Doomscrolling and the Gen Z brain

LUCAS VASQUEZ: Hello everybody, I’m your host Lucas Vasquez from the Minnesota Daily, and welcome back to another episode of In The Know, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota. Today, we are diving into the world of social media, specifically its emphasis on short-form content. As someone who spends a good amount of time on Instagram Reels, I began to think about how Gen Z is consuming more media daily than ever seen before. Then I began to wonder, what does routine consumption of rapid-fire content do to our brains? How does it change the way we learn, form ideas and think critically? To try and answer this question, I sat down with a student and researchers at the university to understand how short-form media is reshaping the modern mind. First, I learned about why we scroll as much as we do. MARGUERITE OHRTMAN: We forget that it’s like a quick little dopamine hit. So every time you see a little video that 10, 15 seconds, get a quick little message, you go to the next one before you even swipe the next one. It takes you to the next one so you don’t have to make the decision. VASQUEZ: That’s Marguerite Ohrtman, she is the University’s director of the School of Counseling, and a professor of educational psychology. What she’s describing is an intentional psychological design. The platforms we use aren’t neutral— they are engineered to keep us hooked. This phenomenon is so prevalent that the National Library of Medicine has given it the name “dopamine-scrolling.” I spoke with Angelica Pazurek, a professor in the College of Education and Human Development. She elaborated on how “dopamine-scrolling” becomes a habit. ANGELICA PAZUREK: We’re constantly scrolling, because the social media and the apps and the technology devices, both hardware and software that we use, are designed to intentionally be sort of addicting to keep us scrolling. You know, that constant dopamine hit. So the designers, the technology companies, the developers, they know that about humans. They want you coming back to their app, their platform, their device. VASQUEZ: And it isn’t just that these platforms are addictive, they are actively changing our brain’s mechanisms for how we process information. When we consume media in these rapid bursts, it can lead to what educational psychologists call “cognitive overload.” Essentially, the sheer volume of rapid-fire content crowds our working memory, making it incredibly difficult to actually retain what we are seeing. To break down exactly what happens to our brains during this process, I spoke with Martin Van Boekel, a professor in the University’s Department of Educational Psychology. They explained that the ease of scrolling actually tricks us into a false sense of security about what we are learning. MARTIN VAN BOEKEL: Learning happens best when we struggle with the information a little bit. It’s called desirable difficulty. It’s like the way I like to frame it when I’m talking about it in my classes. And when we struggle a little bit, not so hard that we can’t possibly do it because then we’re not learning, we’re just frustrated. When we have this level of desirability, we’re going to form those connections in these really powerful ways. Now, when information is presented to us in a way that’s super digestible and interesting, we see it as, there’s again, air quotes there, we see it as, like, interesting because it’s tailored to our interest. So of course we see it as interesting in these short form videos. The ease at which we process that information— it may feel like we’re learning, just like at that direct lecture class where it sounds like, ‘Oh, yeah, I knew this all along,’ right? It feels it’s so easily just sort of heard and that we get overconfident that we learned this information. But then, when the reality is like, two days later, when I have to go recall that because I didn’t work with it, because I didn’t try to make those connections and make sense of this, it just felt like it just clicked. It’s kind of hanging around in brain space just like, really difficult to retrieve. VASQUEZ: The algorithm hands us clips that are both easily digestible and tailored to our interests. As a result, our brains don’t do the heavy lifting required to lock that information into our long-term memory. Van Boekel said that psychologists study this using the “forgetting curve,” which shows that within just 24 hours of passively taking in information without actively reusing it, we lose about 60% of what we consumed. To see how this plays out in real life, I wanted to hear a student’s perspective. Sawyer Henry is a third-year dual political science and journalism major here at the university. He said that while he’s caught himself in doom-scrolling loops, the content rarely left a lasting impression. SAWYER HENRY: Most of the stuff that I think we see when we’re scrolling is so not noteworthy at all. Things that you do remember are like, it’s kind of like a dream. If it makes you feel some kind of intense emotion, then surely you’re gonna remember it maybe the next morning, and then forget about it. But I wouldn’t say I remember everything, especially a lot of it’s just advertisements these days. VASQUEZ: This lack of information retention is exactly what has sparked the popular rhetoric that Gen Z’s attention spans are ruined, and that our capacity for critical thinking is less than that of past generations. But is that the whole story? Or is Gen Z’s way of thinking simply evolving to match our environment? When I brought this up to Pazurek, she pushed back against the moral panic. PAZUREK: I’m more interested in pushing back against that rhetoric to say that there are positive implications about the ways that young people are using, engaging with technology today. There’s lots of research to support that. So others like me in my field of learning science and educational technology or learning technologies make an important distinction between critical thinking and critical theorizing or critical engagement. VASQUEZ: She said it’s important to understand that from a learning science perspective, there is a difference between these two concepts. PAZUREK: So critical thinking as an educational theory refers to this intellectually disciplined process of actively conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating information. And it helps us make more informed evidence-based decisions so we can learn how to do that, and we can learn how to do that more effectively through resources. Whether those resources be online or offline resources. We tend to spend a lot of time online today. That’s just the nature of our world, especially in the U.S. you know, I’m an American, so I’ll talk about U.S. context and U.S. culture. But it’s really important to understand that there’s potential and possibilities to learn to be a better critical thinker. And also it’s important to think about that as being limited because of the way that critical thinking has been framed as kind of an individual process. Because it tends to be very self referential, like I’m a critical thinker, I’m critically thinking about, you know, fill in the blank. But when we frame that as a personal attribute and as kind of a neutral tool of thinking, that way we can be objective in our critical thinking, that obscures lots of things. Because our critical thinking, our thinking in general, our understanding and our learning is all influenced by more than just what happens in our mind. VASQUEZ: She argued that it’s important to take into consideration the social factors that influence our thinking. PAZUREK: So things like, you know, the social, the cultural, the historical and the political conditions under which we think, where we’re thinking, how we’re thinking and what we’re thinking about. So now I’ll move that a little bit further along that kind of continuum to think about critical engagement or critical theorizing. And that’s very different than criti