Neuroscientist Susannah Tye breaks down what happens to your brain doom scrolling

A respected neuroscientist is warning doom scrolling may be quietly reshaping our brains. This is why as a mum she’s concerned.

A respected neuroscientist has spoken of her own fears around her children using social media due to how it is designed to elicit a big spike of dopamine to hook kids in instantly, warning doom scrolling may be quietly reshaping the brain.

Susannah Tye, research group leader at the Queensland Brain Institute, is in support of under-16s being cut off from social media from December 10 thanks to News Corp Australia’s Let Them Be Kids campaign.

She noted that as a mother she’s concerned by what she’s seen firsthand at home.

“My own personal experience as a mother is that even as I try to navigate this with all of the neuroscience that I know … I can see in real time the reward systems being activated in the brain and the consequences of the withdrawal,” she said.

“I think there’s a lot of potential for damage to be done during formative years, and we haven’t even begun to understand how that’s affecting vulnerable kids, including neurodivergent kids who may be at greater risk for adverse outcomes.

“Until we know how to protect them better, I think there’s no other option than to withdraw it.

Susannah Tye is a neuroscientist and also a mother.

“I do think kids, particularly the younger generation (gen alpha), are being targeted earlier and earlier, and in more and more sophisticated ways.”

Medical director at Stanford University Anna Lembke has likened smartphones to a modern-day hypodermic needle that delivers a big dose of digital dopamine 24/7.

Associate Professor Tye said that when someone went on TikTok or Instagram and started scrolling they would get a dopamine hit instantaneously.

“The way our brains are wired is whenever something jumps out at you, the neurotransmitter dopamine will be released, and that signals to your brain that this is important, and it helps you pay attention and respond to it,” she said.

“But we also get dopamine when things are pleasurable, so drugs of abuse stimulate a massive amount of dopamine which is released into the brain and this artificially hijacks attention and motivation systems, which can lead to addiction.”

She said social media was a “mix” of the two.

“It’s capturing our attention with a lot of moving pictures and bright lights and sounds,” she said.

Susannah Tye is glad her young twins, Lucy and Ben, will have their brains protected from social media until they are 16.

“And then it is designed to be rewarding and reinforcing, so it’s training the brain to keep repeating that through a cycle of habit formation.

“It’s sort of triggering all the release of those chemicals that reinforce habits.”

But why do we doom scroll when that is negative and anxiety-inducing?

Associate Professor Tye said that although most of us associated dopamine with pleasure, the more accurate way of looking at it was as a neurotransmitter that signals importance.

“We often think of dopamine as the reward neurotransmitter, released when drugs of abuse or high sugary foods give you a high … but what most people don’t understand is that stress or negative events also stimulate dopamine in just the same way,” she said.

”It’s actually released when something is important, irrespective of being good or bad – the neuroscience term for that is salient.”

She said young people were particularly vulnerable and the long-term consequences of social media use on their developing brains was unknown.

Associate Professor Tye said that with everything we understand about the dopamine system, it was likely that doom scrolling may be quietly reshaping the brain and compromising long-term brain health.

Susannah Tye has broken down why we get stuck in a rabbit hole of doom scrolling.

“When people, especially young people, spend large amounts of time in fast, emotionally reactive loops online, they’re repeatedly strengthening the limbic, ‘survival brain’ circuits involved in rapid, impulsive responses,” she said.

“Because of neural plasticity (the brain’s ability to adapt), the networks we use most become stronger, and the ones we neglect weaken.

“If our daily habits keep reinforcing reactive, emotionally charged patterns of attention, we’re giving far less energy to the higher-order cognitive networks that support critical thinking, complex problem-solving, sustained focus, and adaptive decision-making.”

She said this meant we were “losing the opportunity to develop and strengthen the neural systems that protect and serve us” because they help us “think clearly and navigate complexity”.

“These skills are exactly what we need to navigate an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world,” she said.

She said more research was needed in this area but there were already many red flags.

Originally published as Neuroscientist Susannah Tye breaks down what happens to your brain doom scrolling