This is the seventh installment in a series of articles about the science of various aspects of college life.
In a matter of weeks, “6 7” has transformed from two sequential numbers to a phrase so inescapable that first-grade teachers have resorted to banning it in classrooms.
“6 7” is a prime example of “brain rot,” which was named the Oxford Word of the Year in 2024 and has become a global phenomenon. From students posting memes on Sidechat to professors lecturing about Labubus, references to short-form social media content are infiltrating everyday life — including on College Hill.
Anoushka Singh ’29 said she has “suffered from an extreme case of brain rot.”
“If you just mindlessly consume media the whole day and don’t understand what you are consuming, you have brain rot,” Singh said.
“I was sent a video by my sister the other day, and she was doing all these motions to ‘6 7,’” Noah Matsunaga ’29 said, laughing. “I was like, ‘That’s a new one for me.’”
But is “brain rot” just a humorous term to describe chronically online jokes, or is it indicative of something deeper happening in our brains?
Content creator and linguist Adam Aleksic, who goes by the username @etymologynerd on his TikTok account with over 800,000 followers, defined “brain rot” in an email to The Herald.
“‘Brain rot’ has two definitions: social media content that is perceived to be mentally deleterious, and a meme aesthetic associated with that content,” Aleksic wrote.
Aleksic — who wrote a book titled “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language” — provided some explanations for why brain rot currently seems unavoidable.
“Behind the cycle of rapid creation is a phenomenon I call the engagement treadmill: a positive feedback loop where a trend exists, the algorithm starts pushing the trend and then influencers play into the trend in hopes of being propelled in the algorithm,” Aleksic wrote.
This cycle only further accelerates these trends, which then infiltrate people’s everyday lives.
When people refer to “Labubu matcha Dubai chocolate” or “skibidi rizz Ohio” — examples Aleksic cited — they “humorously play into online oversaturation of certain ideas and commercial aesthetics,” Aleksic wrote. Once these memes become popular enough, they are “added to the greater canon of brain rot.”
Aleksic is not the only person who has attempted to analyze this phenomenon.
Emilie Owens is a doctoral research fellow in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo who studies children’s media and digital participation. In June, her paper titled “‘It speaks to me in brain rot’: Theorising ‘brain rot’ as a genre of participation among teenagers” was published in New Media & Society.
Adolescents are drawn to “the seeming absurdity of brain rot, its total lack of coherence and its general inaccessibility to adults or those who are not ‘in on the joke,’” Owens wrote in an email to The Herald.
But adults are not immune to brain rot, according to Owens. She wrote that the phenomenon can be interpreted as “the human drive to decompress, which is met by the consumption of brain rot, that is mindless or childish or unproductive content.” Owens sees Gen Alpha’s love for brain rot as analogous to “re-watching ‘Friends’ or ‘Gilmore Girls’ for the 20th time.”
Owens wrote that teenagers today face “a time of heightened pressure,” which leads to them relieving that pressure by “rotting one’s brain.”
“Ironically, however, TikTok is also one of the media via which such social pressure heightens; in this context, brain rot is something of a double-edged sword,” she wrote.
When teenagers scroll on social media, it continually stresses them out, resulting in a never-ending cycle of overconsumption.
“We like to think of the internet as a separate thing, but it plays a huge role offline,” Aleksic wrote.
