Television viewing and cognitive decline in older age
I am surprised that 3.5 hours <i>a day</i> is the threshold where decreased performance begins, as in my little life bubble that seems like an abnormally large amount of TV watching. However Wikipedia[1] tells me the average USA &quot;consumer&quot; is watching 4 hours <i>a day</i>! Yikes.<p>To a layman like me this seems like great research. A lot of effort was put in to draw a rigorous conclusion about the effects of TV watching on some aspect of mental performance. I just read <i>Amusing Ourselves to Death</i> though, and I find myself compelled to be a lot more dramatic about the negatives of TV watching, on the late author&#x27;s behalf.<p>Yes it&#x27;s pretty bad that (excessive) TV watching literally damages your cognitive ability to some degree, but I would say (and please point me to research) that before that damage starts to show it&#x27;s already near devastated your personal &#x27;knowledge-base&#x27;. To try and paraphrase Postman, the content on TV is either trivial or non-trivial but delivered in such a way as to keep you from holding onto any significance, meaning, or theory. TV as a medium is terribly fractured (commercial breaks, &#x27;Now..This&#x27; segues) and fundamentally visual (rather than typographic). Human minds thrive in connectivity, interrelation, and continuity. Our minds thrive in the typographic world. At his most polemic, Postman argues that TV at is worst is totally incoherent, conferring basically no knowledge whatsoever. A person&#x27;s mind might still performance just fine in tests, but having been starved of knowledge it is practically unintelligent.<p>Think also of the opportunity cost. At an average of 4 hours a day, as USA &#x27;consumer&#x27; watches 1460 hours of TV a year. An average person reads 200-250 words per minute. Taking the upper bound, and the average non-fiction book as 50,000 words. They could finish that average non-fiction book in 4.16 hours. So, they could be reading <i>almost 1 book a day for a whole year instead</i>. Now, that napkin-math result seems implausible to me, but imagine if I was off by an order of magnitude. Say this person could read 35 non-fiction books in a year if that wholesale swapped TV for reading non-fiction. 35 non-fiction books at ~42 hours per book. They would be enormously enriched by this alternative behaviour.<p>As an extreme (but unfortunately not uncommon) example, instead of getting all red in the face hearing about Socialism coming to the USA from Fox news, our dear average USA &#x27;consumer&#x27; could have read <i>Das Kapital</i>, and <i>The Soul of Man Under Socialism</i>, and <i>The Road to Wigan Pier</i>, and <i>Capitalism and Freedom</i>, and <i>On Liberty</i>, and... etc etc. You get the point.<p>So yeah, I&#x27;m really onboard with the thesis of <i>Amusing Ourselves To Death</i>.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Television_consumption" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Television_consumption</a>