The critical side of your brain is the left. As you read this you are making judgements, passing opinions and coming to conclusions which take the form of beta brain wave activity. These are the waves activated when you begin to use that left hand side, the center of logical human communication and analysis.
Researchers have found that once the television set is switched on, that left hand side and all it’s faculties tends to switch off. Instead the image from television go straight to the right brain. The switch from beta to alpha waves shows this. Alpha brain waves are the ones we associate with meditation and sleep. By no means does this mean that we are not taking the information in – we are taking it all in, we are just not able to critically evaluate it as we would with information coming from other sources.
Video Games have been shown to lower brain activity to below that of the Delta frequency!
The TV screen flicker rate alone is known to induce mesmerized states in people. This flicker rate is the rate at which the screen image is updated, generally about 50 or 60 times a second. DARPA is a US military funded research organization. One of their endeavors concerned developing TV flicker rates that could be played whenever a mesmerized state was required in a given section of the population.
Endorphins are released by overexposure to light. The radiant light from televisions causes a release of endorphins. Researcher Herbert Krugman showed that while viewers are watching television, the right hemisphere is twice as active as the left, a neurological anomaly. The crossover from left to right releases a surge of the body’s natural opiates: endorphins, which include beta-endorphins and enkephalins. Endorphins are structurally identical to opium and its derivatives (morphine, codeine, heroin, etc.). Activities that release endorphins (also called opioid peptides) are usually habit-forming (we rarely call them addictive). These include cracking knuckles and strenuous exercise. External opiates act on the same receptor sites (opioid receptors) as endorphins, so there is little difference between the two.
Even casual television viewers experience such opiate-withdrawal symptoms if they stop watching TV for a prolonged period of time. An article from South Africa’s Eastern Province Herald (October 1975) described two experiments in which people from various socio-economic milieus were asked to stop watching television. In one experiment, several families volunteered to turn off their TV’s for just one month. The poorest family gave in after one week, and the others suffered from depression, saying they felt as though they had “lost a friend.” In the other experiment, 182 West Germans agreed to kick their television viewing habit for a year, with the added bonus of payment. None could resist the urge longer than six months, and over time all of the participants showed the symptoms of opiate-withdrawal: increased anxiety, frustration, and depression.
Herbert Krugman’s research proved that watching television numbs the left brain and leaves the right brain to perform all cognitive duties. This has some harrowing implications for the effects of television on brain development and health. For one, the left hemisphere is the critical region for organizing, analyzing, and judging incoming data. The right brain treats incoming data uncritically, and it does not decode or divide information into its component parts.
Researches into the effects of TV have warned that children under two years of age shouldn’t watch any at all due to the negative impact on various areas of a child’s development which include skills of observation, speech, hearing, depth perception, reading ability, inducing attention deficit type behavior, a lack of motor skills due to immobile viewing habits and so on. TV is a wholly inappropriate and ineffectual teaching tool. It’s pointless having debates lamenting the demise of intellectual ability and endeavor when intellects have never even had a chance to naturally and properly grow due to the numbing effects of television on children particularly.
Conversely its worth noting that radio has the opposite effect and actually develops a higher rate of concentration, the audio forcing people to be stimulated to visualize what they hear. Reading of course further extends the ability to concentrate and critically examine information over longer periods.
Even the style of TV production these days is geared toward an amphetamine-like addiction people have with regard to information reception. The cadence of scene changes, that is the rate and beat at which images are changing on the screen is very fast and further inclines the mind under development to be unable to concentrate for long periods on long pieces of textual information. Average rates of attention span are down from a few decades ago to mere minutes where once it was more than one hour for deep critical thinking.
Studies have linked quality of life to high vocabulary rates which heavy TV consumption impacts negatively. If you have good communication skills you are better able to express the world you live in and how you define it and if this is a yardstick to judge by then for many of our countries’ young folk the world must be very banal indeed. A poor vocabulary means you have a myopic existence, you have a tunnel-like perception of this great world and your quality of life is adversely effected. Just listening to pop stars in particular, the idols of the young, can make one cringe with embarrassment at the vacuous and inarticulate clap-trap they come out with.
We live in a world today where people’s personalities are formed by unreal things: TV, the music industry, video games, movies, the effects of drugs (be that of the recreational or psychotropic variety). Virtual reality also dominates the interests of a lot of people. (Source)
