A robotic voice barrels through the story. Jump cuts pile on. Memes, sound effects, and visual hooks stack every few seconds, each one fighting to keep your attention just a little longer.
Before you’ve processed it, you’ve already moved on to the next.
This is “brain rot” content – a term increasingly used to describe the internet’s most addictive short-form videos. Built for speed and stimulation, it floods the senses while demanding almost nothing in return.
The concern is not just how much we consume, but what it might be doing to the way we think.
Researchers have long warned about the cognitive effects of constant digital stimulation, with one Microsoft study suggesting the average human attention span has dropped to around eight seconds.
Neil Jeyasingam, a psychiatrist and professor at Australian National University, notes that brain rot is about “the idea of indulging and absorbing large amounts of irrelevant, low-quality information … thought to be associated with deteriorating functioning and a loss of intelligence”.
This notion is supported by Stijn Massar, a neuroscientist and lecturer at the National University of Singapore, who highlighted that people spend an average of six hours a day on their phones.
“Short-form video trains us to crave quick rewards,” he said.
What happens, then, to activities like reading? This question sits at the heart the Brain Un-Rot Library by BookXcess, a campaign that aims to turn the very concept into a gateway back to books.
“If we lose the ability to focus, we do not just lose the habit of reading. We risk weakening the way people learn, think, and understand the world,” BookXcess co-founder and executive director Jacqueline Ng said at the launch of the campaign recently.
Reading, after all, demands sustained attention. It asks the brain to slow down, imagine, and follow a narrative over time – something increasingly at odds with how content is consumed today.
Yet, as local author Michael Low pointed out, the appetite for stories has not disappeared.
“Young people are not allergic to stories. They are still deeply attracted to narratives, emotion, suspense and ideas. What has changed is how they discover these stories,” he said at the event.
The Brain Un-Rot Library repackages classic and contemporary fiction into fast-paced, TikTok-style videos lasting about a minute. Titles such as “Animal Farm”, “Frankenstein” and “The Hunger Games” are retold using the same hooks, jump cuts and layered visuals that define viral content.
But there is a deliberate twist: the videos gradually reduce visual clutter, encouraging viewers to focus more on the narrative than the noise – a subtle attempt to rebuild attention over time.
“What’s meaningful about this is, if we use elements from brain rot videos and introduce real stories and literature, we can stimulate curiosity beyond the typical social media feed,” said Massar, also speaking at the launch.
So far, 50 of these videos have been released, with another 50 slated to drop this month, alongside curated in-store sections featuring the same titles – an effort to bridge screen and page.
The goal of this “experiment”, as Ng calls it, is not immediate conversion but curiosity.
“When you captivate their attention through that format, and they start to pay attention to what they’re hearing, hopefully they will say, ‘I’m really interested in this story’,” she explained.
There is some reason for optimism: as Massar noted, “the brain can be retrained” – and habits shaped by digital consumption can be reshaped through more sustained forms of engagement.
Efforts like the Brain Un-Rot Library are just one response to curb the brain rot that is setting in. The bigger question may be whether audiences are ready to pause, resist the scroll, and rediscover the slower, deeper rewards of focus.
Watch the Brain Un-Rot Library videos here.