The brain is incredibly energy hungry so it evolved to detect situations that don’t require full attention and activates the Default Mode Network. This happens when you’re zoning out to pretty much anything, and indicates that you’re essentially in “low power mode”. My question here is whether the framing of the content in question “shutting off brain regions” is an honest one compared to what I said above. fMRI is a…
"The researchers caution against reading the deactivation as evidence of impaired cognitive function. As they put it in the paper, “this deactivation should not be interpreted as a failure of cognitive control capacity.” Instead, the team argues the pattern likely reflects an adaptive shift toward low-effort, automatic processing during passive, low-conflict viewing."
my take: if the study authors could qualify a subject's liked videos, they could qualify a subject's liked activities, and study activation thresholds prior to and post short form content exposure. this would provide a better substrate from which to draw such conclusions.
but I don't need a study to tell me that short form content fries the brain ... it fries my brain!