Scientific evidence: TV rots the brain, ruins the body

international | arts and media | other press Friday February 23, 2007 19:26 by Terence

The evidence is incontrovertible: television rots the brain and ruins the body.

Well I guess we all knew this already, but at long last we have the evidence as reported in today's Guardian of the latest research on this dangerous activity. The research is published in the academic journal Biologist by author Dr Aric Sigman.

It is probably best to quote a few of the choice paragraphs from the report.


Reviewing 35 studies in well-respected scientific and medical journals, I identified 15 biological and cognitive effects linked to levels of television exposure. There was a dose-response relationship: both the average number of hours watched and the age at which a child begins watching television are central to the association with negative effects later on.

Those effects include alterations in activity, size and consistency of skin immune cells, an independent cause of obesity, changes in the endocrine and immune system, links with premature puberty in girls, subverting brain cell development underlying attention and impulse control, reducing cerebral blood flow and brain stimulation, sleeping disorders at all ages even from passive viewing, body-fat production, abnormal glucose metabolism and new Type 2 diabetes, a possible trigger for autism, lowered metabolic rate, raised blood cholesterol and risk for cardiovascular illness and death, substantial increases in child myopia....


And just the findings that it pickles your brain...and it's not just the kids who are affected...

At the other end of the age spectrum, how much television we watch during our middle years (20-60) is now linked with the development of Alzheimer's disease. For each additional daily hour of middle-adulthood television viewing, the associated risk of Alzheimer's disease development increases. Watching television was described by the neuroscientists as "a non-intellectually stimulating activity" for brain function.


The clincker statement towards the end:

Given our sheer exposure time to this environmental factor, it is more than puzzling to consider how little awareness and action has resulted.

is surely quite obvious. Because there is so much vested interest in making money out of advertisiing and producing a non-questioning, intellectually dead mass audience there is no need to ponder why such questions have been kept firmly off the agenda.