy and difficult to use fMRI machines are. I would take this research more as an indication that more research is needed, as opposed to the be-all and end-all of how short-form video interacts with the brain.
(Caveat: I have no expertise with neuroscience or using fMRI machines. I'm mostly basing my comment off pre-replication crisis fMRI experiments that failed to produce useful data upon scrutiny.)
- huijzer
Yesterday someone showed a TikTok video where a friend of him was interviewed on the street. The question was, “What is your best fighting stance?”
I found it surprising how little depth the video had