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Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study

rathbiotaclan.com

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Re: Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study

#91

Post by carabiner »

Aurornis wrote: post #57

dlPFC deactivation is observed in a lot of immersive tasks. There are a lot of tasks that do this. Playing video games, as one example https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/4-431-26797-2_11 Interpreting fMRI results like this article does is almost always wrong. Different activities produce different patterns of brain activity. You could put someone in an fMRI machine, have them do virtually any activity, and the…

fMRI is incredibly noisy. Mandatory dead salmon study: https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/

Re: Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study

#92

Post by bogwog »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #87
avgDev wrote: post #44

It used to be that reading books made you an intellectual. In the age of TikTok and shorts being able to watch a movie for 2 hours makes you an intellectual.

I’d posit that we just puritanically glorify anything perceived as difficult, regardless of the correlation with “intellect.” I’m fine not having the same attention span as people who had to less stuff to do hundreds of years ago.

Watching a 2 hour movie is perceived as difficult?

> I'm fine not having the same attention span as people who had to less stuff to do hundreds of years ago.

Maybe, if we're really generous, there's a reasonable version of this argument that you've failed to adequately communicate here... But it really seems like you're trying to say that a short attention span is a good sign of progress, or something?

I know HN and SV in general has a culty addiction to contrarianism, and it rarely elicits more than an eye roll from me. Framing a short attention span as anything other than a bad thing is wild to me, and I honestly don't know how to respond to something like that (or if my sarcasm detector is off). Do we need scientific studies to show that goldfish brain == bad?

Re: Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study

#93

Post by gagan2020 »

Why only TikTok videos. Other contenders are Instagram reels, Youtube Shorts, Snapchat, etc.

BTW its Social Media as per studies

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12329480/

Whole bunch of research,

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/?term=Social+Media

But, my point is its normal Every generation behave differently. We shouldn't judge it even via these studies.

Re: Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study

#97

Post by Aurornis »

tgv wrote: post #78
Aurornis wrote: post #57

dlPFC deactivation is observed in a lot of immersive tasks. There are a lot of tasks that do this. Playing video games, as one example https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/4-431-26797-2_11 Interpreting fMRI results like this article does is almost always wrong. Different activities produce different patterns of brain activity. You could put someone in an fMRI machine, have them do virtually any activity, and the…

And that's leaving aside the question of what it would affect. Elasticity/learning? Would it result in forgetting, or losing skill? Apart from the problem that I (and others with me) have with the "area X does Y" school of neuro-cognition, measuring changes in activity does not measure changes in connections, synapses, or tissue. It is possible that inhibiting certain brain areas for a longer period will change e.g.…

> And that's leaving aside the question of what it would affect. Elasticity/learning? Would it result in forgetting, or losing skill?

You can't get any of that from this study.

fMRI results are easy to manipulate into sensational news stories because deactivating a brain region sounds like a bad thing. Those brain regions are not always-on. Their activity declining during a task doesn't mean they start to atrophy or degrade.

The only thing it means is that those brain regions are not as active during that task. Tasks activate different parts of the brain depending on what they require. All of the extrapolations on top of this result are people projecting on to science they don't understand.

Re: Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study

#98

Post by rightbyte »

gagan2020 wrote: post #93

Why only TikTok videos. Other contenders are Instagram reels, Youtube Shorts, Snapchat, etc. BTW its Social Media as per studies https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12329480/ Whole bunch of research, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/?term=Social+Media But, my point is its normal Every generation behave differently. We shouldn't judge it even via these studies.

The title of the linked article is "and Instagram reels".

edit: Oh someone changed the title of the post now too.

Re: Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study

#99

Post by polytely »

Aurornis wrote: post #57

dlPFC deactivation is observed in a lot of immersive tasks. There are a lot of tasks that do this. Playing video games, as one example https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/4-431-26797-2_11 Interpreting fMRI results like this article does is almost always wrong. Different activities produce different patterns of brain activity. You could put someone in an fMRI machine, have them do virtually any activity, and the…

yeah I don't feel qualified to comment on the study in particular but from personal experience the sort of 'loss of consciousness' does track.

When I realize I've spent an hour doomscrolling in an algorithmic feed, I don't feel like was 'all there' paying attention that whole period, it sort of washes over you and occasionally it rouses your attention and you pop out of unconsciousness to consume a little nugget of 'content' and then dive back in. It feels not worth it to spend so much time 'away' for a negligible amount of entertainment.

Video games or a book feels way different, like I'm also going under, but I'm going somewhere else, to a place that was crafted by another human with aim of it being worth my time.

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