Not my field - and I’m not arguing for the validity of the claim.
(I’ll confess to having conversationally repeated this apparent myth in the past, but I thought I’d picked it up from somewhere a little more trustworthy than the only sites on which I can now find it).
I grew up reading mostly romance novels from a young age, and I learned a whole lot of vocabulary that I wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to. So even if the content is questionably educational, a reader can still learn from it. I definitely learned more by reading trashy novels than people learn from watching trashy tv (Jersey Shore, Jerry Springer etc).
I don’t think it’s true that tv and movies *can’t *stimulate your brain, but reading books is an active experience. Watching a screen is a passive experience. Reading is more likely to stimulate the brain of an average reader than the television is likely to stimulate the brain of an average watcher.
Not to mention, reading also takes longer than watching. There is a growing body of evidence that tv and movies have lowered modern attention spans significantly.
I dispute this as something that’s always the case. Compare watching a good lecture to reading one of the aforementioned trashy romance novels.
Fade away and radiate.
One of my favorite quotes is, “All generalizations are false, including this one” (generally attributed to Mark Twain, but I don’t know for sure).
I’m sure my brain is getting more out of an intense documentary, TED talk, or episode of Bullshit than it’s getting out of reading Star Trek 13 by James Blish. On the other hand, my typical book reading experience is far more educational than my typical TV watching experience.
Actually, my children learned a lot about spelling from TV. From the time they were pre-lingual we always kept the closed captioning turned on. Despite caption errors, we found that it made pretty much all shows at least somewhat educational.
It’s not really up for debate. Watching anything on tv (even a scientific lecture) is a passive experience. Reading anything in a book (even trashy gratuitous sex) is an active experience. Television doesn’t require imagination in quite the same way, and a lecture being discussed on tv will be processed passively.
None of this has anything to do with whether reading a book or watching tv makes people smarter, though, so be careful of drawing any conclusions on that from what I just typed. I’m only discussing the difference between active interaction with books vs. passive media consumption with a tv. However, to expound on that a bit, studies have shown that babies get MUCH less out of watching a specific activity on tv than observing the same activity in real life.
The facial expressions and body language on movies and TV shows are performed by Hollywood actors reciting scripts written by Hollywood screen writers who read the novel of an clueless author and are directed by a Hollywood director who was hired by a Hollywood producer to make a Hollywood movie.
IMHO, it’s probably not in anyone’s best interest to put much faith in those facial expressions.
What do you mean by passive vs active? There is no such thing as passive observation, cognitively speaking.
Looking at an image on a screen vs creating a mental picture from words.
But there’s a lot more involved in watching (+ listening to) TV and in reading than just this.
Especially something like a TV lecture, where you’re mostly listening to someone talk. Perhaps it’s accompanied by illustrations, but perhaps the book version is too.
This is a bizarre claim. I can only imagine it could be true with a 300wpm typist and a trained speed-reader. Even when I could IM colleagues, anything in-depth was better talked about over the phone. Plus, we’re discussing TV, an audio AND video medium. The speed of information is many times faster than the written word alone can dream of matching.
Generally reading books is better than watching TV for stimulation of the brain. However, TV can stimulate the brain if used on a targeted basis. History, language and other programs can provide a different angle than the written word. It’s often true that a picture is worth a thousand words, so TV can be helpful if used as a supplement to reading. Just avoid TV commercials as much as possible, at least muting the volume, because they truly are brain numbing and have increasingly taken up a greater portion of broadcast time.
All you need to read is to read only Quran. Road to the true path. 
Especially Western woman do have to get it. They need a bit of Sharia law to sort out their… uhm… unmoral ways
Both require symbolic interpretation, and in fact, your typical television program is going to involve you interpreting speech, other aural facets (sound effects, music, and how they fit into the seen), observing and interpreting body motions and facial expressions, and possibly reading signs/background text and interpreting not only what they mean, but how they fit into the scene at large.
With reading you have to imagine at the very least the scene and the dialogue, but you’re not processing as much input. Not to mention while reading you have time to stop and pause, whereas in TV you have to interpret how everything going on fits into the plot RIGHT NOW.
I’m sure ultimately one is more or less active, but which one is a tricky question. TV is by no means “passive”, they both require a hefty amount of symbolic interpretation, sequential reasoning, etc. It’s just that the human brain is more attuned to listening and observing so reading seems more active since parsing and interpreting text is a more difficult cognitive process for the human brain.
Besides, people make the same “rots your brain” claim about video games (modern video games, not even stuff like Pong) as they do TV, and in comparison to books video games are a LOT more active (insert JRPG cutscene length joke here) – so clearly that can’t be the only driving factor behind the criticism.
(Yes, I know this is a sorta-zombie)
A lot of people don’t do this when they read. We’ve done a few polls on it and about half of us don’t “see” anything when we read a story. I was in my early 20s before I knew anyone did.