By The Editorial Board
Entertainment rules our world. We chuckle at the mindless, pointless “brain rot” videos like Ballerina Cappuccina and Tung Tung Tung Sahur and scroll to the next video without a second thought. After all, this AI-generated silliness means nothing, so there’s no harm in laughing at a few funny videos now and then, right?
This is the mindset of an entire generation with the lowest literacy rates in 20 years. Our brains are being cooked alive by our desperation to be entertained, and as much as we try to, we can’t outsmart science.
The quick dopamine spike of a six-second video sends our brain a stimulus we are unable to ignore until every mindless scroll sets our dopamine production to irreversible levels. The more we fry our brains with mindless screen stimulation, the farther we get from the equilibrium the human brain was created to be at. The neuroscience of addiction is incredibly complex, but the principle is simple.
Once your dopamine levels spike to a certain level in response to a stimulus, they never return to normal. So once the high wears off, our brains become trapped in the endless, desperate chase to find that stimulus again — and so the cycle of addiction begins.
The term “brain rot,” which refers to the cognitive decline caused by the overconsumption of mindless online content, was Oxford Dictionary’s 2024 Word of the Year. While there is no formal medical diagnosis for this trend, we’re seeing it manifest in every corner of our online domains.
Generation Z and younger millennials grew up consuming content like Annoying Orange, short-form Vine videos and longer-form YouTube videos. It’s not a new trend to watch silly videos online, so how do we determine what media is too dangerous to consume?
Italian brain rot has been the latest craze among Generation Alpha, a series of internet memes featuring surrealist, AI-generated images with Italian names. Characters like Tralalero Tralala, Chimpanzini Bananini and more exist in a fictional universe with equally fictional lore. Although not created by one individual, these characters have taken off online, with more videos emerging every day.
One of these Italian brain rot characters is Bombardiro Crocodilo, which is a military bomber plane with the head of a crocodile superimposed. It’s wildly silly, an AI-generated crocodile bomber flying around, so we don’t think too much of it — after all, not thinking is the whole point.
Context matters. The image of an AI crocodile might be funny enough to stimulate us, but the context behind it is far from silly.
Because it’s not just a crocodile bomber video; the character itself was created as a mockery of the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict and, in the Italian brain rot universe, bombs children in Gaza.
In 23 months of war, Palestine has seen a child die every hour. While children in Gaza watch real bombers level their homes, American children watch war-themed brain rot for a dopamine spike.
Even Ballerina Cappuccina’s lore raises some eyebrows, as she was kidnapped and forced into marriage by her husband. Bombing kids abroad and violence against women aren’t appropriate topics for kids in prime neural development stages to consume, no matter what form they may appear in.
We have laws protecting children from inappropriate content they see on the film screen, but nothing protects them from the easily accessible, endless domain of the internet.
If the developing brains of young children are consistently being stimulated by contextually inappropriate and negative content, they will continue to seek out brain rot to reach that high again. And brain-rotted kids become brain-rotted adults, and the cycle of addiction keeps on turning.
Online brain rot has the power to keep entire generations trapped in a dopamine-driven feedback loop, which results in gray matter loss, emotional desensitization and impairs executive functioning skills. But it only has that power if we let it.
Like most things in life, it comes down to mind over matter. Brain rot content only fries you if you let it. We have been active participants in our collective brain fog, and it will continue to be a generational problem if we allow it to.
We can’t expect our children to be literate or empathetic when they rely on harmful media for a quick fix. What we consume online manifests itself outside our screens, too, and it makes us regretfully less functional members of society one scroll at a time.
