About

Our Brains Are Shrinking refers to a Joe Bartolozzi YouTube thumbnail for a video called "Humans Are Actually DEVOLVING?" that shows the blonde male YouTuber looking shocked next to a skull that has an arrow pointing to it with a text caption reading, "Our BRAINS are SHRINKING." The thumbnail gained use as a reaction image and exploitable meme on social media in 2025, commonly used in quote-tweets and in TikTok comment sections to highlight a post that represented stupidity in the modern era.

Origin

On July 12th, 2025, Twitch streamer and YouTuber Joe Bartolozzi shared a video to his YouTube^[1] channel called "Humans Are Actually DEVOLVING?" which received over 809,300 views in three months. The video's thumbnail showed Bartolozzi looking shocked with his mouth open next to a human skull with an arrow pointing at it, and the caption, "Our brains are shrinking."

On July 17th, DeviantArt ^[2] user oriolesfan1949 shared both the original thumbnail and a cropped version, omitting Bartolozzi from the frame, gaining over 1,200 views in three months.

On July 15th, 2025, TikToker^[3] @flatmccheese shared an AI video that animated the Joe Bartolozzi thumbnail, gaining over 500 likes in three months. The video is currently the first known memetic use of the Our Brains Are Shrinking image.

Spread

The meme largely evolved within TikTok comment sections from late July to late August 2025. It's unknown where many of the exploited and recaptioned variations were first shared.

However, on August 5th, 2025, a TikToker named @__starr__2 shared a recaptioned version of the meme in the comment section of TikToker^[3] @flatmccheese's video, which instead read, "Our brains are growing."

On September 24th, X^[4] user @KharyAdams6 used the image to quote-tweet a post that referenced him. It read, "Any truth to Michigan flipping Khary Adams?" He attached the Our Brains Are Shrinking image as a reaction to the tweet, gaining over 4,000 likes in three weeks. The image he used had a watermark, showing that it was downloaded from a TikTok comment.

On October 14th, 2025, X^[5] user @sevenkibibytes tweeted the original YouTube thumbnail, captioning it, "This might just be top 3 most useful reaction images," gaining over 90,000 likes in a day.

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

External References