brainrot

‘PDF TO BRAINROT’ STUDY TOOLS ARE A STRANGE ITERATION ON A TIKTOK TREND , techcrunch

AI-based study tools like Coconote and Study Fetch are capitalizing on the “PDF to Brainrot” trend, which involves reading text from documents over “oddly satisfying” videos, like ASMR clips or gameplay footage from Subway Surfers . Why read a textbook if you can l... See more

The first line of My First Book —“He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b”—is language ripped from chat forums (and the rest of the short story collection follows suit). In his review for the New York Times , Dwight Garner admits that he had to look up “haplogroups,” but that he “responded to the way these senten... See more

Newport Institute, a young adult mental health inpatient treatment center, has recently begun recruiting people suffering from “brainrot.” On its website, the Institute encourages parents whose children suffer from “screen dependency” and “digital addiction” to consider treatment plans at one of its locations across the country.

The Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 is ‘brain rot’ which they defined as: “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterio

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Researchers outfitted 20 subjects, ranging in age from 21 to 65, with eye-tracking equipment and an electroencephalography (EEG) brain scanner and showed them five original works in the museum and poster replicas from the museum gift shop in varying order. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans recorded participants’ brains to identify emotions tri

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A few years ago, there was a panic over the rise of the “internet novel,” in which the “reference novel” finds tradition. Web 2.0–informed writing “is dystopic in its moral vision,” author and frequent tweeter Brandon Taylor wrote in a “Substack post.” “‘Internet novels’ have succeeded too entirely, which is to say that they are too exactly like be... See more

What journalist W. David Marx calls “savvy consumers,” those desiring cool and convention-breaking pop culture, are still consumers. When the names of products or celebrities appear in a book, they prick us like a targeted ad, jumping from the page as digestible morsels. Reference novels work because of globalized digitization; the danger in them i

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‘Yeah, TikTok is for three things: learning stuff and feeling good about yourself, stalking people, and brain rot.’

In this way, brain rot is what we might call a ‘genre of participation’, to borrow a term from the work of the cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito. On a digital social media application like TikTok, with its endless different types of con... See more

“Text is a great way to slow down, go deeper, and "work" for the value of the media (in some sense). One way that I might frame the decline of the image, is more so a growing awareness of the effects of cheap dopamine. Same reason why people are choosing to leave dating apps (for in-person dating), seek alternative consumer technology (vs

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