Today, Explained - Battling brain rot

Episode Date: January 25, 2026

Bland colors, AI summaries, and declining literacy rates have lots of us worried that we’re losing our intelligence to the modern world. Can we get it back? This episode was produced by Ariana Aspuru, edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Photo By BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images.  If you have a question, give us a call on 1-800-618-8545 or send us a note here.  Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When I'm talking, I feel dumb. We were never, and I mean never, ever meant to hear the thoughts of this many stupid people in one day. Like, we all know we're getting dumber, right? Like, you feel it, I feel it, we all feel it. As you scroll through your feeds, do you ever feel like all that brain rod is taking a toll? It's not just that. We're investing less in schools. We distrust science.

And we have AI doing a lot of our thinking for us. Some people are saying we're in a golden age of stupidity. I think we are at the dawn of the golden age of stupidity. It honestly feels like at times we solved the issue of not knowing things by deciding that we don't need to know those things. We are the most informed generation in history, yet somehow the dumbest. The words stupid and dumb are thrown around a lot and definitely in ablest ways. but what we're talking about here is willful ignorance,

using our minds less and allowing them to get weaker. I'm John Glyn Hill, and this week on Explain It to Me from Vox, how do we get our brains back? A lot of people have a lot of opinions on what it means to be stupid. The easy way is to say that if you get less than 100 in an IQ test, further you are away from 100 with your score, the more stupid you are.

I really want to push back against that definition. I think it's a really stupid definition because it doesn't really capture at all what we mean when we say, you talk about stupidity. And also IQ tests themselves are pretty clumsy ways of defining stupidity. How do you define it? Damn you. That's a really good question.

This is Stuart Jeffries. He's a journalist, and he wrote a book called A Short History of Stupidity. I like this idea of it being somehow a moral thing, rather than data. You know, because I think we're so ready to data and it doesn't really capture what we really value. What we value, I think, is stopping being ignorant, having a will to stop being ignorant. And that is a, if you don't have that will, that to me is stupidity. Why are we talking about this now?

Why have we returned to this discussion about it? There seemed to be a lot of it around. And when COVID hit, there seemed to be a lot of people behaving in rather stupid ways. A lot of people weren't. But it seemed to be a good time because of that and because of the rise of a kind of populist demagoguery, which still appalls me, still shocks me. It's like people have abandoned the very critical thinking that we need.

Right now there are a lot of things that make us feel, I don't know, like kind of numb. You know, our feet are full of slop. the Pantone colors of the year have been so bland. I'd like to announce Pantone's color of the year, 2025, is shit brown. Good news, everybody. Pantone just announced its 2026 color of the year, and they're going with white. Plus, we have AI summaries for everything now.

Choose watch video, and the AI agent will watch the entire video in seconds and summarize it. The truth is, nobody has time, but AI does. It all just feels flat. hat. Is that making us less smart? I don't know. I'm always going to push back a little bit against the idea that AI is screwing us over. But I really take your point. There is a sort of blandification of life. It's like we feel that we're more stupid. But, you know, looking at history, maybe we aren't. We're just, we're actually just dealing, as we always have done, with new kinds of technology which threaten us, you know,

really upset us. Like the Luddites destroy the machines because they were terrified of them. now we're terrified of AI because, you know, maybe an existentially different threat, but it is a sort of, it seems similar to me, we're just threatened by the unknown, and we think we're on the chasm of something, you know, of our own extinction or something like that. I kind of think it's too soon to call it, but yeah, I know what you mean, the sense of brain rot we're feeling is out there. Do you know more about modern brain rot or OG brain rot? Let's find out. Ballerina, cappuccino, banana.

Perfect. Tung-tong-tong-tong-sah-hor. Yes. And there are ways our brains are working less for things. You know, for instance, I don't necessarily need to know directions. I have Google Maps on my phone. There's not really as much friction in the world for payoff. Does that impact the way we interpret and understand the rest of the world?

I think, yeah, I really saved that point. That's sort of cognitive outsourcing where we just made our technology do the work for us. That's worrying if that's what's really happening. There's also another thing which is that we are made to feel stupid by the bureaucracies we live in. If you ever get mired, as I always seem to, you know, two-factor recognition, authentication and all that kind of stuff, you just feel dumb all the time, even though you aren't. Even though, you know, if you're a college graduate or if you know, you're a professor, you're going to feel dumb. So there is a sense in which you will feel dumb no matter how clever you are.

I think. Living lives in, you know, technologically advanced society, it's got really complicated, perhaps too complicated. You know, people say because of all of these different factors that now we're in this golden age of stupidity. Yeah. Is that true? Do you think that is true?

No, not really. What a father I would be, apart from anything else, suggesting that we're, you know, we're on average getting more stupid when my daughter's, you know, I think, clever than me. you know she's got better opportunities, she's better read and she's, yeah, you know, more empathetic and

kind of sweeter person than I'll ever be, you know. Yeah, so I'm not going to say, I'm not going to say that, and I don't really believe it at all. You know, and I look back to some of the things I was doing when I started my career. You know, they weren't great, and I wasn't doing things that are particularly clever. I think I'm cleverer and better now,

partly because of the technology I use that helps me to connect with people in ways that I wouldn't have been able to do when I say, you know, her age, when I was 20. When we talk about stupidity, are we maybe thinking of a different kind of stupidity when we think of the error we're in now?

You know, it's the lack of critical thinking, a lack of curiosity. Is that sort of where we are? Yeah, there's a fear. And you can see it in a way that people talk about how politics isn't working. People don't know the names of their representatives. They don't really get involved in politics.

And that leaves the way open to demagogues of the kinds of dominating the world at the moment. You know, yeah, you're right. There is a lack of critical thinking, but it was ever thus. You know, it's not like there was a golden age where everybody was really, you know, on top of democracy and really keen to sort of, you know,

Hitler was elected, you know. I'm not just, I've said the H word already, but, you know, it's always worth bearing that point in mind. He was elected and by sophisticated people as well. So, you know, the suggestion that, We are worse than our elders cognitively seems to me to be dubious. Humans have been fretting over how smart we are and aren't for a really long time. That's next.

Support for this show comes from Rocket Money. We all have goals that require a little bit of planning in the Money Department. If you need help getting your finances under control, you can turn to Rocket Money. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps. find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Rocket Money doesn't just help you track and cancel your subscriptions. They also make it easy to build and stick with a budget. It automatically categorizes transactions so you can easily monitor your spending by category. That way, you get to

include whatever silly thing you like to spend money on while making sure you have enough for everything else. Let Rocket Money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join at Rocket dot com slash explain it. That's rocketmoney.com slash explain it. Rocketmoney.com slash explain it. At Medcan, we know that life's greatest moments are built on a foundation of good health, from the big milestones to the quiet winds.

That's why our annual health assessment offers a physician-led, full-body checkup that provides a clear picture of your health today and may uncover early signs of conditions like heart disease and cancer. The healthier you means more moments to do. cherish. Take control of your well-being and book an assessment today. Medcan, live well for life. Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. I'm JQ. This is explaining to me, and I'm talking with writer Stuart Jeffries about his book, A Short History of Stupidity. Turns out, this worry of ours goes a long way back.

Well, as far back as I can find, I mean, it probably goes back further, but it goes back to Socrates two thousand five hundred years ago in Athens. He has this dialogue with this guy called Alcibiades, who is an aristocrat, very rich, very beautiful and really, really done. But he's completely full of self-belief that he should become a leading politician. He has to write stuff to guide the Athenian people through the crises. So the whole dialogue is Socrates, just gently saying to him, now you haven't, you're not very clever. You know, you're ignorant. You are wedded to stupidity, my fine friend, of the vilest kind.

You are impeached of this by your own words out of your own mouth. But that's not the worst thing that you say about you. You're stupid because, you know, you don't realize that you're ignorant. And even if you did realize that you're ignorant, you wouldn't do anything about it because you're so full of pride. You are not only ignorant of the greatest things, but while not knowing that, them you think that you do. So that's like 2,500 years ago. And to

me, it's been reached like today. You've looked at the historical understanding of stupidity through different lenses, including the Buddhist lens. What conclusions did they come to? How did they think about stupidity? Yeah, well, Taoism

as well. They're just very interesting perspectives to have on how we live in the West. The implication is that we live in a stupid way because we live for our possessions. They're saying you are leading a worthless lives in your pursuit of materialism. How can we live without desire and how can we live without wanting to have things and possess things? Is that something that human beings can do?

You know, in a way, that's what the Buddhists are saying, and that's why their critique of how other people live, particularly us in the West, particularly us now in the decadent, materialistic worst. It's so interesting how the definition of stupidity can change based on what time you live in or what culture you come from. Yeah, it's a social construct.

It's always a reflection of what's value at the times in which people are talking about. So, you know, in Shakespeare's time, all those Shakespeare's plays just full of fools. And I, that I'm sure I lack thee, may pass for a wise man.

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit. But the fools are always kind of low-class people. They aren't kings. And they're always telling truth to power in a rather, you know, hidden way, in a clever masked way. And they're talking about the value of folly, you know, the value of not being, you know, easily consumed, not being easily sort of read. That's what, you know, a lot of Shakespeare is about. How did the big psychologist's understanding of stupidity shape us? you know, I'm sure Carl Young had a lot to say about it.

Yeah, I mean, there's so intellectual revolutions where we realize that we aren't masters of our own domains, we aren't, you know, in charge of our cognitive worlds at all, nowhere more so, I suppose, and Freud's saying that we are, you know, subject to our unconscious, or, you know, young sort of talking about the idea that there's a collective unconscious, so the idea that we're all connected, we're all actually part of the same being in a way, and it's stupid, imagine that we're individuals who can just force our wills and other people. And, you know, that's what the game's about life isn't, you know, life for them isn't really about these great big narcissistic displays of human will. I wonder if there are other kinds of intelligence

we should be thinking about, you know, not just IQ, but EQ, emotional intelligence. Yeah, EQ is a very interesting phenomenon, very different. You know, the reason we're not talking about it and the reason that, you know, it's not really written, well, it is, written about. But the reason it isn't held up as a yardstick is because it's hard to measure, you know, why the stereotypes of men not talking and men being, you know, very repressed about their feelings and all of that is often a symptom of a lack of emotional intelligence, for example. How did ignorance come to be associated with evil? Because, you know, there's a history there, too. Yeah, well, there was with Socrates. You know, he was saying that Al-Cabardi's this, you know,

that young dumb and false stupidity guy we were talking about before, he was, he was evil because his soul was sort of bent on doing something which he wasn't ready for. You know, he wasn't ready to lead the people of the city. You know, he shouldn't have been anywhere near politics until he understood what politics was. He cut to a courtroom in Jerusalem in 1961. New York has sent Hannah Arendt, who was this German-Jewish philosopher, to cover the Eichmann trial and she looks at this guy, this architect of the Holocaust and says to herself, this guy is stupid by which she means and she, you know, expands on it. Evil.

And there she's got the idea, she equates stupidity with evil, with a lack of empathy. There's nothing deep about it, nothing demonic. There's simply the reluctance to ever imagine what the other person is experiencing. He had no empathy for the people who was. killing. You just didn't see them as people. And that was, for her, a form of stupidity. So evil comes in, it's like a failure of your soul in some sort of way. So who has gotten this right? You know, which understanding of intelligence and stupidity is the one we should be looking at, especially right now? Oh, me, me.

Of course. I don't know. I mean, if you ever come across anybody who speaks with you, about themselves, who is deprecating about themselves, that to me is such a sign of intelligence. You know, I use this example all the time when the Guardian introduced, like the New York Times did, corrections and clarifications. So for the longest time, you know, you'd write something and it wouldn't get corrected, even if it was garbage,

you know, even if you've got the, you know, this gender or the age of, you know, basic facts wrong about a person. And then suddenly there were these corrections. and I remember feeling absolutely humiliated by it because it was a threat to my sort of self-esteem, you know, but it was really good for my soul, you know, really good to have that, you know, to be made to feel a sense of humbleness, you know.

But there are people around who have a humility, which I think Socrates would have recognised. I think anybody you come across who has done that walk, you know, walk to think into a path where they can, realize that they are wrong and learn from their mistakes, that's got to be a sign of intelligence, surely. Do you think we can reclaim our intelligence? Is there a way for us to turn this thing around?

Yeah, why not? I mean, and the other things, studying history, my daughter's studying history, that helps having a historical perspective on how the thing, you know, we feel we're in a special, doom-laden, terrible age. perhaps we aren't. Perhaps actually things were much worse back in the 18th and 19th century, you know, in these areas when things were supposed to be so much better. When it comes to a sort of cynicism about the age we're living

and it's the worst of all possible worlds and things are only going to get worse, I don't see that. I don't really believe that at all. All is not lost. We can reclaim our brains and make ourselves smarter. Coming up, how to do it. Right now in the world of AI, two things are happening simultaneously.

One, the technology is getting better fast. People are finding new uses for it. It's more popular than ever. And two, every company that makes AI is absolutely hemorrhaging cash. On the Vergecast this week, we're talking about what OpenAI and other companies are doing to try to finally figure out how to make some money off of this technology. Spoiler alert, it's mostly ads. And we're talking about whether any of it's actually going to work.

All that, plus some stories about the Chinese company that appears to be beating Tesla on the Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts. We're back. It's Explained it to me. I'm JQ. And this is Boston University's Andrew Budson. So I'm a neurologist and I specialize in memory disorders. Andrew studies how we make memories and how we hold on to them. He says it all starts when we notice something. That information gets stored deep in our temporal load. otherwise known as the hippocampus. This hippocampus, it actually takes like the separate sights and sounds and smells and thoughts and feelings that you're having at that instant, and it binds them all together into a coherent hole. It then gets tagged with an index that will allow you to retrieve that information later. Is it like a filing cabinet?

Because that's what I imagine. I'm like the little, I don't know, inside out people in my brain, like reaching into the files and pulling stuff out. Oh, here's one where she waved at a guy who was actually waving at a girl behind her. Oh, that was so bad. Good choice. Oh, here's when she forgot that girl's name. Oh, yeah, that was super awkward. Yeah, you know, it's a little bit like a file cabinet, but the twist is that the files are just the blueprints or the schematic.

of the memory. And what your brain needs to do is it needs to take this blueprint and it needs to very actively recreate the memory. It needs to actively recreate all the details that are going on. So there, another part of your brain called the frontal lobes get involved. And they are sort of like the director or the comment. contractor that is in charge of this active construction. So to sort of get all of these pieces to be working together. And when we retrieve the memory and actively reconstruct it, it reproduces the

pattern of neurochemical electrical activity that it had when that episode was originally created. Biologically, what a allows us to learn and retain new ideas? So it's one of the coolest things and it really is part of neuroplasticity. So neuroplasticity is essentially the concept that our brains are elastic or, you know, they're able to make new connections over time. So memories are a strengthening of existing connections in the brain between one neuron and another, and they're also the creation of new connections between neurons in the brain. And so what happens when we sleep is the brain figures out, okay, this strengthening of connections here, this is an important memory. So we're going

to strengthen that even further, or we're going to grow new connections. So those connections, permanent. And one of the really cool things about neuroplasticity is how it's something that people can use throughout their lives. When I went to medical school, I was told that it was really only like babies and children that had this sort of neuroplasticity available to them. But we now know that neuroplasticity is going on throughout the lifespan, including in people as old as me and older. Yeah, so it sounds like our brains are a muscle like any other. And so is it one of those use-it-or-lose-it-type situations? That is very true. And there have been studies that have looked at what happens when people get socially isolated. Our brains evolved for social interactions.

You know, our math teachers might think it's, you know, to do arithmetic in our heads. But they're wrong. That's not what our brain is for. You know, so when you're like talking to your friend next to you in the math class, that is actually what our brains are for. They're for these social interactions. And so people who become socially isolated, their brains actually shrink, even if they don't have a discerning. their brains shrink. And people who are socially isolated are at increased risk of developing dementia. Okay, so if your brain is a muscle, does that mean we can train it to be smarter?

Absolutely. We totally can. And the key is to train with the most direct example as you possibly can. So what I mean by that is there are a lot of companies that are out there, many of whom are working very hard with lots of scientists to try to develop brain training games that are going to really help us. But so far, what the studies have proven is that if you spend a lot of time with these brain training games, you get better at the brain training games. You know, it does not translate into everyday life. But, like, if you want to get better at doing something like, you know, remembering, you know, French vocabulary words... You can get better at remembering French vocabulary words.

I basically working hard at, you know, developing sort of a routine or a program as to how you're going to work. on, you know, studying the vocabulary words, how you're going to incorporate into your life. So we all can improve on almost anything our brain does, but the trick is to work on practicing that. Yeah, you know, people have written and talked about how it can be difficult to focus and think critically these days. How does critical thinking and knowledge develop? You know, I actually think that critical thinking is a little bit of. a skill. And I don't know that I have a simple recipe, but I think it has to do with, when you're faced with

a complicated decision or something complicated that you're trying to do or achieve or create, of sort of slowing down, of listing like all the different things that you know, listing, you know, what is the output that you want to have? What's the final product? And then going through and thinking about all the different possibilities so that you won't miss something that's important. And often, another thing that happens when we sleep is we allow our unconscious brain processes to work on problems.

So I think critical thinking is really the conscious. part of it, but we want to use our unconscious mind as well, because often we can get insights when we sleep. Yeah, you know, before I let you go, I'm curious your thoughts on something. There's all this talk about how, like, oh, we're not as smart as we used to be. I don't know, you look at a lot of brains. Like, how are we stacking up these days? Yeah. So, you know, I do think that there are some reasons that. that we may not be as smart today as we used to be. I think the average person's ability, for example,

to navigate from one place to another, has been dramatically reduced by the use of Google Maps and other programs like that. The part of our brain that's involved in navigation does actually shrink for many people, The one other thing I'd like to mention because it was actually studied is that people who spend more than an hour a day watching TV actually end up getting less smart over time. And what do I mean by that? It's got to make your brain smaller because you're not using it. It's important to use your brain.

And don't forget, the thing that our brains evolve for is to have social interactions. So I don't want people to, you know, go out and, you know, spend their time in a windowless room, you know, studying math texts. What I want people to do is to get out there in life, interact with people. That's how to use your brains the best. If you remember one thing from this episode, let it be this. We all got to hang out with our friends more. Doctor's orders. Is there something you'd like explained?

Something you've always wondered about. Give us a call at 1-800-618-618-8-55 or email AskVox at Vox.com. By the way, you can help make this and other Vox podcast happen by becoming a Vox member. When you become a member, you get perks. episodes with no ads. Head over to Vox.com slash members to sign up today. This episode was produced by

Ariana Aspuru. It was edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. I'm your host, John Glenn Hill. Thank you so much for listening.

I'll talk to you soon. Bye.