Illustration: Benjamin Currie; Photos: GettyWatching sped-up TikToks has become a popular way to consume these short-form videos. But there’s a price our brain pays.
Lately, I am watching TikToks faster than ever.
By tapping and holding down my screen during a TikTok video, I can access the faster playback speed option of 2x speed, which can churn out TikToks at a quicker clip than the original video intended. The video app has been rolling out the faster playback feature for viewing TikToks since last year.
At first I was using it on slow talkers. A stranger explaining her marriage saga in a 52-part series? I needed to speed through it to see if it was worth the payoff. It felt like a small compromise with myself in order to squeeze out a few more TikToks before my self-imposed scroll limit. But now I have been using it on cucumber recipes, hair tutorials, explanations of why your pet tortoise should go in a fridge to mimic hibernation. To my fellow accelerated watchers ― which I’m calling “TokFasters” ― a 10-second clip or a 2-minute history lesson on the failed Donner Party expedition is not quick enough.
In this sped-up world, there are no pauses ― and also less time for thinking. That’s the point. You gain the ability to watch more entertaining videos. You lose the natural syncopated rhythm of someone’s style of storytelling. You also possibly lose your mind. The faster you go, the more the people on-screen transform into a whirl of quick hand motions and fast words that almost sound like unintelligible Simlish.
Watching too many TikToks already feels like a guilty pleasure, and I’m not alone in believing this is changing how I consume information and entertainment, likely for the worse. Using this accelerated playback feature has been dubbed the “ultimate brain rot” or a way to lose “patience and my mind” by weary TikTokers. One TikToker notes it’s making her attention span “smaller and smaller until I have a peanut left as a brain.”
And yet, watching life in fast-forward has become a common way TikToks get consumed. It’s now common to see TikToks with on-screen captions pointing out the feature with language like “hold here for 2x speed,” as a tacit acknowledgement of the new way this avalanche of short-form videos gets pushed through our heads.
TokFaster Wren Sayler said she will now edit her videos to be 1.3x speed because it “keeps eyeballs longer.” She said that in her own TikTok consumption, “I’m more likely to skip the video if there’s long pauses or lots of sighs and ‘ums.’” Her theory, which I’m in agreement with, is this accelerated playback speed is one of many contributing factors to our shortened attention spans.
“I’ve noticed my tolerance for ads/commercials is way less than it used to be when I was a kid watching cable TV, and I think it’s because we’re so used to being in control of how we’re viewing content, part of which is being able to view things quickly,” Sayler told me.
Ironically, the feature that could ostensibly give me more control over how I watch a video is actually making me lose my self-control. That’s by design too, said Princeton University neuroscientist Uri Hasson, who studies how the brain processes sped-up speech.
“What TikTok wants is for you to stay on the platform five more seconds,” Hasson said. The accelerated playback feature allows you to watch more videos, so “if you start [using] TikTok with five minutes a day, you end TikTok with two hours a day,” he said. Hasson likens the app to an “addicting drug that doesn’t require you to think.”
He said the biggest downside our brains lose by speeding up videos is the pauses in speech. The edited-out pauses are actually necessary to do the deep thinking that remembering and understanding what you watch requires, Hasson said: “The thinking is done in the gap between the words. When I’m speaking and I’m taking a moment, I’m thinking and you’re thinking about what I’m saying.”
That said, not all is lost at a quicker cadence. You can actually learn while listening to a faster speaking speed. In one 2020 study, graduate students listened to lectures at different speeds, and researchers found “no significant difference” in the students’ ability to understand what they learned between the normal 1x and 1.5x speeds. But at 3x speed, the students’ comprehension scores were significantly lower in the immediate aftermath and a week later.
For Hasson, the range at which you lose comprehension is typically after 1.5x speed.
He noted that our brains can adapt to different speaking speeds. Our ability to comprehend speech depends not only on the rate at which someone is speaking but how many words they were managing to cram in a second. That’s why some speakers sound perfectly fine at a faster clip, while others sound unintelligible. In Hasson’s view, if you want to watch an hourlong lecture in 45 minutes to save time, “it’s fine,” he said.
“I’m also doing it, but I’m also stopping the video if I need to think, so I’m doing both,” Hasson said. “I’m a smart user in the sense that if I really want to consume and understand the professor speaking, I will also stop it and go backward [in the video]. There is this interaction.”
When I asked Hasson what I should do to retrain my broken brain, he put his advice succinctly: “Slow down, talk with real people, and leave” TikTok.
Easier said than done. I still struggle to stop watching minutes of funny TikToks, but I’m forcing myself to notice when I’ve put my brain on “Airplane mode” and have relinquished my thinking to whatever my “For You” page on TikTok is serving. I don’t want my free time to so easily belong to an addictive app like TikTok.
If you want help on how to reboot your brain, you can also read Jenny Odell’s “Saving Time: Discovering A Life Beyond The Clock,” a wide-ranging work that critiques time management self-help advice and offers new ecological ways to experience time.
For Odell, meaningful time does not mean slowing down, it means paying attention to what’s around you. She notices the smallest changes of bird plumage and how moss is growing. She notices the bad of when dead seabirds show up on her walks due to climate loss, and how taking the time out of her day to mourn their appearance creates “a living, breathing time and place subject to the same pain and injustice found anywhere else.”
“Maybe ‘the point’ isn’t to live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life,” Odell writes in her book, “but rather, to be more alive in any given moment.”
What I took from Odell’s work is how paying attention to the world can begin wherever you are, whatever you are doing. That’s how you feel that aliveness and resist the allure of speeding it all up. By its nature, a TikTok’s loop never changes, always replaying the same video over and over, no matter how fast you watch it. But you and I can break new ground.
Ask yourself, as I am: “Am I interacting with this technology, or am I allowing myself to get lulled into a trance” while on TikTok. When I feel the walls closing in, I try to look up from my screen, get a glass of water, pet my cat, notice the pink and orange sky outside. It’s a small start.
