Comment by Zak
20 hours ago
Here's a study showing an immediate negative impact on prospective memory from switching context repeatedly on short-form video platforms: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/09658211.2025.252107...
Unlimited skipping until a video is sufficiently stimulating had a negative impact regardless of the content, while people limited to ten skips in ten minutes did not experience a negative impact. This suggests that the format itself has harmful cognitive effects.
Scrolling through a comment thread in an online forum such as this requires a lot of context switching. Does the context-switching theory of brain rot apply to text based feeds as well, or only video?
Or browsing shelves in a bookshop. I've noticed I forget what I was doing ("prospective memory impairment") while looking for a good book. Also sometimes I annoy myself because I want to quit but I can't because I haven't found anything good yet. Whoops, where did the time go? So, ban bookshops.
you would hope that comments in a thread would stay in context, ideally.