Is this true? Is it stil relevant in today’s society of digital television and HD televisions?
I have read that this phenomenom was related to CRT tv’s, and isn’t relevant with today’s lcd and plasma televisions.
I read an article about flicker and refresh rate, relevant to the thread, but I can’t find it for the life of me.
Television never “rotted” anyone’s brains, at least not in a physical sense. It’s just what your mother used to tell you to stop you watching quite so much rubbish.
Sit through a few back-to-back episodes of Jersey Shore, though, and I offer no guarantees that brain mush will not start seeping from your ears.
The only serious health effect of televisions that I am aware of was the radiation risk. Back in the 1960s there were several batches of televisions made by GE with a misaligned shield over a certain vacuum tube inside the set. Because of this misaligned shield, these sets radiated excessive (even by 1960’s standards) amounts of X-rays, directed mostly downward at an angle. If you were sitting across the room, you were safe, but children sitting in front of the sets would definitely be exposed to high levels of X-ray radiation. The sets were all recalled, though quite a few were never found. This whole affair was widely publicized, and led to new safety rules and regulations being passed. This is where the old “color TVs are bad for you” idea mostly comes from.
Even though the problem was fixed, many people still had the idea that TVs were dangerous, and to be fair, CRT style TVs did used to emit X-rays. Improvements in tube designs cut down the amount of X-rays emitted by the CRT in the mid to late 1970s, though later CRTs did still emit some levels of X-rays.
Modern flat panel TVs do not put out any significant levels of X-rays or other radiation.
[QUOTE=your mom]
When I was your age, we had these things called books that actually stretched your imagination. That TV is going to make you turn out an uneducated dimwit.
[/QUOTE]
Fair enough.
The notion of TV rotting the brain has nothing to do with CRTs (or any other particular technology). It is a metaphor for the notion that your curiosity, your ability to think critically, and your motivation will all be degraded if you spend too much of your time passively absorbing intellectually vapid entertainment.
Is it a legitimate concern? Maybe, although people these days seem to be inclined to raise essentially the same concerns over the possible negative effects of much less mentally passive modes of entertainment that are now popular, such as surfing the web, posting on Facebook, or, playing video games. I am sure they used to say the same thing about reading novels. Plus ca change.
Back in the old days, people knew novels would rot your brain:
Those books will make your brains liquefy and pour our your ears, kid!
Does resolution, flicker and refresh rate influence the brain, while watching?
Do cut’s and pans trigger the orienting response? Does this create an unfocused mind?
Here is the source article for these claims. I don’t know if the website is nonsense or not.
It might give you a headache if you’re sensitive to that and the refresh rate is too low (60 Hz), but this is more of a problem with computer monitors). If you watch the wrong thing and have photosensitive epilepsy, you might get a seizure. That’s about it.
It mentions gamma waves when it tries to make this case, but we really don’t really know what gamma waves correlate with in the brain or our consciousness. I’d say it’s most likely nonsense.
It sounds like nonsense.