Nearly everyone is overloaded with information these days. In each minute of every day, 138.9 million reels are played on Instagram and Facebook, according to a 2024 report by Domo called “Data Never Sleeps.”
Consuming this much content on a daily basis has shown to have negative effects on a person’s ability to focus. Since 2004, psychologist Gloria Mark has studied attention spans, and her research shows that people’s attention when viewing a screen decreased from an average of two and half minutes in 2004 to an average of 47 seconds in 2016 — which is about the length of many videos on social media.
But the impacts don’t stop there. In Harvard physician Dr. Aditi Nerurkar’s book, “The 5 Resets: Rewire Your Brain and Body for Less Stress and More Resilience,” she discusses yet another side effect of information overload: “popcorn brain.”
Popcorn brain is when “our brains get habituated to this constant streaming of information, making it harder for us to look away and disconnect from our devices, slow down our thoughts, and live fully offline,” Nerurkar wrote in her book.
“While not a true medical diagnosis, popcorn brain is a growing cultural phenomenon.”
