Does TV degenerate or develop the brain?

[WarlokElf]

As a minor, my elders often warned me, “You brain is going to rot, you watch so much television.” I’ve also heard this opinion stated elsewhere.

Do you believe this, or is there any truth to this? I believe that television is not much different than reading a book. Your brain must interpret incoming signals and turn them into meaningful thoughts, ain’t that a workout? There are visual learners and auditory learners, just alternate methods of learning.

BTW, this debate is merely about the physical act of watching TV. I’m not debating about the content of what’s on TV.
To be fair, I’m sure there is something to be learned from Fox’s “Who wants to marry a millionaire midget? 2”

[wonky]

The difference between reading a book and watching TV is that you are forced to create the images you “see” when you read. It’s an active process of your imagination. You are taking symbols and turning them into pictures.

With TV, you are simply receiving the pictures, and then throwing in some sound to further explain the images. You don’t need to do much participation.

I think there was a study that said that your brain is less active while watching TV than while doing anything else, including sleeping. I could be remembering that incorrectly.

Julie

[dangermom]

Watching TV is far less active than reading; everything is given to you. Reading requires both ‘decoding’ and a lot of active mental imaging. TV is a very passive activity, requiring almost no effort on the watcher’s part. Brain waves during TV-watching tend to be very low and passive, I understand.

In very small children, TV does little more than engage the ‘reptilian’ part of the brain near the brain stem. You might as well flash lights at them, almost. It is both so frenzied (esp. in much of children’s programming) and so passive that it frequently results in a weird state in which the child has a high pulse and adrenaline flowing but is also sitting very still–a sort of paralyzed ‘fight or flight’ reaction. Many people have observed that children often are whiny, fractious, or otherwise ill-tempered after watching TV and report that moods improve as TV-watching lessens. (I can also attest to this.) Many feel that it also tends to encourage a short attention span.

Something similar can be said of many adults. Some feel that they are wasting time, or even that TV is fueling depressive moods, but can’t seem to turn it off, either. It can be a big time-waster, taking the place of more active interests.

Some people seem to be vulnerable to an “addiction” to the TV, where they feel a strong need for it and get somewhat panicky at the thought of losing it. Children are also more likely to do this. While plenty of people can take or leave TV, others seem to be unable to wrench themselves away.

OTOH, TV can be entertaining, educational, and all sorts of things. There are tons of concepts that are far easier to learn with a few minutes of TV than with an entire book. As with most things, the key is moderation. TV is usually the mental equivalent of junk food–fun in small doses, but icky and unhealthy in large ones. I quite like TV myself, but only in small increments, and I usually have to have something else to do, or I feel useless. FWIW, I do kind of wish that I had more interesting childhood memories than every episode of Scooby-Doo.

You may enjoy The plug-in drug, a rather opinionated book on the subject, or one of the many others out there. Endangered minds is another one and focuses more on children and education.

[dangermom]

Oh. I should also mention, in relation to the question “Does TV degenerate or develop the brain?” that children do not learn language from the TV. They seem to need face-to-face real-person interaction. So a small child from a home where the parents don’t speak a lot, but do have the TV on all the time, will usually be very behind in language development. Sesame Street or other progams will not come anywhere near to actually teaching a child real language skills. So in that sense, TV can contribute to non-development of the brain.

Enjoy!
–Dangermom, whose TV is known as “The eye of Sauron”

[Quint_Essence]

tv is just a medium like paper or radio, or whatever.
What you get from it is based on what is delivered. If you watch nthing but sitcoms then you probably won’t get much benefit. But a tv is capable of giving you a lot more than entertainment.
Reading a book can be just as pointless as watching a sitcom. It is all a matter of what you are reading or watching.
While the whole visualizing thing with books may have some merit, Television can have the advantage of clearly showing you something that might not be so easy to visualize.
Anyway my point is CONTENT is what matters, not the medium used to present it.

[biqu]

@Quint Essence

tv is just a medium like paper or radio, or whatever.
What you get from it is based on what is delivered. If you watch nthing but sitcoms then you probably won’t get much benefit. But a tv is capable of giving you a lot more than entertainment.
Reading a book can be just as pointless as watching a sitcom. It is all a matter of what you are reading or watching.
While the whole visualizing thing with books may have some merit, Television can have the advantage of clearly showing you something that might not be so easy to visualize.
Anyway my point is CONTENT is what matters, not the medium used to present it.

In the spirit of Marshall McLuhan, who was best known for his pun “the medium is the massage”, the founders of the technorealism movement caution us against such casual dismissal of the effects that new media have on our way of digesting the millions of sensory inputs we receive every day.

Technologies are not neutral.

A great misconception of our time is the idea that technologies are completely free of bias – that because they are inanimate artifacts, they don’t promote certain kinds of behaviors over others. In truth, technologies come loaded with both intended and unintended social, political, and economic leanings. Every tool provides its users with a particular manner of seeing the world and specific ways of interacting with others. It is important for each of us to consider the biases of various technologies and to seek out those that reflect our values and aspirations.

For a further exposition of these ideas, I recommend David Shenk’s book Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut.

[blowero]

In Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Jerry Mander argued that T.V. is most definitely not a neutral medium. As the title suggests, he goes so far as to say that television is inherently evil to the point of being beyond redemption.

[Aeschines]

TV　tends to turn one into a neutral, passive zombie. I much recommend the reading of classic novels, such as Wurthering Heights by Emily Brontesaurus.

[dal_timgar]

I think you need to specify what part of the brain is being stimulated in what way.

TV can give you plenty of visual stimulation with no INTELLECTUAL stimulation. Like having a diet of candy for your brain. I have found all the computer generated junk annoying to watch. Sometimes I turn on the TV for the news but listen thru a speaker in another room while working on my computer. There is something about motion that automatically draws your eyes to it. It is wired into our nervous system.

I grew up with black and white TV. I bet color is much more psychologically effective for advertisers.

There is great variations in books tho. Some books are nice stories but don’t put any meat on your brain.

compare

THE SCREWING OF THE AVERAGE MAN by David Hapgood

to

FREE TO CHOOSE by Milton Friedman

Dal Timgar

@WarlokElf

As a minor, my elders often warned me, “You brain is going to rot, you watch so much television.” I’ve also heard this opinion stated elsewhere.

Do you believe this, or is there any truth to this? I believe that television is not much different than reading a book. Your brain must interpret incoming signals and turn them into meaningful thoughts, ain’t that a workout? There are visual learners and auditory learners, just alternate methods of learning.

BTW, this debate is merely about the physical act of watching TV. I’m not debating about the content of what’s on TV.
To be fair, I’m sure there is something to be learned from Fox’s “Who wants to marry a millionaire midget? 2”

[Optihut]

@dangermom

Oh. I should also mention, in relation to the question “Does TV degenerate or develop the brain?” that children do not learn language from the TV. They seem to need face-to-face real-person interaction. So a small child from a home where the parents don’t speak a lot, but do have the TV on all the time, will usually be very behind in language development. Sesame Street or other progams will not come anywhere near to actually teaching a child real language skills. So in that sense, TV can contribute to non-development of the brain.

I know that you meant little children learning their first language, but I am the living proof of learning a secondary language by watching TV: I basically grew up on Transformers and G.I.Joe, furthermore I have played computergames from the age of 6 onward - and that’s pretty much how I learnt to speak English. So my hypothesis is this: You don’t learn an additional language in a classroom, you learn it by being exposed to it (obviously direct contact with native speakers would be best, that’s a given, but TV, books and computer games are invaluable as well).

As for TV in general - I don’t think you can give an answer without taking into consideration the content. If people would watch Teletubbies, which seem to promote stupidity and baby-speak, and other similar formats, I am convinced that this would have a negative influence on their mental capabilities. If on the other hand, you’d watch the news and reports, I think there would be a positive influence.

One of the big accomplishments of TV is, imho, the unification of the language: Since news anchors are required to speak in a proper language, local dialects have been pushed back to a certain extent. I for one regard that as a good thing.

[Stripey]

In this era, the United States is fighting a war of information. Everything happens in the nation and the world is filtered through the American media machine and what comes out is rarely the truth. It’s propaganda.

Watch ten minutes of network TV. (read: Free TV to all who own a set)
In ten minutes, you’ll get bombarded with christian morality, carefully moderated/edited/fabricated news to get you angry at the arabs and Bush at the same time, and, possibly worst of all, a Super-Size dose of American consumerism: the root of all greed and crime in this country.

What does TV teach us? That we need stuff. That having a big expensive car means we’re better than those who don’t. That we need designer clothes like J-Lo(w) and that Timberlake character wear. We need big, doped-out houses like we see on MTV’s Cribs. We need fresh mexican cuisine, prepared in sixteen seconds, piping hot to the window of your Honda civic. TV makes us think that working fourteen hour days and taking six days of vacation a year is worth it, because we have all this neet stuff. But all this stuff is destroying our values by making parents less involved in the lives of their children. How many parents plop the kids in front of the TV for Sesame Street, thinly veiled as educational TV, it bombards kids with rapid fire skits of information on how to be a good boy/girl. The pace is hypnotic. Even for an adult, leaving the TV on Sesame Street for a even just a few seconds can result in a minute or three spent staring at puppets trying to teach us the alphabet. I know EXACTLY where my ADD came from.

It’s just as bad for the working-man. He comes home from a job he hates and wants to do nothing. TV has him covered. Shows are designed specifically to be self-referential, and require no thinking whatsoever. Any particularly tricky twists in a prime-time drama are convinently laid out for the viewer with a soliliquy (sp?) or a short dialogue between characters. TV doesn’t have to be stupid. Look at British TV, or even many Anime series. Specifically, from my experience, a show called Furi Kuri (also spelled Fooly Cooly in the US) is amazingly crafted, and the dialogue and characters are intelligent and deep while the show remains lighthearted, exciting, and funny.

Anyway, I guess my point is not that TV is bad, but that American TV is bad.

Jess

[Optihut]

@Stripey

Anyway, I guess my point is not that TV is bad, but that American TV is bad.

But that is also too broad a brush to paint. Furthermore it isn’t even relevant to the OP; and I happen to disagree with that assessment, most TV shows I watch are American shows

[Spiff]

T.V. embiggens the brain.

[Hammerstein]

Your brain must interpret incoming signals and turn them into meaningful thoughts, ain’t that a workout? There are visual learners and auditory learners, just alternate methods of learning.

True. And, from that it would seem logical that TV does in fact help the brain.

However, as previously expressed, I think the opposite is the case. Yes, you are getting incoming signals. But the medium of television is meant to be a ‘fast’ medium, where there is almost a sensory overload. It is meant to push image after image into the mind, and, as a result, creatives a passive thought process. It makes us think, perhaps, but it is passively - just the absorbance of information and minimal processing. There is no decision making, no logic, no need for higher-level brain activity. Perhaps, at best, there is some sort of recording device to store information taken from programs from the History Channel or what not. Yet, this is hardly adequate to stimulation - taking a few facts from here and there and remembering them.

In other words, TV would seem to develop the brain, but, in fact, just encourages the opposite - the passive acceptance a medium. If this is applied to the world, it could be dangerous.

In contrast, reading or other ‘slower’ mediums can be reviewed and, at their best, demand thinking. Even serious music, in contrast with its visual brother, lacks the same passive nature; there is actual interpretation and understanding and examination and critical listening that can be done. The same is rarely said of TV. Who has heard of critical watching? Unless it’s a movie, I’ve never heard it done.

I suspect the terminology used in this post resembles a book, but I’m afraid I can remember neither the book nor the exact terms. My memory poses that they were ‘warm’ and ‘cold’, but feel free to correct me on that point.

[Cat_Whisperer]

@Hammerstein

<snip> there is actual interpretation and understanding and examination and critical listening that can be done. The same is rarely said of TV. Who has heard of critical watching? Unless it’s a movie, I’ve never heard it done.
<snip>

Actually, my husband and I watch tv fairly critically. We’re not really your average couple, though - he has taken university courses in analyzing entertainment, and I’m a lifelong learner and a born anarchist. We don’t seem to be very susceptible to the opiate of the masses.

Stripey, I agree with your thought processes, but I don’t think you’ve taken it quite far enough. In my opinion, the message from tv and ads is not just that you ‘need’ stuff, but that you’re deficient in so many ways, which is why you ‘need’ all this stuff. The idea of enough or being satisfied is anathema to the marketing/consumer world - happy, satisfied people aren’t huge consumers. They buy what they actually need, not what they want.

[i_am_a_scientist]

This is a slight hijack, but fairly on topic:

About 10 years ago I read an article in Time Magazine by Robin Wright (I can’t find a link, a google search yields too many Robin Wright Penn links to muddle through). She suggested that one of the more pernicious aspects of TV is that the viewer subconsciously begins to set standards for his life to the ones he sees on the television, standards that real life can’t live up to. Your kids aren’t as cute as Dakota Fanning, your wife doesn’t look like that woman on Raymond, your friends aren’t as cool as, well, Friends. The result is a dissatisfaction with your actual life b/c the players can’t possibly live up to the standards set by the made-up superhot/clever characters on television It was a very insightful article, I’ll do some more digging to see if I can unearth a link.

The remedy is, of course, to limit programming to shows depicting ugly, unfunny, wretched people with dead-end jobs and homely, stupid children (Enter Married with Children joke here)

[dangermom]

Coming in again to pick up an old post…

I know that you meant little children learning their first language, but I am the living proof of learning a secondary language by watching TV: I basically grew up on Transformers and G.I.Joe, furthermore I have played computergames from the age of 6 onward - and that’s pretty much how I learnt to speak English. So my hypothesis is this: You don’t learn an additional language in a classroom, you learn it by being exposed to it (obviously direct contact with native speakers would be best, that’s a given, but TV, books and computer games are invaluable as well).

Well, I would certainly agree that exposure is the major element in learning a language. But I was indeed talking about little children, who are still having their brains profoundly shaped by what they hear. By the time you learned English from TV, your mind was already programmed for language learning, and that part can only be done in person.

So sure, you could learn a secondary language through TV, and it would probably be as good as, or possibly better, or at least a good supplement to, learning it in a classroom. It would definitely not be as good as real-life exposure and immersion–which is what I got for my second language–but many many people learn a lot of English that way.
As for content, well…I would submit that it would not be easy to get a good education through television. TV can be a great way to learn a lot of things visually, but it does not tend to be thorough or well-rounded, and if I was, say, teaching my kids about volcanoes, I would use a TV program as a part of what we learned, but not the whole thing. That is, we’d have 3 books, an experiment or two, a field trip, some talking, and one video, not 3 videos and nothing else.

I would also say that while TV may not actually degenerate your neurons, it does not help, either. Almost any other activity, usually, would require more activity from them. Watching a while lot of TV, I should think, would tend to contribute to atrophy, not development. Obviously TV can sometimes be watched critically or “actively”–but IME and in general, the more TV that is watched, the less critically it is received.

[rivulus]

@Hammerstein

Who has heard of critical watching? Unless it’s a movie, I’ve never heard it done.

Well, as a past viewer of The X-Files and other sci-fi television shows, I can attest to a certain degree of critical watching among some (although not all) fans. I joined with a group of people on the internet that enjoyed critical discussions of X-Files episodes, prompting me and others to read up on all sorts of things, from mitochondrial DNA and hanta viruses to Eschenbach’s Parzival and Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels, in the interest of understanding some of the ideas presented by the show. As a musician, I found myself writing about the effects of Mark Snow’s score for the benefit of other fans, which led to a university course that I now teach called Music and Television. Mind you, these shows are typically not mainstream television and, unfortunately, often decline to the levels of the mainstream after raising the hopes of fans hungry for intellectual involvement with a television show. But TV can provide a forum for intellectual stimulation if viewers are willing to actively engage the medium and put some effort into viewing.

[Cat_Whisperer]

I forgot my third point I meant to make, which is very similar to rivulus’. I watched a program on quantum theory a couple of months ago, which included some fantastic and very informative graphics, and I absorbed concepts in a one hour show that I hadn’t been able to grasp in any of my previous readings on the subject. Seeing the graphics showing how gravity bends around stars sticks in my mind as a real “Ohhh! Of course!” moment for me. Sometimes pictures really are worth a thousand words.

[msmith537]

It occurs to me that I send very little time actually sitting and WATCHING TV. I have it on constantly but I rarely sit there and focus on it. I’ll read, play on the computer, draw, talk on the phone or do whatever. I don’t know how people can just sit there like a lump and stare at it. I thought about getting DVR (like TiVO) but I’m barely interested in what’s on when I’m there, much less going out of my way to watch stuff that’s on when I’m not. I just like the background noise.

@i am a scientist

This is a slight hijack, but fairly on topic:
About 10 years ago I read an article in Time Magazine by Robin Wright … She suggested that one of the more pernicious aspects of TV is that the viewer subconsciously begins to set standards for his life to the ones he sees on the television, standards that real life can’t live up to. Your kids aren’t as cute as Dakota Fanning, your wife doesn’t look like that woman on Raymond, your friends aren’t as cool as, well, Friends. The result is a dissatisfaction with your actual life b/c the players can’t possibly live up to the standards set by the made-up superhot/clever characters on television …

I had heard the same thing. Too much televison does distort perception. Aside from the obvious skew in favor of the good looking, TV also portrays a disproportionate number of professionals - unless you are on FOX, everyone is a lawyer, doctor, etc. It casts certain professions in an unrealisticly glamorous light. ie Lawyers do not make $400k a year out of law school, I have yet to see a female police officer around NYC who doesn’t look like she spent the morning in Crispy Creme with her partner. TV people’s lives appear very exciting because we only see 30 minutes of it. Hell, I bet my life would look exciting if Aaron Spelling, Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Mann produced a TV series about it and took the best 30 minutes out of each week.

Too much TV (and Internet for that matter) also has an isolating effect. While you watching TV by yourself, you aren’t going out and meeting people, getting fresh air, exercising or otherwise having a real life. Probably the best thing to happen to me was going to summer camp for 4 weeks with no TV.

@i am a scientist

The remedy is, of course, to limit programming to shows depicting ugly, unfunny, wretched people with dead-end jobs and homely, stupid children (Enter Married with Children joke here)

Sounds like someone’s been watching too much FOX