I spend two hours doomscrolling short videos or social feeds, close the app, and can’t recall a single thing just watched. Or when it’s time to write a report or plan a project, my mind goes blank — and first instinct is to open ChatGPT and ask it for an outline — while I have no real thread to pull.
If any of that also sounds familiar to you, you might be dealing with a very modern cognitive crisis: Brainrot.
These days, it’s never been easier to get information—useful knowledge and throwaway memes alike flood in the moment we open a phone or laptop. Meanwhile, our capacity for deep thinking is quietly eroding.
Information overload leads to mental overload—and, eventually, atrophy. I get the sense many of us have all but given up on thinking. Thinking is tiring. It’s messy. There’s too much to sift through. Why strain when you can just swipe to the next thing—or copy and paste?
But it isn’t hopeless. From my own experience, bento‑style collage notes can be a surprisingly effective way to jump‑start your brain. I’ll explain how.
Brainrot and the Trap of “Cognitive Outsourcing”
“Brainrot” started as internet slang for the numb, scattered, low‑attention state that follows long exposure to low‑quality, hyper‑stimulating, bite‑sized content—mindless short videos, recycled memes, and so on.
Lately—especially as AI has taken off—it’s acquired a deeper layer: brain atrophy caused by cognitive outsourcing.
With large language models everywhere, we’ve grown used to letting AI summarize long reads, extract key points, or even draft emails for us. AI is an extraordinarily efficient “information chewer,” breaking complex material into spoon‑fed bites. In the short term, that’s a massive productivity boost. In the long run, we quietly skip the most crucial cognitive sequence: read → understand → analyze → reconstruct. We hand that process off.
Your brain is like a muscle: use it or lose it. When we stop actively forging connections between ideas—and skip the friction, struggle, and “aha” that create new links—those synapses weaken. Brainrot sets in. The mind grows less capable of depth, more hungry for the next thing, then the next.
Reactivate Your Brain with Collage Notes
Beating Brainrot isn’t about rejecting AI outright, nor about ascetic strategies like unplugging or swearing off your phone to force yourself back into focus. Plenty of tools and tips follow that logic: cut the distractions, and thinking will magically return. But that only keeps noise at bay; it doesn’t address the deeper question:
Are you actively processing information—or passively receiving it?
The real goal isn’t to wall information out. It’s to reclaim your agency in how you process it.
Design offers a useful parallel: the mood board. Designers don’t chase a perfect answer from the start. They gather relevant images, palettes, type, textures, and references, then arrange and rearrange them in a single space. It looks like collage, but the point is to force the brain to observe, compare, judge, and connect. What harmonizes? What’s a false lead? Which detail suggests a new direction? Inspiration rarely appears from thin air—it emerges as you actively organize the material.
Learning and research work the same way.
When you drop a paragraph, a screenshot, a link, a few annotations, and a couple of PDFs into one place, you’re not decorating a page. You’re putting your brain into an engaged mode: filtering, grouping, comparing—asking why each fragment deserves its spot and how it relates to the others. That shift from passive intake to active organization is the point.
Another telling analogy is the Feynman Technique. Its core isn’t “memorize more.” It’s to force genuine understanding. Explain a concept in the simplest language you can—ideally so a layperson could follow. The moment you try, you discover whether you truly understand—or whether you only skimmed a summary and mistook familiarity for mastery. Many of us assume we’ve learned a topic because we read a recap or an AI‑generated digest. But the instant we must rephrase, decompose, and give fresh examples, the gaps reveal themselves.
This is why mood boards and the Feynman Technique—though they seem worlds apart—are, at heart, quite similar.
- The former forces the brain to discover relationships via collecting, collaging, sorting, and recombining.
- The latter forces the brain to expose the edges of understanding via explaining, paraphrasing, simplifying, and producing.
Neither is about spoon‑feeding an answer. Both demand cognitive participation. You have to dive in, handle the material, impose order, and articulate. In that work, the brain wakes up—rather than slipping into the habit of accepting, copying, and consuming conclusions.
From this angle, the value of collage notes isn’t “prettier” or “more flexible” layouts. It’s that they sit between collecting and understanding. They aren’t linear, write‑it‑down‑as‑you‑go notes, and they aren’t instant AI answers either.
A Few Useful Collage‑Note Tools
If you want to try collage‑style note‑taking, several tools make it easy to bring scattered material into a single, workable space. They differ in flavor, but all support a more active approach to organizing knowledge.
Heptabase
Heptabase is a prominent example. It emphasizes visual notes, whiteboard‑style organization, and connecting sources, notes, highlights, and discussions in one knowledge space—aimed specifically at studying complex topics and building deeper understanding. If your goal is to research a theme, unpack a hard problem, or turn reading into a personal framework, Heptabase feels natural.
Milanote
Milanote leans creative. It’s built around highly visual boards where you can drag notes, images, links, files, videos, and sketches together to shape ideas and projects. It’s a staple for mood boards, brainstorming, and storyboarding. If your process is “collect → arrange → compare → converge,” Milanote fits well.
Notion
Notion isn’t a classic collage tool. It’s more of a general‑purpose workspace spanning docs, knowledge bases, project management, and AI, with boards, templates, and many views. Precisely because it’s so flexible, many people set up research dashboards, libraries, and topic hubs inside it. It doesn’t deliver the same visual “collage feel,” but if you already live in Notion, it’s an easy place to practice active organization instead of waiting for a “perfect tool.”
Xmind
And though it isn’t collage note, xmind (mind mapping) belongs in this conversation. Its core is mapping and brainstorming: unfolding layers, breaking ideas down, and establishing hierarchy—forcing you to turn a fuzzy thought into a clear structure.
Collage notes and mind maps follow different routes but chase a similar outcome: keep your brain in active gear, not passively absorbing conclusions.
- Collage notes work across a plane—juxtaposing, aggregating, and contrasting materials from different sources until relationships appear.
- Mind maps drill vertically from a central question—decomposing step by step until the structure is clear.
One favors lateral association, the other vertical breakdown. One helps you see relationships across materials; the other helps you see layers within an idea. At base, both do the same thing:
They reactivate the brain so we don’t merely skim, consume, and accept someone else’s answer.
Any tool that nudges you to think for yourself is already on the anti‑Brainrot team.
Finally, What I’m Building
This brings me to why I’m building Bentowise—a bento‑style, collage‑first note‑taking app.
Bentowise
For me, knowledge management was never just “store it somewhere.” What I really care about is a specific experience: content I’ve personally organized sticks in my head.
I’ve used many note‑taking tools. In the end, plain folders felt like the most honest mechanism—yet they have obvious limits. Canvas‑style tools are great too, as I’ve said, but for me they tend to sprawl. I prefer a subtle sense of structure and order over a totally freeform canvas.
Either way, what you’ve organized yourself is nothing like what you’ve merely “seen”—and it’s nothing like something an AI has “summarized for you.”
Bentowise is the convergence of these two beliefs.
- It carries forward my commitment to local‑first, privacy‑first software.
- And it aims to support a more active mode of thinking: not just dumping content in, but placing text snippets, images, links, attachments, and annotations in a single visual space—collaging, arranging, contrasting, and organizing until your own understanding emerges.
I’m not trying to build “the most universal note app.” Quite the opposite. I care about something else:
In an era when AI is increasingly great at producing results for us, can we still keep a space where we personally organize, understand, and think? (Like I used to do with my own folders.)
That’s the bet behind Bentowise.
Right now, I’m recruiting early users. You can apply for a free, lifetime, single‑device license—no subscription—in exchange for feedback to help me improve it.