The Psychology behind TikTok’s Memory Interference
This is part 3 of a multi-part series on social media, TikTok, memory, and the psychology of time. You can find part 1 here, and part 2 here.
Above all, the brain needs downtime to properly convert experiences to memory, and on social media, downtime is the last thing you’ll find. As we’ve seen, the pace of content on social media is too rapid for our memory to assimilate - we have the bandwidth to process one video at a time, but our brain doesn’t have the bandwidth to treat it as a discrete event in memory. No sooner does one end than the next one begins.
More so than any other platform, TikTok provides users with a state of perpetual interference - each new video disrupts the memory for the last.
But here’e the thing, this isn’t mere, run-of-the-mill proactive interference; this is the grade-A plutonium of proactive interference. The reason comes down to the context in which TikTok viewing takes place. Research in memory psychology finds that the interference effect is greatest when the subsequent events unfold in the same context.
That is, if you study all day long by reading a textbook, the worst thing you could do in your downtime is to read a book for fun. Since this is a similar medium (e.g. text on a page) to the experience you want to remember, the proactive interference is even more intense. Our brains can’t as easily separate the two when they come to us in a similar domain, making it all the easier to jumble the memory consolidation process.
Exactly this kind of intense, proactive interference is also playing out on TikTok. When we stare into the same app, on the same phone, watching the same TikTok videos, it all very easily blends. Once the next video begins, it's like the last one never happened.
The Psychology of TikTok’s Memory Disruption
When we examine TikTok through the psychology of memory, we begin to see why those experiences, in retrospect, seem to feel so brief, and so thin. Whatever we may think about the quality of TikTok videos, if we don’t remember them, we have very little ability to appreciate them. Core to the experience of TikTok is a complete inability to digest and fully assimilate what we’re seeing. The mind is seduced into a state of perpetual, momentary focus.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU Stern School of Business, has been concerned with social media use among young adults for years. His research suggests that continued use of social media has significant negative effects on young consumers. And here, TikTok is singled out as being especially pernicious, especially from a developmental standpoint: it severely limits our ability to grow through experience.
In a talk he gave at The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, he distills this point, “TikTok is the worst for their intellectual development, as it literally reduces their ability to focus on anything, while stuffing them with little bits of stuff that was selected by an algorithm for emotional arousal.”
Not unlike Clive Wearing, we find ourselves perpetually trapped in the current moment; attending to one discrete experience after another.
This is worrisome when we consider the fact that the average TikTok user spends an astounding 90 minutes per day on the app. You can easily come away from an hour on TikTok having felt like 10 minutes, and with only a memory of the very last video you’ve seen. Caught in a state of perpetual proactive interference, your memory is only as good as the last piece of content you’ve seen.
Alan Jacobs laments about this phenomenon in his book, Breaking Bread with The Dead, “I would ask you, dear reader, to remember the next-to-last thing that social media taught you to be outraged about. I bet you can remember only the last one.”
TikTok’s Broader Impact in Media and Storytelling
While TikTok is the biggest culprit in this frenetic pace of content, it’s become a broader feature of our media consumption. It even seeps into the dense, long-form storytelling we try to savor.
The author Luke Burgis recently described a similar scenario while watching HBO’s Succession. This particular episode was especially intense, even by Succession’s standards, thoroughly engrossing in its masterful storytelling. However, the moment it ended, it immediately autoplay to an HBO special “behind the scenes” special, with the actors talking about the episode that had just aired. No sooner did the episode fade to black did the “analysis” start. The jolt from a dense, hour-long melodrama to the next immediate thing was incongruous. Burgis distilled this frustration perfectly, “good art needs time to breathe”.
And just as art needs time to breathe, experiences of all kinds need time to marinate into long-term impressions and reflections. This kind of speed is atypical of HBO. With shows like The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, and the aforementioned Succession, they pioneered long-form storytelling, and cultivated an appreciative, patient audience who slowly came to understand the intricacies and nuances of complex characters over years of storytelling.
In the modern era of media, these kinds of slow, dense, unfolding dramas are a rare counterpoint to the franticness of social media. But for how much longer? As TikTok continues to eat into the attention spans of younger consumers, will there continue to be a demand for this kind of dense, patient, storytelling?
Final Thoughts on Memory Formation and TikTok
Social media, and especially TikTok, continues to be a target of criticism. Whether it drives social comparison, encourages counterfactual thinking, or disorients our social world, social media has no shortage of critiques.
These criticisms are warranted, and are largely focused on what social media does. Less appreciated, however, is what the experiences are actually like. When we view the TikTok experience through the psychology of time, and now through the psychology of memory, a clearer picture emerges: to experience TikTok is to exist in a state of perpetual, personalized, pleasure. It’s an experience that provides nothing less, and nothing more, than the current moment.
Photo by Isi Parente on Unsplash
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
References for The Psychology of Memory, Time, and Proactive Interference
Ben-Artzi, E., Marks, L.E. (1995) Visual-auditory interaction in speeded classification: Role of stimulus difference. Perception & Psychophysics 57, 1151–1162 (1995). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208371
Haidt. J. (June, 2023), “Social Media’s impact on Generation Z”, Talk at The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship
Gonidis, L., & Sharma, D. (2017). Internet and Facebook related images affect the perception of time. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 47(4), 224-231.
Klosterman, C (2022). The Nineties (p. 55). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Zheng, M. (2021, December). Influence of Short Video Watching Behaviors on Visual Short-Term Memory. In 2021 4th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2021) (pp. 1855-1859). Atlantis Press.
