If you or a loved one speaks almost exclusively in Internet references: “You’re energizing the golden retriever’s boyfriend” or “Show me Rachel,” you may be suffering from a condition known as “brain rot.”
The term primarily refers to low-value Internet content and the effects caused by spending too much time consuming it. Example: “I’ve been watching so many TikToks my brain is rotten.”
Recently, the online debate about brain rot has become so widespread that some social media users have begun creating parodies of people who seem to embody this disease.
Several videos of TikTok user Heidi Becker show her facing the camera, quickly stringing together one Internet reference after another.
“Hello, oh my goodness, the fit is appropriate, jump king!” he says at the beginning of a recent video that has more than 200,000 likes.
Other lines from his soliloquy include: “He’s giving the golden retriever energy,” slang for someone who comes across as friendly, silly, or harmless; and “I really like walking with hot girls and I really like having dinner with girls,” references to daily activities that TikTok has gendered and renamed.
Accusing someone of having a broken brain is not a compliment. But some people show a glimmer of pride in admitting the disease. A recent BuzzFeed quiz challenging readers on obscure Internet trivia had the following title: “If you pass this brain destruction quiz, your brain will be 1000% cooked.”
“One of the easiest ways to tell if social media has destroyed someone’s brain is to look at how often they reference internet slang,” influencer Joel Cave recently posted in a TikTok. “The fact that the Internet can infiltrate our brains so much that people don’t even have control over what they say (they just have to blurt out whatever meme they’ve been seeing frequently) is crazy to me.”
Some social media accounts are dedicated to creating “witty content,” which has become its own subgenre of entertainment. TikTok user “Fort History” takes clips from movies and TV shows and dubs them with the latest internet slang.
“Hey, Rizzler, it’s just you and me today,” Phil from the sitcom “Modern Family” appears to say to his son, Luke, in one clip.
“Okay, I’ll come down,” Luke replies.
Taylor Lorenz, author of “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet,” said she sees “brainrot” as synonymous with the phrase “broken brain.” Both online terms apply to those who have become so distorted by what they see on the Internet “that they have lost the ability to function in the physical world,” said Lorenz, a Washington Post columnist who previously was a reporter for The New Times. York.
A badge of honor?
The term “brainrot,” which appeared online as early as 2007, is intended to be funny. But its rise in popularity is related to growing recognition of a disorder that researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital have called Problematic Interactive Media Use.
Michael Rich, a pediatrician who founded the Digital Wellness Lab at the hospital, said his patients refer to Brainrot as “a way of describing what happens when you spend a lot of your time online and you’ve moved your attention online.” . space instead of IRL, and they are filtering everything through the lens of what has been published and what can be published.”
Dr. Rich added that many of his patients seem to consider having a broken brain a badge of honor. Some even compete for the most screen time the same way they do for high scores in video games. They joke about it, self-aware enough to understand that obsessive Internet use affects them, but not self-aware enough to stop it.
“Even though they’re experiencing brain rot, they’re not using it as motivation to escape it,” Dr. Rich said.
Joshua Rodríguez Ortiz, an 18-year-old high school senior in Billerica, Massachusetts, said he had heard the term come up more and more in the past two months.
“I think people started to realize that TikTok consumes our lives so much that it seemed crazy, because people are constantly scrolling through TikTok and there are so many TikTok-specific references,” she said.
He cited a recent viral video titled “The Tik Tok Rizz Party,” which showed a group of teenagers dancing with Kanye West at a Sweet Sixteen party.
