Are We Having a Brain Rot Epidemic?

By Violet Wisdom

Brain Rot, a term first coined by Henry David Thoreau was announced as the Oxford Dictionary word of 2024. It won the ranking after having been used 250% more on Tik Tok from 2023 to 2024. Maybe the word of the year for 2025 should be irony?

Brain rot: (n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration. Oxford Dictionary Grathwohl, Casper “Oxford Word of the Year.” Corp.oup.com/word-of-the-year, Accessed 01-01-2025

Full disclaimer, having no time machine or the ability to channel, my understanding of who Henry David Thoreau was is based on my own interpretations of his writings and those of scholars who have written about him.

Henry David Thoreau Image: Wikimedia

I do believe most would conclude that Thoreau saw his existence as a necessary journey to find out how to live with meaning despite a social construct that tempted the opposite. This aligns with the mid-19th century philosophical movement of transcendentalism (by no means the same thing as modern transcendental meditation groups commonly referred to as cults). What made Thoreau stand out amongst his deep-thinking cohorts was his choice to fully walk away from societal expectations. He truly did walk into the wilderness, built a small cabin and lived there for two years. He even went to jail for refusing to pay his taxes because he was ideologically opposed to some of the ways they were being used. Without getting into the weeds of how he would make a little money selling pencils or as a surveyor, visit friends and often rely on Ralph Waldo Emerson for financial support, he practiced what he preached. He also never received much income from his writing during his life. According to the Walden Woods Project, only over 700 copies of the self-published 2,000 copies of Walden were sold. Other references to the early copies of the book state even less were sold.

Printed in hundreds of languages, according to Cape Cod Times,[1] there are thirteen translations just in Japan. While there are over 75 editions of Walden, the Princeton University Press edition sells an average of 6,000 copies yearly. Thoreau’s first edition came out in 1854. In 2017, The Guardian listed it as #64 out of the top 100 best nonfiction books ever printed. Why establish the eventual success of the book so profoundly? For 170 years, millions of us have gone to Thoreau for his wise philosophy as guidance. We continue to find relatability to the society he felt was such an antithesis to human existence many years ago. Oh, and his fears of potential brain rot are becoming a reality.

Our brains are atrophying. Have you ever seen someone’s arm or leg after it’s been in a cast for a month? The extremity becomes small because it has lost so much muscle from not being used, the brain is like a muscle. Use it or lose it applies. According to The National Library of Medicine[2], the  World Health Organization  found that students with high media use (screen time) were experiencing anxiety, depression, lower attention spans, memory loss and regressed comprehension. Several years ago, it was discovered that the hippocampi, the part of our brain that navigates is shrinking. Whatever part of our brain learns to drive while listening to directions coming from our smart phones is doing just fine.

Our brain is an efficient little melon. When we’re having a conversation about our favorite movies growing up and no one can remember the name of that one movie, you know, the one about the dog and the baseball game? (Absolutely made that up, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it existed). Our brains no longer have to send a thought messenger to the dusty file room of useless memory. Instead, the messenger whispers, “google it.”

Here's an interesting concept; we can tell our brain no. At that point, the messenger will shake its head and slowly descend to the cerebellum basement. It might not get back to us until 3 a.m., but if the information exists, it will find it.

I’m by no means saying we should all walk into the woods dropping our laptops, tablets and smart phones as we go. Technology isn’t as much the problem as how we use it, or how we allow it to use us. What I am saying is that instead of buying into the usual January motivation of trying to look like a super model, focus instead on keeping the body AND the brain healthy.  Exercise the mind spending time in nature, create phone-free zones, engage in a distraction free conversation. Read something printed on paper and process every word. Pay attention to the sunset, it is always to the west.

If you were really enjoying the whole Thoreau thing (which I do so much I went to Concord, Massachusetts on a personal pilgrimage), here are a few of his quotes:

“I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man” ~Civil Disobedience

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

“I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run” ~Thoreau to H.G.O. Blake 3-24-1848

And finally….

“While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” ~Walden

[1] “Walden at 150”, Steve Gran, The Hartford Courant, Aug. 9, 2004, updated Jan. 6, 2011

[2] The impact of the digital revolution on human brain and behavior: where do we stand? Korte, Martin, Prof Dr, TU Braunschweig, Zoological Institute, Dept. Cellular Neurobiology, 2020,  Creative Commons Attribution License