Why our brain asks us to scroll through TikTok or Instagram until we look like zombies? And what awaits us when artificial intelligence can instantly create entire videos "just for us"?
For many of us, the day begins with opening our eyes and frantically reaching for our phone. As before going to rest, we scroll through TikTok, Instagram and YouTube videos, it says Deutsche says.
Seconds become minutes, minutes become hours.
But what is so attractive about it? Researchers from the University of Bayreuth analyzed 42 studies with almost 30.000 participants, mostly children and young people.
They found three things that all social media algorithms adhere to. First, what you see is personalized "for you", while others have a different selection of videos. Second, it can be watched endlessly, and you can't exactly predict the next video. Third, very easily, with the movement of a finger, the current one is interrupted and the next video starts.
It is significantly different from traditional media such as television, even from what social networks were from the beginning until recently.
"The back of TikTok is a massive supercomputer pointed right at your brain. It's trained on the behavior of three billion human primates," says Aza Raskin of the Center for Humane Technology in San Francisco.
She talks to DW about the "attention economy", which is crucial in today's capitalism - people need to be occupied. "It's really a race to the bottom of your brain. If TikTok doesn't preoccupy you, then Facebook, Instagram or someone else will."
There are as many as you want.
Scientists have known for a long time that a short video is especially good for the brain at first because it quickly and easily provides it with a dose of dopamine. "Moving images are bait for the mammalian brain anyway," Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford and author of Dopamine Nation, tells us.
"A short video is an even more potent form and thus creates a greater addiction, which leads to a chain of videos, like when someone lights one cigarette after another. Once it starts, it's hard to stop, even if we want to," says Lembke.
Like gambling, short videos are an unnatural brain stimulus that is flooded with dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is released when we experience something pleasant and "calls" us to do it again.
The brain protects itself from too much dopamine - the cells reduce the number of receptors for the feeling of pleasure. We are chasing more, and the brain is getting harder and harder to satisfy.
"We need more and more videos, and not to feel great, but just to be normal," says the scientist. "We lose the ability to find pleasure in things that offer a slower, more modest reward—a sunset, a dinner with friends, or reading a good book."
Sooner or later, everyone ends up scrolling through videos like a zombie. Looking for a dose of dopamine, the process leaves them extremely tired.
"Just for you"
It's important that the cinema is endless, but it's even more important that the content is selected "just for us", says Ben Rein, a brain scientist. It describes TikTok's algorithm as "a system that runs thousands of little experiments on you and learns faster than you what content keeps you in front of the screen."
Lembke says the algorithm thus develops the "perfect drug" for everyone. "Having the videos always fresh beats boredom," he says.
"And being unpredictable engages the exploratory part of our brains, which evolved to persevere in difficult ecosystems where the fruits of life are rare and uncertain, but that makes them all the more precious when we find them."
What else awaits us?
In the 42 studies the Bayreuth scientists examined, several problems were immediately apparent.
Difficulty in concentrating, decreased working memory capacity, more anxiety and depression, weaker self-control and addiction matrices were found in the subjects.
"But there is still not enough evidence to say decisively that short-shot platforms cause 'brain rot' or extreme dopamine effects," Marlene Ebster, lead author of the study, told DW.
That is why she does not stand for bans, but for helping young people to understand how the brain works and how the algorithm works.
Rein, author of Why the Brain Needs Friends, thinks the next step is even more intense personalization of content with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
"As content recommendation systems improve, and AI is increasingly able to generate or tailor content for an individual in real time, the gap between what you 'would enjoy' and what you're being shown is likely to narrow," he adds.
Ruskin even thinks we're "not even close" to the pinnacle of the attention industry. "Generative AI's power to maximize attention—from synthetic media to personally tailored synthetic connections—is inconceivably greater than any psychological engineering known to us."
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