WATCH Funny or cringe? Heres what some kids think about brain rot

These words made the jump from memes to the real world

If you say things like “skibidi,” “what the sigma?” and “only in Ohio,” you’re probably fluent in brain rot. 

Brain rot refers to bizarre phrases like these that have popped up in the last couple of years. 

They started becoming popular online and then they made their way into the offline vocabulary of a lot of kids and teens. 

Want to know more about where the whole brain rot thing came from?

Read on to hear from some experts. 

But first, here’s what happened when we asked kids in Toronto, Ontario, to try to sum it up.

Click play to hear kids try to explain brain rot. ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Does brain rot actually rot the brain?

At first, the idea of brain rot was tied to the belief that spending too much time watching silly, low-quality content “rots” your brain. 

In scientific terms, the theory was that watching too many of these videos on social media would hurt your cognitive functioning — your ability to think and concentrate. 

But researchers like Poppy Watson at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, say that so far, there’s no solid evidence to prove that. 

In a Nov. 6 article on the university’s website, she said that if consuming lots of digital content hurt people’s brain health, we would have seen a major drop in average IQ scores between pre- and post-internet generations — and we haven’t.  

• WATCH — 3 ‘skibidi’ origin stories you may not know about 

Today, the phrase “brain rot” is more often used to describe that low-quality digital content itself and the goofy meme words that come from it. That’s according to Adam Aleksic, a linguist and content creator who studies online language.

What makes brain rot stand out from other slang, Aleksic writes in his Oct. 27 Substack newsletter, is that people mostly use it ironically. 

It’s kind of an inside joke that makes fun of the words used in TikTok memes, and only other people who are “chronically online” will get it.

“Brain rot words become funny because they’re funny,” he said. “The more we repeat them, the funnier they get and the more ‘brain-rotted’ we all become.”

Now we want to hear from you!

Want to hear from more Canadian kids and teens? Check out these streeter videos:

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• WATCH — Kids share what they think about daylight time and changing clocks
• WATCH — What kids think of phone bans in some Canadian schools

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