It's official now: Short videos make you dumb

Short videos impair the consumer's cognitive abilities. This is stated in a study by a group of scientists on the impact of videos on human mental health.

The work brought together 71 projects and almost 100 thousand participants. It has shown that dependence on short videos, such as Reels, TikTok and Stories, negatively affects a person's mental health and cognitive abilities. The authors of the study concluded that frequent consumption of such videos reduces the ability to concentrate and impairs attention, as well as complicates the performance of tasks that require cognitive effort. This is due to the fact that short videos "flash" the reward system in the brain.

It is noted that when a person gets instant pleasure from watching a video, the brain begins to get used to the "cheap" dopamine — a quick and easy reward. As a result, when you have to work on something more difficult, any task seems much more difficult and requires much more effort.

In addition, such videos contribute to the growth of anxiety and stress, because we are used to the rapid and superficial consumption of information, which increases internal pressure and a feeling of insufficient productivity. At the same time, it is noted that "rils-dependence" does not affect the decrease in self-esteem of "rils consumers", which the authors cannot explain.