TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are designed to overwhelm the brain's pleasure circuitry and keep people watching, researchers say. A team from the University of Bayreuth, Germany, examined the phenomenon, particularly in children and adolescents, in a review published in the European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry journal.

The analysis covered 42 studies with nearly 30,000 participants, mostly teens and young adults. Crucially, the authors looked at the mechanics of the platforms themselves, often overlooked in public debate. They identified three key features: algorithmic personalization, unpredictability of infinite scroll, and novelty of rapid video switching.

Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, told DW: "TikTok is fundamentally different from television. On the other side of a TikTok screen is a massive supercomputer pointed directly at your brain. It is trained on the behavior of 3 billion other human primates." He described the attention economy as "a race to the bottom of the brainstem."

Anna Lembke, Stanford psychiatrist and author of "Dopamine Nation," compared short-form videos to "catnip for the mammalian brain." She warned they create "video chaining, akin to chain-smoking," making it hard to stop. Overstimulation of dopamine receptors leads to downregulation, requiring more videos over time to feel normal, and reducing enjoyment of simpler pleasures.

Neuroscientist Ben Rein emphasized personalization as the engine: "A typical TikTok feed is a system running thousands of tiny experiments on you, learning faster than you do what keeps you watching." He noted that combining personalization with unpredictability makes platforms highly scalable and addictive.

Across the 42 studies, researchers found higher attentional difficulties, lower working-memory performance, increased anxiety and depression, weaker self-regulation, and addiction-like patterns. However, lead author Marlene Ebster stressed that evidence is still insufficient to claim short-form videos cause "brainrot" or extreme dopamine effects.

Rather than blanket bans, the authors suggest educating young people about recommendation systems and platform design influences. Raskin warned: "We are nowhere near the peak of attention engineering. Generative AI will create synthetic media and personalized relationships that dwarf any psychological engineering seen to date."

Source: www.dw.com