Note the reference to “traditional Google search” – !! As a traditional researcher who used to visit libraries, carry heavy reference tomes to a table and copy by hand (pre-Xerox) this makes me feel as old as the pyramids.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/technology/personaltech/ai-social-media-brain-rot.html
How A.I. and Social Media Contribute to ‘Brain Rot’
A.I. search tools, chatbots and social media are associated with lower cognitive performance, studies say. What to do?
By Brian X. Chen, The New York Times, Nov. 6, 2025
Last spring, Shiri Melumad, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, gave a group of 250 people a simple writing assignment: Share advice with a friend on how to lead a healthier lifestyle. To come up with tips, some were allowed to use a traditional Google search, while others could rely only on summaries of information generated automatically with Google’s artificial intelligence….
Dr. Melumad’s experiment, like other academic studies published so far on A.I.’s effects on the brain, found that people who rely heavily on chatbots and A.I. search tools for tasks like writing essays and research are generally performing worse than people who don’t use them.
“I’m pretty frightened, to be frank,” Dr. Melumad said. “I’m worried about younger folks not knowing how to conduct a traditional Google search.”
Welcome to the era of “brain rot,” the slang term to describe a deteriorated mental state from engaging with low-quality internet content. When Oxford University Press, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, named brain rot the word of the year in 2024, the definition referred to how social media apps like TikTok and Instagram had people hooked on short videos, turning their brains into mush….
This year, reading scores among children, including eighth graders and high school seniors, hit new lows. The results were gathered from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, long regarded as the nation’s most reliable, gold-standard exam…
The problem with AI tools was that they transformed what was once an active process in your brain — perusing through links and clicking on a credible source to read — into a passive one by automating all of that….[end quote]
The decline in NEAP reading scores began in 2012. Some analysts have said that this correlates with the ownership of smartphones by teens. Schools are banning smartphones all over the world. But that doesn’t affect the home environment. I witnessed the battles royal between my friends and their young teen son over phone use vs. real activities such as reading, homework and athletics.
AI is taking the problems from cell phone use to a whole new level. Brain rot will have a truly Macroeconomic impact as a whole generation forgets how to read, focus and produce original thinking.
Wendy