Does Watching TV Really Make You Dumb? - By: Larry Mondello

TV makes you dumb. But it’s oh-so-good nonetheless. And therein lays the problem. The “boob-tube” is aptly named. I heard this guy being interviewed the other day who said that his really good friend was a writer for a TV crime drama on a major network. He said his friend was reprimanded by his superiors for writing plots and dialog that were too complicated and required too much of the viewer’s full attention. He was ordered to make his writing much less complex dish-washing viewing. In other words, make the plots and dialogs easy enough to follow for a person to be capable of following it while washing the dishes. Okay, so I think that says it all. A lot of mainstream TV is seriously dumbed down. It is purposefully made for multi-tasking. In fact, I’m watching TV right now as I write this, seriously. But does it make you dumber? I sometimes get envisage the television set silently and invisibly sucking brain cells and synapses out of my brain the minute I switch it on. I imagine that the longer I watch, the more of my brain matter is methodically extracted. I guess this is just a fantasy, but I really do believe it does indeed make you dumber. The Ways TV Watching Makes You Dumber •TV puts you in a mild trance-like state where your brain shuts down and is left unchallenged (I’m pretty sure there have been studies that have shown that TV does have a hypnotic affect on the brain) •It’s a passive activity, non-interactive, so watching TV is something that is being done to you, not with you, again leaving you completely unchallenged. •It efficiently and all-too-often takes the place of activities that could potentially expand our intelligence, such as conversing, reading, or project undertakings •Television is intimately tied to advertising and consumerism, so the goal of most programs is to promote capitalism (through commercials and actual program content), and not to represent reality. TV often distorts reality and manipulates meanings in a way that benefits advertisers. Since we have a tendency to believe what we see on TV , our minds are susceptible to being influenced in a way that benefits advertisers and promotes the goals of consumerism, which is often at odds with intelligence. •TV pushes upon us the erroneous mindset that if we only buy a certain product or service, we’ll be happy. Furthermore, and even more damaging is that this implies that if we are not currently satisfied or happy, then there must be something wrong with us. This is a horrible state of affairs, because as the Buddha so elegantly put it, life is suffering. •In George Leonard’s book Mastery, Leonard explains that TV shapes our thinking in a way that makes us believe that the outcome is more important than the process, that everything can be achieved, resolved or wrapped up within a specified and short period or time. This is a terrible misrepresentation of reality. Life simply does not work this way. Most things aren’t black and white. And most things that are worthwhile do not take a half hour or hour to achieve. He explains that both TV shows and commercials present viewers with an unrealistic rhythm of life where a problems are encountered and then resolved by the end of the commercial or show, and that it is one climax after another. So watching TV distorts our perception of reality, which makes you less intelligently equipped to deal with the real world. •Believe it or not, you actually spend more energy doing nothing than watching TV. You do less thinking and fidgeting when watching television than when just sitting there doing nothing, thus expending less energy. So watching TV turns you into a sort of zombie. No surprise there. The problem is that TV often feels so good. It’s the ultimate in laziness. You don’t have to do a thing, it’s done for you and to you without having to put in any effort. You don’t have to participate in life at all when watching TV. It allows you to escape life, avoid your problems and numb your brain. In all these ways, TV is truly like a drug. And those who put people down for abusing alcohol or drugs but then go on to watch too much TV are simply being hypocritical. I remember when I was a child, I was hooked on TV much to the chagrin of my dad, who is the intellectual type and has always known the dangers of TV . So he handed down a new law that I had to live by. I think it was that I was allowed 2 hours of TV a day and no more. Every time I went over my allotted 2 hours, he took .50 cents out of my allowance. Unfortunately, all that did has made me appreciate TV even more as an adult, and sometimes I catch myself watching way too much on a daily basis. Child Development and TV And I have a child on the way now. How am I going to manage and regulate his TV viewing? How should I? I recently read that Baby Einstein, a TV video series that is purported to be good for children’s development is actually bad for them. In the latest study on the effects of popular videos such as the “Baby Einstein” and “Brainy Baby” series, researchers found that these videos may be doing more harm than good. And they may actually delay language development in toddlers. Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, both at the University of Washington, the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form. “The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew,” says Christakis. “These babies scored about 10% lower on language skills than infants who had not watched these videos.” (from http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1650352,00.html). Interactivity is paramount for the development of babies. Face time with people trumps passive TV watching every time. We have a brand new HD LCD flat screen that is huge. I absolutely love it and it has inevitably increased my television consumption. It’s like one side of our living room has been transformed into a massive wall of entertainment. It calls to me at all hours of the day and night and I can’t get enough of it. How on Earth am I going to be able to limit my child’s TV watching when I love it and have a huge new HD TV ?! But I really think TV makes you dumb, so I guess I am going to have to be strong and seriously limit my child’s viewing.