Also, books, TV, board games, newspapers didn’t disappear. So it’s compounded in some ways

Reading is obviously healthier than scrolling tiktok.

Everyone had freedom to pick their poison so to speak. Now? All tech and screen based.

Hyper-social normalization always falls apart. It's unnatural; modern human biology evolved for thousands solving problems mostly in isolation. Tech fueled distribution of material goods humans need to survive is great as it removed risk to biology. But social normalization sucks.

Whether the socialized motive is appease gods by living up to scripture, keep a job/build career make money, or validate it just normalizes people and if we all know the same shit, why discuss anything with them? We already know the same shit.

And the regions involved in the default mode network are actually some of the metabolically most active regions in the brain, involved in memory consolidation, future simulation, theory of mind, and self-narrative; among other things.

I think screen activity/tiktok keeps us in some kind of purgatory where we can neither fully engage nor fully disengage.

"The researchers caution against reading the deactivation as evidence of impaired cognitive function. As they put it in the paper, “this deactivation should not be interpreted as a failure of cognitive control capacity.” Instead, the team argues the pattern likely reflects an adaptive shift toward low-effort, automatic processing during passive, low-conflict viewing."

my take: if the study authors could qualify a subject's liked videos, they could qualify a subject's liked activities, and study activation thresholds prior to and post short form content exposure. this would provide a better substrate from which to draw such conclusions.

but I don't need a study to tell me that short form content fries the brain ... it fries my brain!

The Youtube app now has a "shorts feed limit" under "time management" that will limit your access to the auto-scroll shorts feed to a certain amount per day. Worth checking out!