Little Videos Are Cooking Our Brains

By Adam Clark Estes, senior technology correspondent, Vox

The following is an excerpt from a recent Vox article, which discusses the effects of short-form vertical videos on attention span.

… People already spend a staggering amount of time on TikTok: 108 minutes a day, which is more than double the time spent on Instagram. There are many, many studies showing how more TikTok use increases anxiety and stress, especially in young people. (One of them coined the term “TikTok brain” and not in a good way.) We’ve also known for a while that watching TikTok has the side effect of shredding your attention span. Researchers have found that TikTok disrupts your ability to complete a task when interrupted. Our attention spans while looking at a screen have shrunk, on average, from two and a half minutes in 2004 to just 47 seconds, which is incidentally quite close to the average length of a TikTok video.

“You can think of it as attentional capacity, and we can use that capacity to get work done, to do important things,” said Gloria Mark, author of Attention Span and professor of informatics at the University of California Irvine, whose research landed on that 47-second number. “But if we’re switching our attention, that’s draining our tank of resources, and then we just don’t have the capacity anymore to pay attention.”

Before the next era of TikTok and its clones overwhelms you, it helps to know how we got here and how to run the other direction.

…

Early on, a one-minute length limit meant that TikTok users were fed videos constantly, often serendipitously, on their For You page. That limit has since been extended to 60 minutes, but users have also learned they can swipe to see a new, unexpected video as soon as they’re bored. This can lead users to keep searching for good videos, which are effectively rewards, triggering dopamine release and effectively getting them addicted to the feedback loop. As Mark put it, “The hardest behavior to extinguish, to stop, is randomly reinforced behavior, and the reason is because of the randomness of the rewards coming.”

If you find yourself stuck

Try these three tips from professor Gloria Mark:

1. Take breaks. If, rather than enjoying yourself, you find yourself foraging for interesting content, stand up and go outside and look at a tree. There are lots of apps that prompt you to put down the device.
2. Be intentional rather than automatic when you use any app. If you tap TikTok because you don’t know what else to do, that’s a sign that you’re tired and low on cognitive resources.
3. Think ahead to your future self. Visualize what you want at the end of your day and how you’ll get there. It probably doesn’t involve spending 108 minutes looking at TikTok.

Read the full article on Vox.