On social media, brain rot and story-telling

Social media is robbing us of the ability to concentrate. It’s not only changing how we communicate—it’s reducing attention spans and creating what is becoming known as ‘brain rot.’ Research suggests that attention spans are dropping from minutes to seconds. Platforms such as TikTok and Instagram thrive on rapid-fire content and condition their users to crave constant novelty. Autoplay videos and endless feeds train the mind to flit between stimuli, eroding our ability to concentrate on tasks, books, and even conversations.  

Cognitive scientists argue that our brains are wired for narrative. Story-telling is humanity’s original technology. From cave walls to campfires, our ancestors used stories to map the world and their place in it. While we’ve traded ochre pigments for books and electronic devices, the essence remains the same: we are at heart inspired by stories, forever shaping our reality through the tales we hold and tell. 

Story-telling is more than a pastime, it’s a cornerstone of human evolution. Long before the written word, our ancestors spun tales to survive, to connect and to make sense of their world. With the emergence of complex language fifty thousand years ago, humans began sharing stories to pass down critical knowledge. Elders around a campfire would recount hunting strategies, warn about predators and explain seasonal changes. These narratives, no doubt dressed up as drama or legend to make them interesting and memorable, were essential to survival. The beautiful paintings of Lascaux in France and Sulawesi in Indonesia are thought to have been prompts for oral tales. A handprint beside a bison might symbolize a hunt; abstract symbols could mark sacred stories.

In the Stone Age, story themes were survival, danger, and cooperation. In Neolithic times, when agriculture began, the themes became harvest rituals, land ownership and early spirituality. With the onset of the Civilization Era, themes changed again, to heroes, morality and cultural identity.  

By sharing such narratives, humans could preserve knowledge across generations, strengthen social bonds through shared values and inspire collective action, for example, coordinating hunts or migrations.  

To ‘receive’ a story is an active process, whether that story is narrated orally, held in a book or delivered by video. It needs engagement, it needs concentration. With even the lightest of escapist books or feel-good films, we need to hold our focus and retain memory for the time it takes to tell the story, whether it’s absorbed at one sitting or page-by-page over several days.

The ‘story-telling’ of social media has an agenda diametrically opposed to that of traditional story-telling. Instead of sharing information essential to the processes of survival, community and understanding, social media feeds prioritise viral, emotionally-charged content over substance. Users gorge on ‘low effort’ media: memes, clickbait, and superficial posts. ‘Echo chambers’ reinforce bias and replace critical thinking. Bite-sized content reduces patience for nuanced analysis, fostering intellectual laziness. Every ‘like’, share or notification triggers a dopamine hit, mimicking the addictive cycle of gambling. This reinforcement prioritises quick reward over deeper engagement, leaving users mentally drained yet perpetually unsatisfied. 

The damage from social media is insidious. Scrolling feels like a harmless distraction when we are tired, when trying to clear the mind after a spell of work. It would be, but for the active algorithms behind their feeds, driving mindless addiction in order to satiate the advertising machine.

While one way you can avoid being damaged by social media is to simply leave, there is much of value in social media that you would lose. Relevant social groups, people who share your (non-radical!) interests, local community. The alternative is to fight back at the algorithms, and not let them take you down the paths Big Tech want you to take.

Curate your feed. Unfollow accounts that prioritise outrage or vapid content. Follow educators, scientists, or creators who spark curiosity. Don’t fall into the trap of watching car crashes, crane collapses, Fail Army or police chases. If you watch one, your feed will be filled with them, and offer nothing but mindless drivel.

Set boundaries. Designate screen-free hours.

Practice deep focus. Rebuild attention stamina by watching well-produced drama or film. Engage in hobbies that demand sustained engagement.  

And read! Reading fiction isn’t just a hobby—it’s a cognitive antidote. Science shows immersive story-telling rebuilds attention spans, sharpens intelligence, and counters the mental drain of digital overload. Fiction demands sustained engagement with its complex plots and characters, unlike social media’s fragmented content. Reading a novel is a mental marathon, retraining your brain to focus for hours—not seconds. Decoding metaphors, subtext, and character motives sharpens problem-solving. Fiction readers outperform non-reading peers in verbal fluency and abstract reasoning.  

While non-fiction builds facts, fiction hones cognitive flexibility. It provokes mental simulation of diverse viewpoints, allows comfort with ambiguity such as symbolism or unreliable narrators, and stimulates pattern recognition in nonlinear plots.

And, of course, if simply reading does so much good, writing, being the story-teller, will do so much more. That’s why it’s hard work. Keep going, and get some quality mind-feeding literature out there. The world needs it as much now as it ever did.

_{Image attributes: Lascaux: Klaus Hausmann, Pixabay. Campfire, Pexels, Pixabay, Reading bear, Christiane, Pixabay}