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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Much has been written about TV being a passive stimulus for the brain with hypothesis being that the lack of active stimulus causes atrophy of the brain. Reading doesn't have the same effect because the brain has to actively process the written glyphs to language and abstract concept so there's more processing happening than when you're just watching something.

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I've always thought that the the difference may actually be the reverse, in the fact that reading provides less information (and requires less input processing). The reader has to fill in all the gaps using their imagination, which seems like a more active mental process then the more "automatic" input processing even if such input processing may be more mentally complex. Arguably, you're actively processing much more information watching TV. Your brain is interpreting both sounds (usually a complex mix of language, music, and other natural and natural sounds), as well as as stream of rapidly changing and complex visual information. In both cases the viewer/reader still has to interpret and process the more abstract "story" elements, but in the case of the reader they are also constructing mental images/sounds/scenes as part of that process, as opposed to just consuming them. So while the TV viewer may be processing more information, they are doing so passively and their brain is mainly focusing on that passive automatic process. The reader is "exercising" their mental capabilities more as they have to fill in more gaps using their imaginations.

Does this at all depend on the type of show? I find when watching programming with a lot of ambiguity (mysteries, procedurals, etc) my brain is very active trying to anticipate or think back to connect dots to follow what's happening. Compare that to spectacle programming like sports/drama/reality shows where everything is happening onscreen.

I wonder also about foreign shows where you are forced to read while the action is in progress.

And then combine that: I can watch reality shows with my wife and feel no real change in energy, but then we watch something like "Dark" (subtitled and very mystery-box format) and I feel exhausted by the end of the episode.

That all makes sense. There are some kinds of TV/movies where viewing is more mentally engaging. Mysteries, deep sci-fi or documentaries, anything where you are imagining and/or trying to understand aspects outside of the audio-visual experience. I was mostly just saying that in broad strokes that the most passively consumed written story still requires some 'active' imagination, where-as viewing a lot of TV/movies does not seem to.

I think that depends on the viewer. e.g. One could watch tv news passively accepting everything as fact OR watch the news while trying to understand what the agenda of the news program is.

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