Scientific American on Television Addiction

Etcetera writes: "The Drudge Report had an interesting link to a Scientific American article on Television Addiction. Talks about some of the quantifiable effects TV watching can have on the body. Very interesting read. There's also a paragraph or two at the end about game/computer use and why that might be a *little* bit different. But, similar to Jon Katz's essay Browsing Alone, they conclude that when a habit interferes with a growing, active life, it should be taken seriously."

Comments

Why TV makes you mad, sick, fat and stupid...

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I saw ironically in a feature on German TV about ten years ago. There they had shown much more severe research results about how watching TV harms your health:

It causes overweight not only because you don't move around, but it slows down metabolism while it makes you feel hungry and lets you eat tons of snacks while not beeing aware of it (->fat)

While your body goes into a sleep-like state, you feel very exhausted after long TV sessions; this really wrecks havoc on your immune system(->sick)

Watching TV before sleep forces your brain's nightly garbage collection to work on what you have seen on TV instead on your real life experiences, with negative effects on decision making and dealing with real life problems, up to causing serious mental diseases(->mad)

Watching TV makes the parts of you brain responsible for controlling your motion wither, which is known to negatively affect your intellectual capabilities (->stupid)

And finally the incredible amount of trash transmitted over U.S. TV can not have any positive effects on the spectator, and all this is regularily interrupted with a mixture of ads, many of them using sophisticated techniques to manipulate your mind. (I can not stand a U.S. TV program for more than a couple of minutes because among other things I am not used to these frequent breaks; it makes me so agressive that I have to switch it off)

I hope that one day the people responsible for this lunacy will have to pay for it.

p.