Brain Rot – A Neurological Framework

In David Thoreau 1854 book Walden he first crafted the term ‘Brain Rot’. His comments suggests concerns about mental deterioration from the trivial. He continues to criticize society for devaluing complex ideas over those that are simple, straight forward, and garnish an easy reaction. Ultimately David concludes that:

“While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” – David Thoreau, 1854

Attention as Economy

Why is it that trivial content may lead to ‘brain-rot’? I propose the key to this phenomena is understanding how cognitive attention is affected by content-consumption. Dr. Maxi Heitmayer uses an analogy of economics to describe current neuroscience models of attention. Attention is viewed as a finite resource that can be exchanged, much like currency, for knowledge, information, or the general ability to expend your mental capacity from moment-to-moment.

Attention can be experienced as active, like solving a mathematics problem, or passive, like staring at a news screen without noticing what is being displayed. Either way your capacity for attention is constantly being depleted from a stock with every moment. Ether you actively choose to solve that rubiks cube, or apathetically look out of a train window, you inevitable expand your biological limit. This is the center of attention as economics.

Flow vs. Calcified Attention

Recent technological advancements have put a spotlight on the attention as economy argument. Generally, attention is experienced not as a classical stock currency, but as a flow currency. Our stock of attention constantly dissipates, empties, and refills itself, with the amount limited by biological factors (hunger, fatigue, etc.). This is an internal process where the person may use their attention as they wish, and the flow of attention always ends with dissipation into the medium.

By recording, storing, and making visible the internet as found a way to collect and monetize the fleeting nature of attention. Calcified attention represents the external accumulation of attention, brought under the microscope by social media and its likes, followers, views, etc. This differs as calcified attention cannot be actively ‘used’ to direct cognitive processes. But instead provides a metric of how much attention something has garnered. Generating a self-reinforcing feedback-loop (Heitmayer, 2025).

The Cognitive Cost

Thus my thesis: Brain rot represents the cognitive cost differential between flow attention expenditure and calcified attention accumulation—what we might call the cognitive costs of expending your flow attention into someone else’s calcified attention.

Mechanism of Action:

Social media works by maximum flow attention from users while providing minimum cognitive enrichment (with some exceptions). The gap between attention extracted and value returned is the ‘rot’. While flow attention is built to be used and dissipate calcified attention is permanent and cognitively inert. The asymmetry between giving creators calcified attention and a users depleted their own flow attention without any residual cognitive capitol, is the phenomena called Brain Rot.

You scroll for hours – a creator gains likes/views/follows, while you retain nothing. Users are therefore depleting their own stores of attention while giving it away to media pages. Resulting in a users attention stock squandered, and when a task comes that truly needs your attention you now feel ‘overwhelmed’ or ‘overstimulated’. Simply because, your attention stores are depleted.

Final Nail in the Coffin: Attention Inflation & Cognitive Devaluation

The final piece of this puzzle. As attention becomes increasingly monetized, content is directed for maximum attention extracting, not cognitive enrichment. Moreover, capitalism has learned how to create dollars out of flow attention; continuing the positive loop of extraction.

Brain Rot manifests when you are purchasing less and less cognitive enrichment with your attention-economy.

More attention for less gains. Endless consumption yields diminishing returns, and neurologically, humans have an extremely hard time with this.

Like when your body reacting with a fever to a foreign infection, in hopes of fighting it off. Our brains are trying to fight off the attention-arbitrage by reacting with an anxiety response. And thus Brain Rot.

References

Maxi Heitmayer, The Second Wave of Attention Economics. Attention as a Universal Symbolic Currency on Social Media and beyond, Interacting with Computers, Volume 37, Issue 1, January 2025, Pages 18–29, https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwae035.

Simon, H. A.(1971) Designing organizations for an information-rich world. In Greenberger, M.(ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, (Ch. 2), pp. 37–72. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press.

Thoreau, H. D. (2016). Walden. Macmillan Collector’s Library.