Watching Too Many Reels Reduces the Brain’s Cognitive Capacity

It’s not only a matter for Millennials and Generation Z. More and more it’s normal to see people occupying their free moments hooked to their phones. Watching videos that, even lasting just a breath longer than a sigh, turn these moments into hours. With the risk, according to science, that they become less smart. Or, at least, they lose cognitive abilities, cognitive flexibility and efficiency when it comes to imagining.

Virginia Aguado Carrión, clinical psychologist at ViBood Psychology, explains what watching so many TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts is doing to our brains.

Short, if good…

The first thing to analyze is the reason why these short videos have so much success. And it’s not just a dopamine-driven stimulation. As the expert notes, “it is true that the brain reward system plays a key role, but it’s not the only factor.”

In fact, they act as a variable reward system: some will please us more and others less, and we’ll never know when we’ll encounter the one that truly delights us. Like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. And here is the first problem…

That the content that truly captivates us appears suddenly “hooks us even more”. So we keep scrolling without knowing when the video that will generate a real reaction will arrive. And it doesn’t matter whether it arrives or not. The doubt will always remain that there might be something better, so we will keep dragging videos with our finger. Nonstop.

Effortless fun (and without feeling guilty)

These audiovisual content platforms are designed to minimize the effort of searching. Access is easy, fast and can be done from the sofa. And you don’t even have to decide what to watch: the algorithm chooses for you.

And since they are so short, the cost of watching one and feeling that you’re wasting time is minimal, which “connects immediate pleasure with a continuous exposure to novelty.”

There’s one more factor left. The psychosocial. As the clinical psychology specialist notes, “this rapid consumption fits with our current habits, with the search for people we can identify with and with the famous fear of missing out or FOMO, fueled in this case by the idea that the next video could be exactly what we need.”

Is there real addiction?

In the strict sense of the term, one cannot talk about TikTok addiction. Doing something repeatedly, even intensively, doesn’t necessarily mean one is addicted. But it certainly inhibits part of one’s ability to do other more productive things.

Does it make us dumber?

Yet there is a problem. It’s not just that you’ve spent the afternoon watching video after video. Some studies had warned that this intensive consumption could have “long-term effects on brain functioning,” especially on attention and self-control.

The worst predictions have been confirmed: as a study in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience concludes, “people with higher use of this content show worse performance on executive control tasks and changes in prefrontal cortex activity.” The study, as the expert notes, “establishes a correlation, not causation.” In other words, it does not prove that the videos directly cause those changes in brain function. And what is even more relevant, “these effects only appear in cases of excessive or problematic use, not in moderate consumption.”

All the bad things it can do to your brain

What can be drawn from the study is that watching many short videos entails a ‘negative impact on self-control and a decrease in executive control within the realm of attentional functions’. Which, according to Virginia Aguado, can translate into several concrete day-to-day difficulties for a person:

• Concentration problems: Greater difficulty maintaining attention on long tasks and a tendency to constantly shift focus, making individuals more sensitive to distractions.
• Academic or work impact: Lower performance, problems planning and needing more time to complete tasks, along with a decrease in working memory.
• Decision making: A shift in priorities appears, such as the habit of postponing obligations to watch another video.
• Low tolerance for boredom: A constant need for quick stimuli that makes slower or more demanding activities much harder.
• Lack of self-regulation: Difficulty managing time, phone use or even sleep cycles.

We are left with diminished capabilities

In short, will spending hours watching TikTok, Reels or Shorts make us less smart? What science shows, according to Virginia Aguado, is that “their consumption could alter how our attention and self-control manifest. This does not imply a loss of capacity and certainly not of intelligence.”

In reality, intelligence is a complex construct that includes reasoning, creativity and linguistic or logical abilities. Some areas that “will not be erased by watching these videos.” Although there is indeed a risk that getting hooked could end up hindering our performance in tasks that require sustained effort.

The key, as with almost everything in life, is not to overdo it. The problem does not lie in the format itself, “but in intensive and deregulated use,” the expert concludes. And she recommends establishing digital self-control strategies to manage consumption, just as we do with any other aspect of our health.