Brain rot, Walden and Walden two

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Josep Oton

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived”.

With these words, Henry David Thoreau explains the purpose behind his retreat into the woods. In 1845, he left his home and moved into a cabin he had built himself on the shores of Walden Pond, Massachusetts. He remained there for two years, two months, and two days, away from the ceaseless hustle of everyday life, to experience a mode of living immersed in nature and free from the entrapments of social conventions and economic dependencies through self-sufficiency.

With the notes from his journal, he composed his celebrated work, Walden, which took nine years to complete. The book is a hymn to simplicity and a radical questioning of the constraints of social life. Towards the end of the book, he poses the question: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely?”

Thoreau was referring to the so-called potato rot, the food crisis that ravaged Northern Europe during the 1840s. The potatoes literally rotted due to the effects of a fungus that plunged the inhabitants of the British Isles into famine. In this context, he decries the scant concern shown for “brain rot”—the intellectual poverty afflicting wide sectors of the population.

In Walden, he laments that students “have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the feeblest efforts any where made to become acquainted with them”. He criticises American schooling for being “so innocent and limited that the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child”.

A century later, in 1948, B. F. Skinner wrote Walden Two, a science fiction novel presenting a utopia—or dystopia—founded on behaviourism and behavioural engineering. In this micro-society, built upon supposedly scientific principles, psychological methods are employed to improve communal life by artificially regulating instinctual drives. Children are raised collectively, and instead of studying traditional subjects, they are taught how to learn and how to think.

In 2024, brain rot was chosen as the Word of the Year by Oxford University Press, highlighting the impact of digital content on mental health and contemporary culture. Today, it denotes the intellectual, psychological, or cognitive decline of individuals resulting from excessive consumption of trivial or undemanding material. It warns of the risks associated with exposure to low-quality content online, particularly on social media. It thus draws attention to how excessive use of digital media—especially short-form entertainment—can negatively affect cognitive health: diminished attention spans, mental fatigue, generalised anxiety, emotional disconnection, low tolerance for silence and boredom, constant craving for immediate gratification, and memory difficulties.

The expression brain rot had re-emerged in various internet forums, half-jokingly, to describe photos or videos devoid of meaning, bordering on the absurd, or seemingly designed by someone whose brain had, indeed, rotted. The advent of artificial intelligence rapidly evolved the phenomenon. It mutated into a specific viral genre, crafted to capture the attention of millions on social media.

Brain rot videos do not aim to please the viewer but to provoke compulsive engagement. They lack context and narrative. They often feature hyperrealistic imagery paired with surreal content. At times, they depict recognisable characters in grotesque situations. Ultimately, they serve as visual stimuli that push the limits of decorum and logic in order to unsettle already overstimulated minds. The more histrionic the content, the more likely it is to go viral. Even when such content might otherwise be considered clearly objectionable, it can prove highly lucrative for its creators.

Thus, the term brain rot refers both to a type of content and to a collective mental state—manifested, for instance, in increasingly short, chaotic, or incoherent speech, or in the growing tolerance for the absurd, the delirious, or the irritating as part of the everyday digital landscape.

Thoreau warned us of the dangers of intellectual poverty, of the risks of turning our backs on the classics, and of the tendency to become entangled in the complexities of social life. Skinner promised us a counterfeit happiness, a harmony secured at the cost of individual freedom. Perhaps Thoreau, if he were to see us now, would return to his cabin by the lake. Perhaps Skinner would be fascinated by the sophistication of today’s social engineering. As for us, we must contend with the challenges of our time. Brain rot—whether stemming from the devaluation of knowledge in education or from the overabundance of digital content—may well lead us into a crisis more devastating than that wrought by the potato rot.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons