A new study conducted by the Department of New Social Studies at Lakeland University has sent shock waves across the world of developmental psychology. A team of psychologists, led by Dr. Jeffrey Ellison, investigated whether continuous exposure to superficial, meaningless, and highly addictive short videos on social media would have any impact on brain development or cognitive functioning. The results were shocking!

“Watching a continuous loop of mind-numbingly stupid and unimportant content might sound like a fun way to spend a Saturday evening,” says head researcher Dr. Ellison. “But it turns out that wasting your limited attention with brainrotting short-form content could have serious unexpected side effects.”

Among other things, researchers found that teenagers and young adults who spend more than four hours a day staring at their phones to watch flashy clips that are surgically designed to fry their dopamine receptors scored significantly worse on tests of attention span, memory, problem solving, language, visual perception, moral and logical reasoning, empathy, creativity, IQ, gratification delay, impulse control, executive functioning, emotional regulation, and other measures of cognitive and social functioning.

“We are still not sure how to explain these results,” admits Dr. Ellison, “this is a young field of research, and we are still investigating how the habitual consumption of irrelevant and overstimulating micro-videos on social media could be related to cognitive impairment. It’s too early to make definitive statements yet, but one hypothesis that we’re looking into is that it might be related to 5G radiation emanating from wireless devices such as tablets and smartphones.”

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