Television viewing and cognitive decline in older age
nature.com
nature.com
"The people who bought wine were more likely to place olives, low-fat cheese, fruits and vegetables, low-fat meat, spices, and tea in their carts. Beer drinkers, on the other hand, were more likely to reach for the chips, ketchup, margarine, sugar, ready-cooked meals, and soft drinks."
Schatzker, Mark. The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor (p. 155). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
EDIT: What I am saying is - yes, television shuts off the thinking part of your brain, but then you also don't move, don't exercise. Causation here is VERY flaky.
In these sorts of study, causality is not simple and is rarely established in one go — it is approached incrementally, as one potential factor at a time is investigated.
They made no claims for causality.
Staring at repetitive, content free crap cannot be good for your brain.
I would wager it's more of a vicious cycle, with other factors at play.
The thing that bugs me about these genres of dumb TV is that the constant attention grabbing and little dopamine hits of whatever the crisis de jure is has to have some impact.
My in-laws called me this summer genuinely concerned about thunderstorms approaching some place in Alabama. We live like 1500 miles away.
And stopped criticizing parental units over holidays for watching too many old westerns/noirs. There was an ancient Audie Murphy movie on that could be plopped into modern day anti-corporate/rich messaging but the plot was so complex it would never get made today.
"Good for your brain" is an incredibly loose criteria. I think for many definitions of that statement there's no clear evidence to to support it.
Furthermore there's a huge cultural bias towards believing that statement - which makes me even more wary of accepting it unconditionally.
News isn’t that, but where does it lie on the spectrum? I’m not saying I have proof, just presenting conjecture, and I’d love to read about research in this area.
Younger people binge-drink and watch Netlfix for hours, and can still be sharp and fit. But then activities become much more important after 30, as you've drained the gift of genes and youth.
I bet there is not a lot of info on the results of 70-year-olds playing half-life :)
Either way, I always skeptically view these studies that take two random things and tell you that they somehow directly relate to each other. Especially with humans, where the number of variables at play is nearly infinite.
Is there any scientific evidence to support that? At the MRI/brain activity level?
This is the measure that declined in heavy television watchers. It is also a task that television watching doesn't require, since recall of previous spoken words is rarely needed to understand the next video sequence.
It's also a task that I don't do well on. I do much better if the words are presented in writing. I can watch a TV show and not remember a thing about it later. It may be a way the brain has of protecting memory from being overwritten by nonsense.
Does television watching cause cognitive decline?
Does cognitive decline cause television watching?
Does some other factor cause both television watching and cognitive decline?
Knowing some people are inactive and read books doesn't help much in probing this. Because we're not asserting cognitive decline always causes television watching, or whatever.
Some MOOC courses are given primarily by video lectures with a side-by-side transcript. I can read faster than the audio, even with the audio set to 1.5 X speed. It's also easier to skip back and re-scan the transcript. Reading the transcript at the same time as listening to the audio enhances retention.
Maybe that is because when we read a story, we imagine much more about it than when watching it on a screen, and that effort makes more of an impression?
"Indeed, it is of note that other screen-based activities such as video gaming and using the internet which involve more interaction can in fact have cognitive benefits, leading to higher levels of frontal and central EEG activity(21) and enhanced visual-spatial skills, problem-solving skills and cognition in older age(16), suggesting that it is this alert-passive interaction that is a key feature of the effects of television viewing."
Also note in Table 1 there are activities such as "using the internet" and "reading a daily newspaper" that were examined.
So to answer your question: it depends on whether you consider all assumptions of the article relevant. One thing the article certainly doesn't contradict is the old adage "use it or lose it".
Almost all research is narrow in scope, and more research is always needed.
And calling other research fields "nonsense" is also something that researchers from all fields do.
A ton of them are constantly inadvertently opening control center and then accidentally turning it on airplane mode or whatever. Another issue is that software changes constantly and any slight interface change they have no clue what to do.
After looking a little, he was wrapping his hand behind the phone far enough that he had his fingers from that hand touching the screen while he tried to poke buttons with his other hand.
Since there were multiple fingers on the screen, it kept interpreting them as gestures and not doing anything.
Further, his case made it so the Square dongle thing wouldn't stay plugged in all the way. So when he finally did get it to the swipe screen, it wouldn't read the card.
Finally ended up offering to look at it myself and manually entering my card info. The guy was so visibly relieved to be out of that situation.
Smart phones aren't nearly so user friendly as a lot of tech people like to think.
Yeah, the perfect amount of bezel is significantly more than zero, I really don't get the hype for maximising screen/body ratios. It's just impractical, at least without serious measures against wrapped touch like having a fully touch enabled side only tho know which touches near the edges of the screen to ignore.
I'm not denigrating the upper class, fashion, or trends in general -- just pointing out that fashionable trends are different from technological advancement.
The more power you put into a tool, (frequently) the more complex the interface becomes. This is a trade-off that must be weighed. Either you make your devices do less, or you require your users to learn how to use their tools.
I do not think we should sacrifice the power of our devices in exchange for improved ease of use.
Final note: Of course better interface design can help mitigate the increase in complexity of the tool with the increase in power of the tool, but I believe this has a limited effect.
I'll also note that we have been sacrificing the power of our devices in exchange for improved ease of use since the 1980s and it's great. Manually configuring X-Windows in those days was enormously powerful, and enormously user-hostile. We sacrifice vast amount of computing power on the altar of usability, and that's exactly what we should be doing. Contrary to my early computing experience, I have never once had to rebuild the kernel on my phone, and I am very happy with that.
And third, you mostly create a false dichotomy here. If we're talking about a typewriter or a steam loom or something, yes, power and user complexity go together. But the true power of software is the ability to hide most of the complexity most of the time. Most of the work of software development is pushing complexity down, wrapping it in abstractions that provide the next level up with a clean interface.
A perfect example here is Google Search. It's a magic box into which I can type (and now, just say) anything, and it will apparently intuit what I want. The "powerful" version of that interface was 1980s search, where you carefully specified the various fields you wanted to search (because all data had to be carefully fed into the system's structure) and a painfully constructed, manually stemmed, boolean query. For maybe 1 search in 500, I still want that kind of power. But for the rest of the time, I'm very grateful that thousands of nice people at Google have made it so that their search's power has increased continuously, with users needing to learn less and less to get good results.
No, it's just bad design. Holding a phone only from the sides is simply not comfortable nor very safe for the phone.
I have my own story from today: I have iOS devices since forever and sill I had to google how to access some option. The damn things move between versions and some become invisible until you read somewhere where they are etc. It’s really that bad.
Previously on HN: “perfectly cropped”:
Reading engages the brain in an entirely different way than viewing images does. When you read you interpret meaning from text and construct a mental model of what's being described.
Yes, maybe I interpret text in my head and build mental models, but my brain just throws them away as soon as the story is over. Ask me what I read about 5 minutes later and I swear, I won't be able to tell.
Having said that, it often feels like the internet speaks with one voice, even when it’s disagreeing with itself.
Rarely does anyone say or write anything original.
I guess HN feels more familiar though, more like family. And we’re probably driven by millions of years of evolution to seek that out.
There's too much everyday garbage on the web, it's disappointing quantity is trumping form and quality. If YouTube loosened up it's monetization rules and went back to letting the producer set the form we could have more focused videos. The ten minute spam videos are the plague.
HN is more rational and quantitative than other sites in general so I prefer this as a counter to other more abstract information sources.
For me it is like System 1 or System 2 taking charge (as in the book "Thinking Fast and Slow", by Kahneman).
a director watching a cut of a movie, weighs every detail with a focus that is quite unlike the mental state of the public audience. I think that changes the way they watch all films, always dissecting.
So I’m assuming the importance of television isn’t that it’s television, but that it’s minimally stimulating activity, so easily within your cognitive capacity as to require neither physical nor mental discipline nor adaptation, requiring just enough from you to displace sleep.
I don’t watch a lot of tv, but I choose to take this as a warning I need to do less scrolling
Edit: one thing in particular that stands out is the discussion of television being fast paced, fleeting information, I wonder if I’m viewing adaptation incorrectly here, what if it’s that we are exhausting our adaptive capacity, training ourselves on static?
Viewers do this as well. Analysis of literature and of television/film overlap to some degree, and both require an active consumer of the material.
I think the question is: Given an equal amount of effort on the part of the consumer, does one medium convey more benefits than the other?
1990: He is so dumb, he is watching TV all day
2000: He is so bright, he spends a lot of time on the Internet
2020: He is so dumb, spending all day on the Internet.
I'm not sure this was ever the case.
> Newton N. Minow spoke of the "vast wasteland" that was the television programming of the day in his 1961 speech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_aspects_of_television#N...
Both media began with precious little content, most of it relatively high in value for the times and circumstances. (Even if it could be argued some content was low quality or utility, the simple access to a much wider array of thought was valuable.)
But once they matured, of course they filled up with trash. Just like every medium.
Given the quality of most books these days, someone “reading a lot” doesn’t mean much anymore, for instance.
This never happened.
Abstract:
> Digital writing devices associated with the use of computers, tablet PCs, or mobile phones are increasingly replacing writing by hand. It is, however, controversially discussed how writing modes influence reading and writing performance in children at the start of literacy. On the one hand, the easiness of typing on digital devices may accelerate reading and writing in young children, who have less developed sensory-motor skills. On the other hand, the meaningful coupling between action and perception during handwriting, which establishes sensory-motor memory traces, could facilitate written language acquisition. In order to decide between these theoretical alternatives, for the present study, we developed an intense training program for preschool children attending the German kindergarten with 16 training sessions. Using closely matched letter learning games, eight letters of the German alphabet were trained either by handwriting with a pen on a sheet of paper or by typing on a computer keyboard. Letter recognition, naming, and writing performance as well as word reading and writing performance were assessed. Results did not indicate a superiority of typing training over handwriting training in any of these tasks. In contrast, handwriting training was superior to typing training in word writing, and, as a tendency, in word reading. The results of our study, therefore, support theories of action-perception coupling assuming a facilitatory influence of sensory-motor representations established during handwriting on reading and writing.
At best I think you could make the claim that, for the average person, as typically consumed, reading results in more activity in the brain.
Some of them have moved somewhere cheaper to retire where they don’t have many friends, but most of the ones I know just watch tv instead of calling a friend to do something. The friend is the same even though they would love to hang out. I’ve tried nudging them with no success.
In her home she mostly passed the time watching TV and knitting. In the retirement home, she joined a choir, she ate with friends every day, she took advantage of regular trips to restaurants and shopping malls, and she was constantly playing cards.
Having friends around and things to do with them was huge for her happiness.
I wouldn't be surprised if those who watch less TV fill that time with creative hobbies, socialization, reading of thought-provoking books, etc. As a matter of fact, I would love to see a paper trying to structure those activities and correlate the prevalent groups to the cognitive performance.
I'd be curious what people do in cultures without the drip feed and their reaction to it.
I've often wondered what effects refresh rate has upon the brain and how fast/how we process information and equally, how we adapt.
So with all that in mind, I wonder how old people who grew up with a 60hz TV compare to those accustomed to 50hz and if the statistics of cognitive decline are not the same - more interesting questions.
associated
Not "caused".
It is still an interesting study, but this should be the first thing to recognize, whether it claims association or causation.
How many degrees are there in a circle?
The latter has questions like; What can come fourth in this sequence?
All this happened more or less.
Sherlock Homes took his bottle from the corner...
There were four of us - George and William Samuel Harris...
I have no idea what came fourth in the sequence, does that mean I should expect rapid age-related cognitive-decline?
I’m probably going to blame that on all the hard drugs I’ve abused, rather then my lack in other areas.
Having active shared experiences with other people while asking and answering questions is what keeps us us.
I don't watch much television but I think that consuming and processing narrative is not entirely passive. Your brain is still doing work to connect dots in stories, you're building internal networks of events and characters.
I think there's a lot more interaction on the receiving end there than you're giving credit.
Truthfully what television removes (though not entirely) from story processing versus reading is a huge chunk of imaginative work and some memory requirements.
while I agree with this, modern television requires far less "interaction on the receiving end" than you give it credit for. It lacks novelty.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by “modern”? We’re in a golden age of television, according to some. I can think of at least a dozen shows released in the past few years that have deep and complex storylines.
I wonder if my Sunday Afternoon TiVo binges of "Dr. Pimple Popper," "Below Deck," and an occasional "Judge Judy" are making me dumb!? I hope not.
Oh, and I tried the new podiatric reality show: "My Feet Are Killing Me." I think I'm smarter because of it.
Granted, I watch about 4-5 hours of TV a week, not 3.5 hours/day. But only because I don't have enough hours in the day. I enjoy television, and look forward to my Sunday binges.
I have observed in my grandmother that she displays markedly lower cognitive decline when compared to her peers (friends and family around the same age).
Here are some (maybe biased) observations.
In the early 80s (at 40+yo) my grandmother was working as a secretary in a small office and went through the change from mechanical typewriters to electronic ones. While she was doing this the majority of her friends where 100% house wives.
In the early 90s(at 50+yo) my grandmother learned to use a T9 mobile phone by herself. Her friends didn't have a mobile phone for years, and even myself would only have a mobile phone much later than her. (in fact i remember her teaching me how to navigate a Nokia that she gave me when she upgraded)
In the early 2000's (at 60+yo) my grandmother bought a Windows XP PC, learned how to use it from scratch (had never used a computer in her life) and started to browse the internet, write emails, copy photos from digital cameras on to the computer etc. At the same time, her friends had no clue how to use a computer.
In the 2010's my grandmother quickly transitioned to iPad to browse the web / iPhone to keep up with grandchildren on social media. Her friends would only come to have a smartphone and join the social media revolution in the mid 2010s.
Note: I think no one is minding the unscientific nature of your anecdote. I just don't understand what point the anecdote is supposed to underline. Your grandma likes technology and therefore she likes technology? Or something?
It's sharing this observation, not very scientific as it would need larger samples and better controlled environment but it's an interesting anecdote. Many of us perhaps see the same trend.
I think it's pretty clear that not stimulating your brain lead to drop of cognitive abilities. Parallels are made between a trainned muscle and a trainned brain. We teach kids to memorise poems to stimulate their memory. We forget about stimulation as we grow older, we tend to retire and accept the status quo that there is the active career and some day we quit and no one expect anything to be done as retired folks.
I find my own cognitive abilities dropping after a few months of slope into brain laziness. I find my cognitive speed and performance increased after a few months of rather intense focus on multiple challenging projects. I also find myself unable to perform at high cognitive levels, drop of concentration if I've been on a burn up for months without much brain rest and relaxing time. Again perhaps a good parallel with how muscles performance works.
Anecdotes are interesting, as they help see trends when in correlation with other anecdotes. I rarely hear stories about the opposite phenomenon.
In my view an anecdote is just that. Not supposed to support any broader point or generalization.
Its an individual story, you can make of it what you will! =)
If you don’t: probably don’t.
But it says more about HN that your comment is still the top comment after an hour+.
Also she is a chronic late sleeper (as in going to bed late and waking up late) which both me and my mom seem to have inherited.
Some tiny percent of the population can smoke and drink non-stop, never exercise, eat shit constantly, and die by getting hit by a bus while jogging at 02:30.
Still not real helpful for us who didn’t win the genetic lottery.
- is that the medium itself (and the fact we watch it passively)?
- is that the fact that it replaces other activities?
- is that the retarded content it shows?
- is that the stressful content that appears in the news all the time (crimes, natural catastrophes, war, terror attack, etc.)?
- is that the way it's shot (with non-stop movement, even when nothing happens,just to keep us watching)?
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 Amusing Ourselves to Death though, and I find myself compelled to be a lot more dramatic about the negatives of TV watching, on the late author's behalf.
Yes it'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's already near devastated your personal 'knowledge-base'. 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, 'Now..This' 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's mind might still performance just fine in tests, but having been starved of knowledge it is practically unintelligent.
Think also of the opportunity cost. At an average of 4 hours a day, as USA 'consumer' 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 almost 1 book a day for a whole year instead. 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.
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 'consumer' could have read Das Kapital, and The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and The Road to Wigan Pier, and Capitalism and Freedom, and On Liberty, and... etc etc. You get the point.
So yeah, I'm really onboard with the thesis of Amusing Ourselves To Death.
Why are you assuming that watching television isn't enriching? What makes books better?
I can make a positive case for reading over TV watching, and the book I mention in the comment does just that, but first I’d like to quibble with your first question. I don’t say that watching TV is not enriching in general. Certain television and certain movies are awesome and even indispensable.
I do think books are better than watching TV though. For starters, you are in a thread about how TV is associated with cognitive decline. Reading on the other hand is promoted by the results of a number of studies showing its relationship to improved cognitive performance.
Perhaps the simplest argument I can think of now is this. When we as a society look to create great educators, lawyers, doctors, scientists, and philosophers, we make sure they’re reading a lot. We don’t have them watch TV. When society builds education systems they fill their curriculums with books, whether at the primary, secondary, or tertiary levels. This is still true despite television existing for almost 100 years. The replacement of reading by television has been actively resisted by educational leaders generally. In the most potent cases, professors would find it totally laughable that their graduate curriculums be facilitated by TV watching rather than books.
If someone told me that the only way to learn linear algebra or calculus would be from a textbook I'd have believed them when I was at university (about 25 years ago). If someone told me that now I'd send them some great YouTube content that explains it far better than any math textbook I've ever seen. I think that says more about professors than about how people are able learn difficult subjects.
I don't think books are going to go away, and I think it's important to cultivate an enjoyment of reading in children so they can read complex subjects later in life, but the common line that "books are better for you than TV" in adults who aren't reading for education is just something that I think is hard to justify. People always end up comparing low-brow TV with high-brow books to show how TV is bad. That's what I think is unreasonable.
When TV is attacked there's defenses bringing up digital textbooks.
Not the GP.
You're right that argument is simple, it's also not compelling. The reason for that is most of the information is currently encoded in the form of literature.
It might be that we'll made TV/computer programmes can convey the information, and build knowledge, better; we've just not tested that yet. Is an anatomy book better (alone) for learning than text and visuals that are interactive - maybe VR - for example.
If you take the people who read and make them watch TV it seems likely to me that they'll watch stimulating television, if they read stimulating books?
In short maybe it's the content, and one content group prefers one medium.
I'd totally agree that TV with advertising breaks is anathema -- but Netflix documentaries (say), seems like they might be better than a Mills & Boon bonkbuster?
If it is solely the medium the problem is significant and we need quickly to find out what specifically about the medium is the issue. It's unlikely to get solved though, TV advertising is a cornerstone of Capitalist society; keeping the masses "sedated" by TV (raging about Soaps or MCU plotlines instead of real life) helps to control society.
MOOCs are huge and often don't use books as primary media, they rely on lectures delivered through video. My most recent learning has all been this way and I find it works well for me. But presumably you include "screen based text" with "books"?
Given that you're bring up lectures and MOOCS, it's definitely worth being more clear about what Postman understands as constituting the medium of TV. It's not merely the transmission of audio-visual content, it's is the whole technology, taking the concept of "technology" in the broad sense. For example, the usage of music in TV is part of the technology, and it is usually conspicuously absent from MOOC lectures.
Postman would not consider a digital textbook as TV, but if such a textbook were borrow from TV, for example using conventional drama narrative as a device then he would be against that.
Does this more or less resolve the problem? TV != digital textbooks or MOOC lectures.
No argument here. There's a reason the book if reference is called "Amusing Ourselves to Death".
> One big thing about tv is that it can run while you do other boring chores.
True. I want to say that I'm not literally saying we should replace all TV watching with non-fiction book reading. I was making a point.
However, you can also listen to the radio or podcasts or audio-books when doing boring chores. It matters whether those alternatives are better.
> It is closer to human communication then books.
It's impossible for this to be true, given that books are human communication and further that written language is the only domain of communication unique to humans.
You was never alone for an extensive period of time with little chance to hear other people talk, didnt you? Uniqueness among animals have nothing to do with anything.
> However, you can also listen to the radio or podcasts or audio-books when doing boring chores. It matters whether those alternatives are better.
There is zero difference for most podcasts and most for-fun audio books. None at all. And it may be my age, but I find most podcasts to be quite annoying. Some are good, but too much of it has cringy style.
For example, I know of people who would turn on the TV, then go about their chores, but they aren't paying attention to whatever is on. Would that be better or worse, from a cognitive point of view, than intently watching a program?
As a different example, I like "watching" films or series while doing some work, as in watching for a few minutes when I get stuck on something, then hitting pause and going back to work. Other times, I'd just stare at a blank wall for a couple of minutes. Would that count as daily watching time?
My wife and I have something like The Office literally playing all day while we go about doing normal day time things like work, chores, etc... If we do find time to really watch TV, we may watch one or two hour long shows before bed.
If you counted stuff like browsing HN/Reddit/social media in addition to TV/streaming I'm sure most everyone would average more than 4h daily (maybe more on weekends, less on week days).
By Neil Postman’s thesis in Amusing Ourselves To Death, audio-visual content consumption on social media is actually worse than TV. He would be aghast at say, TV being replaced by TikTok.
I think a comparison with radio would be instructive.
I wonder if there’s a way to have TVs with watch timers. For better self-control.
I notice at my parents house that the TV is almost always on. It personally drives me insane. I think they want to curb it down, but it’s a habit that’s hard to break... so maybe a screen-time app for the TV can help??
Streaming services sadly have the reverse incentive in this case, to actually make you watch more.
I doubt there is any activity that can accelerate the rate of decline apart from the things we put in our bodies (food & drugs). It's better to think of cognitive decline proceeding at some baseline rate and the mental and physical activities we engage in act to buffer this pace. Watching TV happens to be a poor buffer, especially over such long stretches of such passive stimulation (requires little mental or physical exertion). You would get the same low buffer effect staring at a wall, flipping through a picture book, or knitting a scarf for 3.5 hours. This might be obvious but TV isn't causing decline, it's just not helping to prevent it.
What do you base your certainty on? It's certainly not fact.
"I doubt there is any activity that can accelerate the rate of decline apart from the things we put in our bodies (food & drugs)."
You missed oxygenation.
I base this certainty partially on my expertise in the field of cognitive decline, but mostly common sense principles. Cognitive decline is a natural part of aging. It happens to everyone regardless of how much TV one watches; even people who watch no TV whatsoever cannot avoid cognitive decline. Thus our best estimate of what causes cognitive decline points towards the aging of the underlying biological apparatus that supports cognition. Furthermore, there are likely to be infants and young children who watch as much TV, and view programming geared towards learning; and as they mature will see gains in cognitive abilities. How is that explained it TV causes cognitive decline.