And that's leaving aside the question of what it would affect. Elasticity/learning? Would it result in forgetting, or losing skill? Apart from the problem that I (and others with me) have with the "area X does Y" school of neuro-cognition, measuring changes in activity does not measure changes in connections, synapses, or tissue.
It is possible that inhibiting certain brain areas for a longer period will change e.g. cognitive skills. There is enough literature on losing skills after inactivity. But this approach can't bridge the gap.
It makes more sense to observer TikTok users' behavior over time. That can give more information about the actual effects, although without nice, colorful blobs.
> And that's leaving aside the question of what it would affect. Elasticity/learning? Would it result in forgetting, or losing skill?
You can't get any of that from this study.
fMRI results are easy to manipulate into sensational news stories because deactivating a brain region sounds like a bad thing. Those brain regions are not always-on. Their activity declining during a task doesn't mean they start to atrophy or degrade.
The only thing it means is that those brain regions are not as active during that task. Tasks activate different parts of the brain depending on what they require. All of the extrapolations on top of this result are people projecting on to science they don't understand.
Only thing I took away from it was, "No wonder the algorithm is the golden goose"