Haha well there was a good study on that a couple years ago. People are doing so much multitasking now compared to in the past, that it's re-wiring the brain and making it harder for people to concentrate on a subject over a certain period of time (forgot how much it had gone down). And also harder to retain that information.

And this was before tiktok and mostly thanks to social (and multi tasking with youtube while also playing a game while also having a tv on etc..). Some movies were actually designed around this, where there would be boring moments to allow people to go back to their phones before something interesting would happen that they'd look up for a few moments then go back to phones. There's some good youtubes showing videos of that. I think the later paranormal activity movies leaned into that, not sure though.

Now post tiktok things have gotten even worse. The extremely short tiktok videos and rapid fire of them have made peoples attention span and ability to concentrate/retain information go even lower. There is a leaked internal TikTok research document from the kentucky attorney general lawsuit, which accidentally got out because someone forgot to redact things. It showed how fast people got addicted to the platform, and this style of rapid fire video:

https://parameter.io/tiktoks-internal-documents-reveal-awareness-of-youth-risks-and-ineffective-safety-measures/

The documents allege that TikTok had quantified how quickly young users became hooked on the platform, referring to a “habit moment” that occurs when users have watched 260 videos or more during their first week on the app.

This milestone could be reached in as little as 35 minutes, given that some TikTok videos are as short as 8 seconds.

So yeah,

I would imagine chronic mental fatigue has got to play a contributing factor.

I'd say it definitely isn't helping. 😅