Five Paths to Cognitive Damage

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.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.

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. 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.”

-Simple To Remember: The Truth About Television