If you or someone you love talks almost exclusively in Internet references — “Energizing Your Golden Retriever Friend” or “Show Me Rachel” — you may be suffering from a condition known as “brainrot.”
The term mainly refers to low value internet content and the effects caused by excessive time consumption. Example: “I’ve watched so many TikToks, I’m out of my mind.”
Online discussion of brainrot has recently become so widespread that some social media users have begun creating parodies of people who appear to embody the condition.
Several videos from TikTok user Heidi Becker show her facing the camera as she rapidly merges one internet reference after another.
“hey oh my god the app fits shut king!” he says at the start of a recent video that has over 200,000 likes.
Other lines in her monologue include: “Gives the Golden Retriever energy,” a piece of slang that describes someone who gives the impression of being friendly, silly, or harmless. and “I really like walking with hot girl and I really like girl dinner,” references to everyday activities that TikTok has adapted and rebranded.
Accusing someone of having brains is not a compliment. But some people show a hint of pride in admitting the condition. A recent BuzzFeed quiz that challenged readers to dark web elements was headlined: “If you pass this mind quiz, your brain is 1000% cooked.”
“One of the easiest ways to tell if someone’s brain has been damaged by social media is to notice how often they refer to internet jargon,” influencer Joel Cave recently posted on a TikTok. “The fact that the internet can infiltrate our brains so much that people don’t even have control over what they say — they just have to spout whatever meme they’ve seen a lot — is crazy to me.”
Some social media accounts are dedicated to creating “brain content,” which has become its own subgenre of entertainment. TikTok user “Fort History” takes clips from movies and TV shows and dubs them into the internet’s latest language.
“Hey Rizler, it’s just you and me today,” Phil from the “Modern Family” sitcom is seen saying to his son, Luke, in one clip.
“Okay, I’ll go downstairs,” Luke replies.
Taylor Lorenz, the author of “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet,” said she sees “brainrot” as synonymous with the phrase “broken brain.” Both online terms apply to those who have been so distorted by what they see online “that they have lost the ability to function in the physical world,” said Ms. Lorenz, a Washington Post columnist who was previously a reporter for The New. York Times.
Mark of Honor?
The term brainrot, which appeared on the internet as early as 2007, is meant to be playful. But its rise in popularity is related to growing recognition of a disorder that researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston have dubbed Problematic Interactive Media Use.
Michael Rich, a pediatrician who founded the Digital Wellness Lab at the hospital, said his patients refer to brainrot as “a way of describing what happens when you spend too much time online and you’ve shifted your awareness online. space as opposed to IRL, and they filter everything through the lens of what has been published and what can be published.”
Dr. Rich added that many of his patients seem to consider having a badge of honor. Some even compete for the most screen time the same way they do for high scores in video games. They joke about it, self-aware enough to realize that their obsessive internet use is affecting them, but not enough to stop it.
“Even if they’re experiencing brain problems, they don’t use that as motivation to get out of it,” Dr. Rich said.
Joshua Rodriguez Ortiz, an 18-year-old high school senior in Billerica, Mass., said he had heard the term come up more and more over the past two months.
“I think people started to realize that TikTok is consuming so much of our lives that it felt like it was confusing because people are scrolling through TikTok all the time and there’s so much niche reporting from TikTok,” he said.
He mentioned a recent viral video titled “The Tik Tok Rizz Party,” which showed a group of teenagers dancing to Kanye West at a Sweet Sixteen party.
