How infinite scrolling damages our brains - The Saturday Story
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 6 June 2026
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
What starts as a quick check of social media can quickly turn into an hour lost to scrolling. The culprit is infinite scroll, a feature once built for convenience that has become one of the most powerful tools ever created for holding our attention. In fact, it's now thought the average Brit will spend five years of their waking lives doomscrolling. So how did infinite scroll come to dominate our online lives and what is it doing to our brains?
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Read by: Fleur Britten, contributor, The Times.
Producer: Dave Creasey.
Further reading: I created infinite scroll. Now I regret how it damages our brains
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From The Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story on Saturday. I'm Manvine Rana. |
| 0:10.4 | Most of us will have experienced it. You pick up your phone for a quick look at social media, only to look up an hour later, wondering where the time went. |
| 0:21.9 | That's thanks to something called Infinite Scroll, |
| 0:26.8 | the technology behind modern social media |
| 0:30.1 | and the biggest thief of your time and life. |
| 0:34.4 | It was invented in 2006 by software designer Azaraskin as a simple way to make browsing easier. |
| 0:42.3 | Now, it's helped to create the endless feeds that power Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X. |
| 0:51.3 | 20 years later, even its creator says he regrets the impact it's had, |
| 0:57.0 | with a new survey this week suggesting that people might spend up to five years of their waking lives mindlessly scrolling. |
| 1:10.0 | So how did a feature, designed for convenience, become one of the most powerful tools for capturing human attention? |
| 1:16.6 | And what is endless scrolling actually doing to our brains? |
| 1:22.6 | Fleur Britton, a writer for the Times, met Raskin, and we asked her to read her article. So, When an American software developer named Aza Raskin came up with the concept of the Infinite Scroll back in 2006, |
| 1:57.0 | little did he know that it would turn into one of society's most powerful time thieves. |
| 2:05.7 | The idea, now used by nearly all social media platforms, was simple. |
| 2:11.6 | New content that automatically and continuously loads as you scroll on an app or a website, |
| 2:18.2 | creating a never-ending stream of videos, tweets, posts, messages, you name it. |
| 2:26.6 | If you've ever sat on the sofa at the end of the long day |
| 2:29.5 | and opened Instagram just for a second, only to find you're still there three hours later, |
| 2:35.1 | in the dark, watching an endless supply of 10-second videos. |
| 2:39.3 | You have been a victim of the Infinite Scroll. |
| 2:57.8 | Its original purpose, Raskin explains on a video call from San Francisco, |
| 3:03.0 | was to help users, so they didn't have to keep refreshing a web page for new information. |
... |
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