“Brainrot” is what many people call the chaotic, fast-moving memes, sounds and catchphrases that spread across TikTok, Roblox and online gaming and into playgrounds. An example is the endlessly repeated chant of “six-seven”, which still echoes through houses and schools across the country – to the bewilderment (or annoyance) of many teachers and parents. But if you’ve ever said “I’ll be back” in a mock-Arnie voice or asked “you talkin’ to me?”, you’ve already engaged in a form of brainrot.
The instinct to repeat and remix lines from the culture around us is nothing new. What has changed is the source material. For young people growing up in a digital world, quotable moments don’t come from films or TV but from TikTok, Roblox, memes, Minecraft mods (modifications) and the fast-paced humour of online gaming.
Hearing a child burst into the looping “Skibidi dop dop dop yes yes” audio from the Skibidi Toilet trend, or repeat a surreal line from a Roblox NPC (non-player character), might sound like nonsense, but for the younger generation these fragments slot into a fast-paced, referential style of humour. Today’s equivalents are faster, more layered and often more chaotic, with that chaos very much part of the appeal. Although brainrot is often used knowingly and with a touch of irony to describe these phrases, remixing and repeating fragments of media has always been part of how people connect.
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It creates a shared cultural code, a second language made of references, rhythms and sounds that bind groups together and turn everyday moments into opportunities for humour and social connection. The style of communication offers lightness and playfulness in a world that can often feel slow and muted. Brainrot is changing how children play online.
Many adults grew up with video games built around structure. In Pokémon, Zelda or Half-Life, you cleared goals, quests and puzzles to reach endings. Even when games were open-world, giving you nearly total freedom to choose what challenges you take on and when, there was an underlying design logic to follow.
Those experiences shaped how we thought about play, and later how we approached designing games and interactive tools in research. Structure, narrative and pacing felt fundamental. Watching children engage with today’s digital culture, and particularly with what gets called brainrot, challenges these assumptions.
Their experiences aren’t always built around long-form story arcs or carefully crafted mechanics and challenges. Instead, it’s fluid, fragmentary and relentlessly social. They jump between Roblox, TikTok, Minecraft and meme-based jokes without losing the thread.
What sometimes looks like disjointed overstimulation to adults is entirely coherent to them. They’re fluent in a digital literacy that involves stitching together references, humour, audio, images and interactions at high speed. From a research perspective, this has been a timely reminder that how children engage online changes.
Young people aren’t abandoning meaningful play, they’re interacting with an online environment dramatically different from the one their parents grew up with. There is research that raises questions about whether switching between short, chaotic bursts of content might affect attention or wellbeing for some users. For example, a recent study found associations between heavy use of short-form video apps and poorer sleep in adolescents, but also noted that higher social anxiety partly explained this pattern.
A broader analysis of a number of research studies reported similar correlations between heavier use and lower scores on attention tasks, as well as higher stress and anxiety. But these findings do not show causation. It remains unclear whether short-form content affects attention, or whether young people with particular cognitive styles simply gravitate towards media that already fits how they process information.
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