Posted on 11/05/2004 5:48:10 PM PST by gobucks
- snip ... Drs. Larry Gross and Michael Morgan made headlines when they found that television did not just impair academic achievement, it retarded intelligence. They discovered that the more television tenth graders watched, the lower they scored on IQ tests. The inverse relationship between IQ and television watching held even after the researchers controlled for socio-economic status, sex, and family size.64
The drop in IQ scores was large and consistent, and it could not be attributed to television attracting an abundance of children from lower socio-economic groups or crowded families. "It is extremely unlikely that the association between viewing and [low] IQ scores is spurious," they concluded.65
Although data trickled in throughout the late 1970s, the dam finally burst in 1980 when the California State Board of Education became interested in the television question and decided to launch a thorough investigation. That spring it distributed a comprehensive questionnaire to more than half a million sixth and twelfth graders, evaluating writing, reading, and arithmetic skills, work habits, family profiles, and television viewing patterns.
The astonishing results caught the attention not only of research psychologists, but also (for the first time since television research began) the popular press. The New York Times reported:
A California survey indicates that the more a student watches television, the worse he does in school. Wilson Riles, California schools superintendent, said Thursday that no matter how much homework the students did, how intelligent they were, or how much money their parents earned, the relationship between television and test scores was practically identical. Based on the survey, Mr. Riles concluded that, for educational purposes, television "is not an asset and it ought to be turned off."66
The survey was repeated the following year, and statisticians and psychologists performed even more detailed analyses of the data. Their reports shocked parents and educators alike. Students from households with no television set in the living room earned an average reading score of 74% correct, versus 69% correct for students who had TV sets in the living room.67
Children from upper socio-economic strata were even more negatively affected than those from the middle class or lower class.68 Even one hour of television viewing a day reduced achievement scores, and every additional hour of viewing made things worse.69 It made no difference whether parents discussed the programs afterward with their children,70 whether children chose their own programs or parents chose for them,71 or what sort of programming children watched.72 Across the board, even small amounts of television viewing hurt academic achievement.
Five Paths to Cognitive Damage
In the wake of the California surveys, researchers began to ask why exposure to the stimulating and potentially enlightening content of television should retard achievement and IQ.
Even more confusing, studies revealed that television reduced educational aspirations. These studies demonstrated that, even though TV programs portrayed an overabundance of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, the more television children watched, the less time they wanted to spend in school.
The effect was especially pronounced among adolescents who, as they watched television, lowered not only their educational aspirations but also their professional hopes. The more TV a child watched, the lower status the job he eventually wanted to pursue.73 Something about the medium seemed to undermine whatever positive content television offered. Five explanations emerged.
First, Harvard investigators confirmed that television ate up time children would otherwise have used to study or read for pleasure. They found, for instance, that children from homes with no television were 11% more likely to do homework on weekdays and 23% more likely to do homework on Sundays.74
Professor George Comstock of Syracuse University, arguably the leading scholar in the study of television, wrote in 1999, "Learning to read is often hard work for a child, whereas television viewing is comparatively undemanding. Children are certainly tempted to watch television instead of mastering reading, and those who succumb will be permanently impaired scholastically."75
In a spontaneous experiment in 1982, a New Jersey elementary school announced a "No TV Week." According to the New York Times report of the event, "Students in every class started spending more time reading books and talking to their friends and families."76 Two years later the entire city of Farmington, Connecticut voluntarily gave up TV for one month.
When Wall Street Journal reporters interviewed Farmington residents, both adults and children most often mentioned reading as the activity they used to fill the newly available hours.77 Children who do not practice reading find themselves "impaired scholastically," they do not enjoy school, and, recognizing how much preparatory schooling the elite professions demand, they scale down their aspirations.
A second way that the medium itself depresses achievement and IQ (and perhaps thus aspiration) is by making children sleepy.
Not only do children stay up past their bedtimes watching television, a team at Brown University found that children's sleep onset time was prolonged when they watched television anytime during the previous day or evening, producing shortened sleep duration and daytime sleepiness. The researchers suggested that at bedtime children conjure forth "excessively violent and/or stimulating" television scenes viewed in the last 24 to 48 hours. Thus, even children who went to bed on time were less alert if they had watched television the previous day.78
Marie Winn, a Wall Street Journal columnist, discovered another way television makes young children overtired.
She writes: Today parents do not "work" to keep the nap. Instead, with relief in sight second only to the relief they feel when their child is asleep at night, parents work on their young children to encourage them to watch television for reliable periods of time, a far easier job than working on a child to have a nap.79
Third, television's quick cuts alleviate the need to concentrate. George Comstock explains, "The pacing of much television suppresses impulse control and the ability to attend to the slower pace of schooling."80 New York University's Neil Postman reports that the average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, "so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see."81
Robert MacNeil, executive editor and co-anchor of the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, writes that the idea "is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement. You are required to pay attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more than a few seconds at a time."82
In the famous 1854 debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, Douglas led off with a three-hour opening statement, which Lincoln took four hours to rebut. During the televised presidential debates of 1987, each candidate took five minutes to address questions like "What is your policy in Central America?" before his opponent launched into a sixty-second rebuttal.83 This sort of parody is as intellectually taxing a presentation as anyone will see on television.
Since our children sit passively while the television dances, their ability to become deeply involved with books, school teachers, and other less frenetic sources of wisdom -- their ability to think -- atrophies. It should be no wonder that they abandon books, manifest lower intelligence quotients, fail to achieve academically, and have depressed professional aspirations.
Fourth, television impedes imagination. A study of gifted fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, included in the Surgeon General's report, shows that watching a range of television shows - from cartoons to "educational television" -- depresses the students' subsequent creativity scores.84 Commenting on experiments in which children went on television "diets," researchers at the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry write:
Experience has shown that children who cease watching television do play in ways clearly suggesting the use of an imaginary world. Resuming their viewing, the children decrease this kind of play. Research findings also suggest that children who are light television viewers report significantly more imaginary playmates than those who are heavy viewers.
Harvard professors Dorothy Singer and Jerome Singer discovered at least one mechanism by which television corrodes creativity: Viewers never need to conjure up an image. "Children accustomed to heavy television viewing process both the auditory and the visual cues afforded by that medium simultaneously," they write, "and may become lax in generating their own images" when reading or listening to a story.85
A fifth explanation emerged from the work of Harvard University Professor T. Berry Brazelton. Brazelton hooked newborn babies up to electroencephalographs and then exposed them to a flickering light source similar to a television but with no images.
Fifteen minutes into their exposure, the babies stopped crying and produced sleep patterns on the EEG, even though their eyes were still open and observing the light.86 Brazelton's experiment revealed that the medium itself, with no content, acts directly on the brain to suppress mental activity.
The Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry confirmed Brazelton's finding in 1982. They reported that the brain waves generated while watching even the most exciting shows were those of low attention states. The researchers found that while subjects viewed television, "output of alpha rhythms increased, indicating they were in a passive state, as if they were just sitting in the dark."87
Every activity a child engages in during his busy day refines some set of skills. Reading is practice; writing is practice; sports is practice; engaging in fantasy games is practice; and interacting with people is practice. All these activities in some way help prepare a child for the challenges of adult life. Television is also practice, but not for any activity. Television is practice for inactivity. When children watch television they are practicing sleeping - often for hours every day. One does not need a Ph.D. to realize that this could have all sorts of deleterious effects on cognitive development and later aspirations.
***snip***
The fourth and perhaps most insidious link between television and obesity was discovered in 1993. Psychologists and epidemiologists at the University of Tennessee and Memphis State University monitored metabolic rates in eight- to twelve-year-old children under two conditions: lying down in a dark room, and sitting up watching television. In every case, the child's metabolic rate while sitting and watching television was far lower than his metabolic rate while lying down in the dark. Watching television is worse than doing nothing.
Equally surprising, the effect of the TV session on metabolic rate persisted after the session for at least the length of time the child had watched television. That is, a 25-minute TV session depressed metabolic rate not only during television viewing but also for at least 25 minutes after viewing had ended.105
The Tennessee study has two astounding implications: First, since TV slows metabolism, the same child, eating the same types and quantities of food and participating in the same amount of activity, could remain healthy or become obese depending on how long he is exposed to television each day.
Second, since metabolism remains depressed even after the TV session ends, a child who watches television gains more weight from food eaten even when he is not watching television, and will have more difficulty burning off excess fat, than children who do not watch TV.
***snip***
A second reason parents give in to TV is that it is such an effective babysitter. Raising good children is tough. Really tough. It demands creativity, endurance, and especially patience. It demands time and commitment, and more time. For any normal person, the challenge can be daunting.
TV provides what seems to be an easy way out. Jack Gould, the New York Times' first television critic, thus observed, "Children's hours on television admittedly are an insidious narcotic for the parent. With the tots fanned out on the floor in front of the receiver, a strange if wonderful quiet seems at hand."123 With the click of a switch, our parenting responsibilities seem to drop to making meals, doing laundry, and handling bedtime.
***snip
Of course, television is not the only threat to our children's development. It is but one especially noxious example of the sort of danger we are now capable of identifying and avoiding. We might also detect problematic aspects of Walkmans, Gameboys, and computer games. Even media like the internet take on a different appearance when viewed from this perspective. Each of these educational challenges demands our attention.
Now, our job is to muster the willpower -- and the love -- to take a courageous stand for our own sake and for the sake of our children.
chronic understimulus plus synaptic pruning = loss of intellectual capacity
easy math, and I have been saying it for years.
The "campfire effect" has been recognized and documented for many years.
In fact, someone playing around in 6502 assembly language on one of the original (late 70's) Apple ][s wrote a screensaver-like graphics progream which duplicated the effect electronically. He named the program, "Electric Fire"...
But what does FR do to the IQ?
(hint Bush's 5% majority is part of it)
Dare we say it frees one from the shackles of the MSM.
DUH.................
This article says that watching TV makes you stupid. This might be wrong and the opposite true:
Stupid people like TV more than smart people do. The test results would look exactly the same if this were the case.
TV and stupidity are correlated but this does not mean that TV causes stupidity. Stupidity might instead cause TV-watching.
"(Welfare is your friend, no need to succeed, competition is bad.)"
That doesn't even scratch the surface ...; we once had the cord on the TV cut for a year in my house. It was a different house.
Then, the Buckeyes got good again .... and oh well..
"I turned my TV off 8 years ago."
WOW.
Thanks for the ping to this informative article.
There was a marvelous book about television, and its impact upon both adults and children: socially, intellectually, congnitively, and morally - written by a Catholic priest s ome years back, whose names escapes me.
It was called: "Air Waves from Hell".
The title said it all.
TV is responsible fo the gross lack of critical thining faculties in younger people, as well as in the acquisition and use of what we might call common sense.
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