The Science of Brain Rot & the Beauty of Paying Attention Again
How attention capitalists, hormone shifts, and our overextended lives are reshaping cognition—and how we can reclaim it.
I underwent hours-long cognitive testing last month. More on that in a minute.
But first, let me tell you about my present.
It was smoking seconds ago. Now, it’s on fire.
My mouth is ablaze—and all I did was take a sip of steaming chai after a few bites of spicy boti fry.
Desis do this all the time. We layer heat on spice. We blur joy with pain. And often, we don’t even realize we’re the ones who lit the match.
Spicy food tricks our brain into thinking our mouth is burning—even when there’s no actual damage.
When spice hits the tongue, it activates millions of TRPV1 receptors—the same ones designed to detect heat and pain. That jolt triggers a wave of endorphins, our body’s way of self-soothing the perceived injury.
It could’ve ended there. But then I added actual heat.
Sipping tea above 109°F (43°C) kicks the same TRPV1 receptors into overdrive. Burning on burning. Spice pain meets heat pain. The result is a compounded burning sensation—part real, part neurological illusion—making it feel way hotter and more painful than either alone.
My nervous system scrambles, firing off even more endorphins
A sensory overload—hot, spicy, painful, euphoric.
I do this again and again, as I’m sure you do, unaware of what’s actually going on in our brain.
So much of life is like this. We don’t understand our brain. Even as we subject it to extreme sensations. They keep us moving, loving, and thinking. They carry our rage, grief, and hunger. They invigorate with pleasure. They burn out under stress. They slow down with nostalgia.
We live in these brains every day, yet our school biology is gravely inadequate in helping us understand our brain, and how to keep our brains healthy.
We learn nothing about how trauma rewires our nervous systems. Nothing about the way chronic stress or doomscrolling reprograms the brain. Nothing about the chemicals that govern our mood, our focus, our ability to be present. Nothing about how hormones impact cognition.
That absence? It’s not accidental.
Because if we truly understood how our brains respond to pain, fear, or pleasure—we’d be harder to manipulate. Harder to exhaust. Harder to sell “brain rot” to.
Brain rot was the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year in 2024. It captures the negative mental effects of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality, trivial, or unchallenging online content, particularly on social media. It's not a clinical diagnosis, but the feeling of mental fog, lethargy, and reduced attention span that some people experience after prolonged exposure to such content. More from the dictionary folk:
Our experts noticed that ‘brain rot’ gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024.
The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
Brain rot doesn’t happen overnight.
It creeps in slowly—through constant notifications, unprocessed grief, capitalism disguised as productivity, and a culture that tells us to keep going, no matter the cost.
Attention capitalists know exactly how your nervous system works—even if you don’t.
The Attention Capitalists Causing Brain Rot
Tech companies, ad platforms, and social media apps aren’t neutral tools; they’re precision-engineered to hijack your focus, fragment your thinking, and monetize your brain chemistry. Every ping, scroll, and notification is designed to bypass your prefrontal cortex and tap your limbic system, where impulse and craving live. This isn’t just clever design—it’s a trillion-dollar strategy. The global attention economy, driven by digital advertising, is projected to surpass $1 trillion by 2027. Your time, your habits, your moment of indecision as you scroll past an internet ad—they’re all being tracked, tested, and sold. And they’re not just targeting kids. They’re mining adults like us—parents, caregivers—because our exhaustion is profitable.
It’s not just burnout. It’s a nervous system in crisis.
And most of us don’t even know it’s happening.
At the get-go I want you to know that this essay is not about a parent talking about brain rot in kids because of social media and cell phones.
Adults are struggling just as much, if not more, because we’ve layered decades of stress, trauma, overwork, and unprocessed emotion onto fragile systems we barely understand. The prefrontal cortex might mature by 25-29, but that doesn’t make it immune to cognitive decline. In fact, it’s the part of our brain most vulnerable to modern life.
Brain rot is not just a youth problem. It’s not just a screen time problem. It’s an everything, everywhere, all at once problem.
We are not meant to hold this many tabs open—in our browsers or in our brains. The attention economy profits from keeping our focus fractured.
This essay is about an adult talking about cognitive decline in midlife because of the way the world exists today, it's antagonistic to deep thinking and it's impacting all of us. Ovary holders more so, because of the way estrogen, and the loss of it, from birth control or perimenopause, impacts our brain.
Last month I underwent hours long cognitive testing. It was hard because I don’t remember the last time I took a test. It was harder because I panicked a few times during the test, which rarely ever happened during my test-taking era.
In school and college, when prepared, I was an excellent test taker. But how do you prepare for a brain test meant to judge your attention and memory?
The test prep paperwork said: eat a full meal and get a good night's rest. I had shown up with neither to my appointment. I had also forgotten it was going to take upwards of 2 hours. I was very unprepared, but was that my brain? Or was it just the fact that I made this appointment months ago and I had a full week of work with Nava ending 7th grade, so I couldn't prioritize this the way I wanted to?
Midlife Brain Rot
It all started in January of last year.
At 42, I’d open my front door exhausted at the end of the day, walk towards my beeping alarm. And stare at it blankly, unable to recall the code. Unable to remember a few numbers I used multiple times a day every day. Suddenly, old security codes would start popping in my brain. All in order of oldest to latest. And then just as I would start panicking that the alarm might go off, I’d remember my latest code.
The same started happening for things I used to always have handy in my brain: names, people, dates, and facts. My recall seemed to be stuck in transit. Sometimes the info I was looking for would pop into my head hours later in bed when I was relaxed.
I used to know so many dates and facts that when Google was released as a new search engine in 2004, a friend asked what made it different from Yahoo, another friend responded it spits query results like Sahar. That friend started calling me Google after that day.
The life long instant recall I had suddenly seemed broken. My excellent memory that had been a cause of so much awe, fascination and worry–because I’m the elephant in the room that never forgets–suddenly seemed to be on vacation. At least I hoped it was just a vacation and not retirement.
Initially, my doctors said it could be a symptom of my anemia. My ferritin levels were dangerously low. That helps carry oxygen in our blood and is key for cognition. But then I went through the slow and boring process of 12 hours of iron transfusions in tiny pipes in my tiny veins over 6 weeks. My ferritin levels were out of the danger zone, but my recall still didn't improve.
Then, I was told maybe the high inflammation in my body was the cause of my shrinking elephant recall. A scan revealed I had extensive scar tissue and masses related to endometriosis that had colonized every organ around my uterus.
Until I could be operated on, I was put on synthetic hormones to trick my body into thinking I was pregnant, post menopausal, or in a loop of a half cycle.
By flooding my body with progestin, a synthetic hormone used in birth control, the goal was to suppress my natural estrogen production. Doctors believed estrogen, the ovary hormone, was feeding the mass that had now colonized most of my pelvis and was strangling some of my vital organs.
But estrogen isn’t just about fertility, it’s a neuroprotective hormone—deeply involved in maintaining brain health and cognitive function.
The brain has estrogen receptors everywhere—especially in the prefrontal cortex (executive function) and hippocampus (memory and learning). When estrogen levels drop, these brain regions take a hit. Research shows that postmenopausal women experience faster structural decline in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus—the same areas hit hardest by chronic stress and multitasking.
Estrogen also helps the brain use glucose for energy. Without it or at lower levels, an energy crisis emerges, making your brain feel foggy, tired, and less sharp—one of the biological underpinnings of "brain rot."
Estrogen plays a key role in serotonin and dopamine regulation, which influence mood, motivation, and reward. It also affects melatonin and circadian rhythms, so its loss disrupts sleep—making brain rot symptoms worse.
Because estrogen-suppressing progestins are chemically altered testosterone, they can also stimulate unrelated receptors, potentially disrupting stress responses which is why the stress hormone profile of women taking progestin-based birth control, research suggests, is similar to people who have experienced chronic stress. Other research has found effects on the immune system, learning and memory.
Basically, the hormones lowering my estrogen made my brain worse in every way possible.I couldn’t stay asleep. Doomsday scenarios kept on creeping into my brain that’s usually lined with silver linings and the moments of blankness became worse.
I’d drop Nava off to her aerial class with a plan for the 90 minutes until her pick up. Something multitasking parents do all the time. But would suddenly forget what that plan was. First came the Stop sign, then my brain spitting back blankness at me. Then came the panic. Where am I going? What am I supposed to be doing? I tried to breathe through it. Slow down my blood flow and neural messaging as if my memory was on a speed train and if only I could slow down the speed it could get off at the right stop. With slow breathing and thankfully no one behind me at the Stop sign, suddenly my brain started firing my to do list back to me. Trader Joe's first, then go to Heyma, the Yemeni tea place and do these three work tasks.
Thank you brain, but what happened earlier?!
Then my surgery happened. It involved 17 different procedures. My doctor said a bomb had gone off in me. In my post-surgery appointment, he did a scan of the 6 week-old war zone and said “we’ll need to put you back on estrogen suppressants.”
He explained he could already see my problem returning if we didn’t cut off my estrogen. “You’ll be back in for surgery in 6 months without it.”
But what about my brain? All this estrogen suppressing is going to put my brain on permanent vacation. He didn’t disagree with me on the impact the estrogen control was having on my brain. He suggested I go through cognitive testing, so we could have a benchmark to test against in two years, because he did believe I’d need to be on this protocol until menopause actually hit, and my estrogen declined naturally at mid-50ish, which he called an age appropriate time.
But in a capitalist world that pushes us to function like machines, where no one can afford to retire and a climate emergency is one wild fire or flood away, what is age-appropriate for mental decline?
Midlife Cognitive Test
Last month, I took a cognitive test that revealed my mental energy wasn’t gently declining like a sunset. Instead, it crashed suddenly, unexpectedly and intermittently, like a fish wading in shallow water.
First the doctor asked me everything about my life, my routine, my work history, my stresses, my relationships, my eating and movement habits, then we moved to the actual two hour long test.
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