TV Viewing Linked to Attention Problems

oDDmON oUT writes "While your mother may have told you that sitting too close to the TV was bad for your eyes, the folks over at New Scientist are reporting that too much television may be linked to a bad attention span 'The study is not proof that TV viewing causes attention problems, Landhuis notes, because it may be that children prone to attention problems may be drawn to watching television. "However, our results show that the net effect of television seems to be adverse."'"

Comments

Obligatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

OK, this thread's done. Back to the firehose. When's the next article come out, guys?

Re:Obligatory.

[bakana]

I'll believe this when I see more unbiased studies come out with the same conclusion under the same factors. For people whom don't know, just because one study's result points towards a corilation doesn't mean that to hold as truth. The study has to be replicated several times over and should be done by different scientist each time under the same conditions. If the results of each study are the same, then maybe they are on to something, otherwise as 1st post says move on nothing to see here.

Re:Obligatory.

[TheWanderingHermit]

Yep. It's nowhere near new. I used data like this in a speech I had to do in public speaking around 1979 in high school. When I worked in Special Ed, many teachers had noticed that the kids who talked more about TV were the ones that tended to have less of an attention span. There's a lot of experience that leads one to believe that kids that watch too much TV tend to have an attention span that's about 10-15 minutes, or the length of time between commercials.

On the other hand, I've seen a huge number of kids who are supposedly ADD or ADHD show an amazing attention span when they sit down with a copy of Harry Potter. It makes me wonder if part of the problem with attention spans in school is due to inappropriate expectations for a child's age and boring teachers that just don't have the skills teachers did in years past.

Re:Obligatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually ADD/ADHD is a bit of a misnomer. It is more about an extreme difficulty in controlling one's attention. So frequently it is in deficit. But at other times people enter hyper-attention and get lost for hours at a time. This can be wonderful. But all-in-all the inability to "turn it off" can also be destructive (missing meals, social commitments, etc). Not being able to control one's focus sucks.

At least it does for me. I don't know whether it was the cause or the symptom, but as a child practically all I did was watch TV. It was my baby sitter and my friends. Even now I can easily get sucked in for hours on end if I'm not careful. The funny thing is that I don't feel like I absorb much in front of the TV most of the time. It's just a way to go numb. Anyway, I'm not judging TV, or other poeple's use. Just reporting my biased, subjective experience which is that I have ADD and as a child I easily watched 5+ hours of TV a day.

Re:Obligatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on now, Ed's a great guy, but he's no more special than anyone else.

Re:Obligatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

"...or the length of time between commercials."

But that begs the question. Is it the TV program that hurts attention span, or the frequency with which it's interrupted?

Re:Obligatory.

[patrixmyth]

It has NOTHING to do with the skills of teachers. It's a problem with our expectations of what our educational system should provide, and a dearth of parental influence. Somewhere along the line, we decided that introducing Algebra and the history of Pre-Columbian Meso-American fishing cultures to third graders was a wonderful idea, and that we needed to test for every piece of trivia that any expert thought our 10th graders should know. Meanwhile, mommy and daddy both work until 6:30 pm, and barely have time to check if the kids have finished their 4 hours of homework per night.

When my son finishes high school, I want him to be self-sufficient. That means being capable of researching any topic, writing a concise summary of what he's found out and advocating his own opinion on the subject. That means balancing a checkbook and calculating how much wood he'll need to build fence. That means being able to reason his way through a natural disaster, and walk 5 miles to the nearest gas station when his car breaks down. That also means controlling his own emotions well enough to smile and wave at road-ragers. The rest, I am confident, he will get from my wife and I, and fill in for himself, based upon natural human curiosity and ambition.

Let's get the trivial pursuit tests out of our schools and give our kids the chance to take responsibility for their own future. America's aptly titled "greatest generation" grew up in the depression helping their families make ends meet, and their kids grew up on howdy-doody, and took us to the moon with slide rules. We're not going to get back to that by cramming more powerpoint presentations and multiple choice tests down our kids' throats. We're going to get back there by restoring single paycheck families and giving families the time to do something BESIDES watch TV for an hour before bedtime.

Re:Obligatory.

[TheWanderingHermit]

Actually ADD/ADHD is a bit of a misnomer.

Yes, it is and I'm not sure I believe that most children diagnosed with it actually have any issue, other than impatient parents or teachers. I was using a less accurate but convenient label. I really did not feel like going more into the topic.

Re:Obligatory.

[TheWanderingHermit]

If you look at the Standards of Learning, for example, that some states use and look at what is being taught overall, it's not trivial. The problem is that most of what kids needs is not getting taught.

And to go with your example about Pre-Columbian Meso-American fishing cultures, did it occur to you there may be other reasons for teaching that other than "trivia?" For example, and this is a broad one, Gene Roddenberry realized he could do a show on the Viet Nam War by basing it on a planet far away. By the same token, often there are things that can be taught to people in a culture by focusing on one that is not so close. Then people, especially kids, don't see how close to home it hits. It's quite possible that such a group might be studied in a social studies class to teach about communities and how each person in a community has a distinct job and it's only through the efforts of all that the community thrives and grows.

I haven't taught for about a decade, but I have friends who are teaching and I keep up with what I can. I've never seen an example of trivia being a big problem, but I've seen many examples of teachers that were restricted on what they could teach and were not able to teach many things they wanted to or need to teach.

And for teachers vs. parents, there's some of both. Parental involvement is a huge issue (and does lead to kids sitting in front of the tv/babysitter way too much), but I have also noticed changes in what some newer teachers know vs. some of the more experienced teachers when they got out of college.

Re:Obligatory.

[patrixmyth]

Hermit,

I'm not arguing that a teacher should not be teaching Pre-Columbian Meso-American fishing cultures. I'm arguing that the "standards" have grown beyond a reasonable expectation of what a teacher can meaningfully convey to students and that students can process and integrate. I have no doubt that a motivated teacher, so inspired, could make Pre-Columbian Meso-American fishing cultures into an entire semester's study with great benefit to all. The issue which I am raising, is whether in meeting the testing requirement to inject facts into our kids, we are missing the point of education, which I would posit to be preparing kids to take responsibility for their lives, rather than preparing them to take tests. I happen to think teachers today are every bit as qualified as the past teachers, but without agreeing what they're qualified to do, it is probably difficult to measure.

Re:Obligatory.

[TheWanderingHermit]

I wish you and I could meet for coffee and discuss that. I think we have some basic agreements but that we're coming at it from such different points of view that we could go over our different thoughts on it for hours.

Yes, schools aren't getting kids ready for life. I would not say what they're forced to teach is always trivial, but I would call the requirements triviality forced into pseudo-importance by people who don't know a think about what goes on in the classroom. While this is likely outdated now, I read about how, at one point, California had spent millions on education reform, but throughout a number of years, that had not resulted in a single change in the classroom. Schools had moved to site-based management (and back from it), buzzwords were created, organizational structures were changed, the teachers were given more work to document everything, but nothing had actually had any effect on how things were taught.

The material taught has nothing to do with what those in the classroom have found needs to be taught. It's all worked out by bureaucrats who do nothing but read test results.

Re:Obligatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the point I was trying to make was two-fold:

1. The ability to occasionally show amazing attention span does not mean that someone does not have ADD because people with ADD can focus, they just have trouble controlling it. And to survive in our society it is important to be able to voluntarily and selectively engage one's focus.
2. ADD appears to be a real condition, not just bad teachers, lazy students, or missing parents. I know this because of the amount of effort it can take for me to focus on something that doesn't grab me. It's exhausting and sometimes impossible. People that have not personally experienced it seem to think that it is not real but rather some character flaw.

ADD may well be over-diagnosed. Because of my age and possibly socio-economic factors I was not diagnosed until I was 35. So I guess I have a knee-jerk reactiion to other people's knee-jerk reactions. Peace.

Re:Obligatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

That means balancing a checkbook and calculating how much wood he'll need to build fence.

It also means calculating how many indefinite articles he'll need to write good sentence.

Re:Obligatory.

[Lemmy Caution]

Naw. The findings don't really contradict common sense, and they are consistent with other expectations. Further research should be on mechanisms: just how do attentional mechanisms get trained by stimuli in childhood? What are the differences in the attentional demands between television and other stimuli? Is there a relationship between, for example, motor activity and attention? What about affect?

Repeating such a basic and obvious research project just to quell the perennial doubters is a waste of time and money, although I'm sure that someone, somewhere, will still being willing to take a check to do so.

Re:Obligatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

So ... really the problem is the commericals? If there were no commerials the kids would have a 1/2 hour or a full hour of show time and attention span?

Re:Obligatory.

[bakana]

There are many things that were thought to be common sense and were proved wrong through strictly following scientific protocols. Here is a common sense notion "Boys are more violent than girls". However you have to define what it is to be violent. A good definition of violence for young girls is social isolation not actual physical hitting. That being the case, social isolation voilence, aka violence as defined for the young girls, happens more often than boys interacting physically. Then once you get past frequency you have to account for harshness of the interaction. Was it just a soft hit or did he take a haymaker swing. Did the girl only get socially outcasted from the group of elites or from all groups. Then taking into account that "rough play" as it is called is a needed interaction for healthier young boys to properly progress. etc etc. You see how common sense really isn't something to base your research project on?

Re:Obligatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just smile and wave, son. Smile and wave.

I wholeheartedly disagree

[CaptainPatent]

I am an avid TV watcher and have no problems pa...

Oh look a bunny!

Re:I wholeheartedly disagree

[lmnfrs]

Yeah bunnies are fuz.. oh have you seen this commercial before!?

Re:I wholeheartedly disagree

[Bluesman]

I'm sure you all think you're very funny, but this is a serious problem. You shouldn't joke about it, even if Lindsay Lohan just bought a new house in Beverly Hills.

Re:I wholeheartedly disagree

[skeeto]

How many kids with ADD does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Hey! Wanna go ride bikes?

Re:I wholeheartedly disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

It's "a bird" not "a bunny", weren't you payi-

By the way, did you catch Dr. Who this past weekend? It was pretty good!

Re:I wholeheartedly disagree

[varmittang]

Yeah, I don't have a problem eith...

Ooooohhh, pony!

Re:I wholeheartedly disagree

[eln]

Lindsay Lohan did what? Oh, that girl is out of control!

What were we talking about again?

Re:I wholeheartedly disagree

[Jorgandar]

As an avid bunny watcher i'm offended by your..

Oh look a TV!

Re:I wholeheartedly disagree

[tomstdenis]

I lol'ed. Thanks.

I don't know why more people don't just get a PVR and skip over commercials. That way you can watch crap shows and not be subject to lame advertisements for

Oh look a Bunny on top of the TV.

Re:I wholeheartedly disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

There was no Dr. Who, in the US at least. We had Stargate. We have to wait until next week.

Re:I wholeheartedly disagree

[Bluesman]

I don't remember what we were talking about, but with the amount of time I've spent here, I'm feeling like it's getting a bit too likely that I'm going to be kidnapped by a cyber-predator.

And Oprah's coming on. Adios.

Re:I wholeheartedly disagree

[rossy]

This housing problem is wonderful isn't it. Look at all the pretty colors. When is Star Trek going to be on? I get all my news from the Daily show.

No, really?

[SultanCemil]

Gosh, you mean watching Tv with 1/2 second shots changing quickly will shorten my attention span? What's next, water that gets you wet?

Re:No, really?

[cp.tar]

You forgot commercial breaks, which make our attention stop and go and stop and go...

Re:No, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

nah. a 15-second commercial outdoes the average attention span by a good 14 seconds.

Re:No, really?

[ackthpt]

Gosh, you mean watching Tv with 1/2 second shots changing quickly will shorten my attention span? What's next, water that gets you wet?

Ever notice how stuff on TV in most countries is peppered with advertising? Start a story, ad, ad, ad, some more of the story, ad, ad, ad, ad, a preposterous climax/cliff hanger, ad, ad, ad, ad, some sort of resolution which returns things back to the way they were at the beginning of the show.

I don't watch TV anymore as I find it frustrates the heck out of me. I read books now, play the occasional video game, but have suffer no doubts maintaining my attention span is quite a challenge. I must have 5 or more thoughts pass through my mind each minute I'm listening to someone talk, then find I can't remember their name.

Re:No, really?

[Tau Neutrino]

Ever notice how stuff on TV in most countries is peppered with advertising? Completely agree. Commercials drive me up the wall. And even the bad shows are lousy with them. Fortunately, most of the good stuff comes out a little while later on DVD, with no ads. And the kicker is, the local library has many of them. Gratis.

If you don't mind not being current with the latest TV-induced craze, it's a reasonable solution.

Re:No, really?

[ed.mps]

Just to mention (in Brazil), the main audience-whore programs are soap operas (mainly those starting at 21h). You see credit card/bank/car (one, two or all) being advertised in every episode. (I am at univ. at night, free from this crap, luckily)

Re:No, really?

[nospam007]

Ever notice how stuff on TV in most countries is peppered with advertising? Start a story, ad, ad, ad, some more of the story, ad, ad, ad, ad, a preposterous climax/cliff hanger, ad, ad, ad, ad, some sort of resolution which returns things back to the way they were at the beginning of the show.
--
The movies are following not far behind. The Bourne trilogy was unwatchable for me, for the last one I left the theater after 10 minutes, because I got seasick.
The whole stuff is done with a camera handheld by a guy suffering from Parkinsons.

Re:No, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's ADD Chicken, err, Robot Chicken. Most show's don't suck that bad/don't have that problem to quite the extent you mentioned.

Re:No, really?

[anagama]

I'm with you, though I go for the convenience of netflix. I quite watching broadcast/cable TV in 1993. On the once every other year chance I watch a show at a friend's place, I'm constantly annoyed at the breaks in the story. Aside from years of training, I don't see how people can tolerate it.

What I prefer is to have a whole season on DVD -- the story becomes a video-novel that way. Even feature films start to feel like short stories when compared to the pleasure of a commercial free movie about 20+ hours long per season.

Re:No, really?

[sveard]

You should try 28 Weeks Later, I got motion sickness of that one.

Re:No, really?

[JesterXXV]

Allow me to don my Captain Obvious purple leotard and green cape for one (disturbing) moment:

CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION.

Maybe they watch a lot of TV because they have a short attention span.

Re:No, really?

[LMacG]

Thank you for reading the summary.

Re:No, really?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I stopped having that problem when I invested in Beyond TV and stopped watching shows live, but rather on my palmtop on the way to work. I imagine people with TIVO have the same solution.

Re:No, really?

[sugrshack]

re: the convenience of netflix,

I do the same thing, but unfortunately because of my poor attention span, I keep being distracted by something, and realize I've been watching for 5 minutes and not aborbing anything.

It seems to take me longer to watch a tv show on DVD than it does on tv, but of course I can't rewind the tv (no I don't have tivo).

Re:No, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Maybe they watch a lot of TV because they have a short attention span.

So why watching TV would be the activity that doesn't suffer from attention shifts itself?

Because it has all commercials and crap? test if the kids can survive a movie on dvd. I guess if they could it would be mentioned in the studies.

Because TV has bigger power to draw people towards it than other activity? I'd say videogames are way more able to capture attention. Is videogaming considered by the study?

Do ADD kids watch and switch channels with the remote?

If TV were the exception it is improbable to speak of correlation only.

Re:No, really?

[SunTzuWarmaster]

I know we don't read the articles... but JUST THE TITLE... man, even I'm not that lazy.

Re:No, really?

[Trumpet of Doom]

Huh? Are you still talking about that?

Re:No, really?

[JesterXXV]

I read the summary. I was simply restating that point to the parent of my post.

Re:No, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's nice knowing that you can determine when to watch anything, versus depending on a schedule that someone else creates for you. Reminds me of the working class; it's not usual for them to decide the hours they'll be working, they choose to have it forced upon themselves by a stranger.

Re:No, really?

[Strange Ranger]

While I agree with you in an "ideal world" kind of way, I automatically assume you're young and single and have a comfortable income working reasonable hours, without many obligations in life.

Why?
Because most of us don't have time to watch a lot of full length feature films without breaks. If we owned a full season on DVD, we'd have to hit the pause button 3 times per episode anyway. We iron our clothes and cook during commercials, we answer the phone. We sit with our laptops and answer email while maybe glancing at Mythbusters. We pack lunches, open mail, arrange schedules, write thank you notes, replace light bulbs, take out the trash, we clean our bathrooms(note to bachelors!), run out for milk, feed the dog, let the dog out, let the dog in, answer the phone again.... We clean up after our kids who will wake up and need a drink any minute.

And then finally, we sigh with relief when we get 25 minutes to veg out in front of the last half of whatever the heck is on because we don't really care. Our eyes are glazed over before we even reach the couch.

A 20+ hour long commercial-free movie sounds like a sick joke to anyone with family and a lawn to mow. Enjoy this time in your life. It won't come again for a long time.

Re:No, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't have a fucking dog....there's 30 minutes in a day saved right there, if not more. Also, you shouldn't have reproduced. Wouldn't it have been cool just to let your genetic material reach an evolutionary dead end? And why not? If there is a God it doesn't matter, if there is no God it doesn't matter. Let things dwindle quietly....

Re:No, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wasn't just trolling with the above "evolutionary dead end" post. Why don't you respond. Oh, I know why. Because everyone faced with that suggestion knows its true, can't deny it, and gets morose and can't respond. I'm sorry I made you despondent, but at least you have been directed toward the truth. Denial now will just make it hurt more.

Re:No, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was mentioned in the summary - didn't read the whole thing, did you?

Re:No, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

No they get morose because of you not the response. It's like asking "Why should you love your children?"
If you don't the response to your "question" it can't be explained to you. Most people would then feel sad for you.

Um.

[ackthpt]

I lost my attention after the first sentence. Someone tell me what this is all about. :-/

Re:Um.

[ShatteredArm]

tl;dr

Re:Um.

[hatchet]

Maybe you should be sent to concentration camp... you know... to learn to concentrate.

Re:Um.

[ackthpt]

Maybe you should be sent to concentration camp... you know... to learn to concentrate.

Right on. Do they have TV there?

Re:Um.

[hatchet]

No TV, just a nifty 'arbeit macht frei' sign.

Re:Um.

[qazwer00]

wasn't that from South Park (season 5) when Cartman says that Kyle should be sent to a concentration camp, but according to him, it wasn't a put down on Jews and just a comment about Kyle being unable to concentrate ?

Re:Um.

[value_added]

Maybe you should be sent to concentration camp... you know... to learn to concentrate.

Maybe my attention span is too long. I actually didn't get that at first reading. ;-)

This reminds of a friend of my mine telling me the story of how he dealt with his daughter's teenage years. At a certain point after puberty, teenagers naturally become rebellious, but in her case, she became insolent, short-tempered to the point of making everyone around her miserable, and was generally antisocial. Sounds familiar, huh?

Well, one day when she was mouthing off to him about something while the TV blared in the background, he decided to pull the plug. Literally. Out of the wall and out of the TV. The deal was that there would be no TV in the house until she straightened out.

She screamed for the first few days, was somewhere between angry and resentful the week after, and in time settled down, resigned herself to the situation and started reading books (again). By the end of the month, things were harmonious for everyone. When she asked her dad whether she would be able to watch TV again, she did so calmly and politely. He said yes, of course, but with limitations. From then on, things were different for everyone. Today, she doesn't even own a TV.

My guess is that TV, per se, doesn't reduce attention span. It just lowers the level of patience for anyone who watches too much of it. In some way, it's analogous to the current state of affairs with electronic communication (email, posting on web forums, etc.) -- it seems to invite or even encourage a short-tempered rudeness that would be unheard of if the person had to take the time to sit down and write it out the old fashioned way.

Re:Um.

[Knara]

IIRC it was Kyle's cousin. Kyle had paid Cartman to be nice to him and that line is what lost Cartman the payment. Or was it Stan? Whichever kid is Jewish.

Re:Um.

[Knara]

I dunno, I think its like any other thing that gets vilified in our society. It effects different people different ways, and requires different strategies different people to decide how they're gonna prioritize it in life. I have a friend whose major hobby is watching movies and TV, and he's a virtual encyclopedia of knowledge about the entertainment industry. Perhaps the difference is because he's an active, not passive, viewer. Unlike many people, who simply absorb what they are watching without any sort of mental activity going on (or a minimal amount).

Re:Um.

[qazwer00]

Yep the Jewish is Kyle, but Kyle's cousin is also named Kyle... ;)

In related news...

[notthe9]

And in related news, scientists are reporting the polar ice caps are cold.

Re:In related news...

[gardyloo]

In 50 years, that may have transitioned to an anachronism. I hope not.

Re:In related news...

[jollyreaper]

And in related news, scientists are reporting the polar ice caps are cold. Not for much longer.

Re:In related news...

[seebs]

You'd think so, but in fact, it's just the opposite.

This is news?

[mark-t]

This correlation was discovered at _LEAST_ 30 years ago... I remember hearing about it when I was a child.

Re:This is news?

[Anonymous Coward]

And further, the presumption seems to be that a short attention span is a bad thing.

If that were true I would think that the Amish would have taken over the world by now.

Re:This is news?

[mark-t]

Well, I don't think it's a _good_ thing. And your conclusion assumes causation, where all that we know is that there is a corellation.

Re:This is news?

[jedidiah]

We don't even know if TV has anything to do with it. It just might be that 30 years ago is when the kids with no attention span started to gibber jabber about TV in class instead of something else. That might have just represented a certain market penetration point for TVs.

Then there's the possibility that it's a "must jibber jabber" issue rather than an "attention span" issue.

The "jibber jabber" crowd may simply not be cut out for the current quasi-prussian-american educational model that's meant to churn out factory workers and cannon fodder.

Re:This is news?

[ShiNoKaze]

In between commercials?

Re:This is news?

[AnalogDiehard]

This correlation was discovered at _LEAST_ 30 years ago... I remember hearing about it when I was a child.

It was? I didn't see it on TV.

Huh?

[hurting now]

Oooooo, look! Shiny!

One for the books, says Ivan

[Anonymous Coward]

Flappin' them jacks, eh??

You know...

[jmcwork]

The phrase 'Boob tube' was coined long before late night Cinemax was available.

Re:You know...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now it's called You tube. And you are the boob. Or at least you wish you were.

Re:You know...

[pilgrim23]

I always used IGDBB instead of TV. IGDBB is a abreviation of a quote from Jubal Hershaw in Hienlein's Stranger in a Strange Land: "Infernal God Damn Babble Box!"

Wow, what a revelation

[eviloverlordx]

Everybody and their dog has been talking about this for the last few years, so I'm not sure that this is really 'news'. My wife and I try to keep our daughter from watching too much TV, and limiting what she does watch to Sprout. Sometimes, though, you just need the services of the electronic babysitter to keep your sanity.

Re:Wow, what a revelation

[ackthpt]

Everybody and their dog has been talking about this for the last few years, so I'm not sure that this is really 'news'. My wife and I try to keep our daughter from watching too much TV, and limiting what she does watch to Sprout. Sometimes, though, you just need the services of the electronic babysitter to keep your sanity.

Teach her to play chess, then give her one of those eletronic chessboards. Honestly, give kids those Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, Legos and such and they'll keep themselves entertained for hours, develops their little brains, too!

Re:Wow, what a revelation

[eviloverlordx]

"Teach her to play chess, then give her one of those eletronic chessboards. Honestly, give kids those Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, Legos and such and they'll keep themselves entertained for hours, develops their little brains, too!"

Well, since she's coming up on her first birthday next week, those will have to wait. We do have age-appropriate stuff for her, like shape sorters and such.

Re:Wow, what a revelation

[stove]

My 3 year old will spend about 5 happy minutes throwing the Lincoln Logs all over the room, then ask to play with something else. I anticipate him playing with those types of toys in the future, just not right now. If the child is able to play chess, the parent is probably not needing to plop them down in front of the TV.

When I grew up, our family was allowed a half hour of TV a day. Strangely, that half hour was right before dinner. Now I understand my Mom's reasoning...

Re:Wow, what a revelation

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes, though, you just need the services of the electronic babysitter to keep your sanity.

Wow, Ivan really can go anywhere!

Re:Wow, what a revelation

[Anonymous Coward]

Television isn't really age appropriate for children under two years of age either, according to most child experts. We never use the television around our 15 month old daughter. Her only exposure to TV has been the few times that she has visited grandma and grandpa.

Re:Wow, what a revelation

[butterwise]

Sometimes, though, you just need the services of the electronic babysitter to keep your sanity.

Unless, of course, that electronic babysitter goes berserk and mechanically separates your kids. Happened to a friend of mine.

Re:Wow, what a revelation

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of all those--albeit good--suggestions why not just put her in front of Slashdot. She'll be entertained and get:

1. sex education that will make sex education teachers blush;
2. passionate hatred of Microsoft;
3. an understanding of rudimentary In Soviet Russia theory;
4. mod points

Plus there's the added bonus that having a one year old posting can only increase the average intelligence around here (that means you Twitter).

Re:Wow, what a revelation

[plague3106]

I did those things, and also watched a lot of TV. Somehow, no one in my extended family has ADD (which is likely just a made update "disorder" to sell drugs).

Re:Wow, what a revelation

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of all those--albeit good--suggestions why not just put her in front of Slashdot. She'll be entertained and get:
sex education that will make sex education teachers blush;

That may be the most stupid comment in the history of slashdot. That took real talent.

Maybe I could have the Amish give my kid driving lessons while I'm at it.

Re:Wow, what a revelation

[InlawBiker]

"Need" is too strong a word, but I can relate. Sometimes the T.V. is a lifesaver. Like you, we pick shows that are educational, age-appropriate and do not contain advertising. Some programming is even beneficial. To us, it is very important to not let corporate media shape our kids' minds.

We just went camping for a week with our young kids and specifically left the toys behind. They fully entertained themselves the entire time with sticks, pine-cones, bikes, books and fishing poles. Kids don't need T.V.

Of course for myself the hypocrite... I have Lost, Battlestar and the Office all cued up on the TiVo.

Re:Wow, what a revelation

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think dogs can talk, you've definitely been watching too much TV.

Re:Wow, what a revelation

[Culture20]

Everyone's been talking about it on TV, thus, given a few minutes, it is 'news'. If I don't remember having seen it, it's new to me!

it makes sense...

[mseidl]

You get five minute clips of your show, followed by 30 seconds of commercials. Overall the pace of life in America is a very go go go go go! So, things have to be short and sweet. But unfortunately it's spilling over into all types of content and collectively ruining our children. But I suppose parents could get rid of the TV and lock the kids outside in the sun.

Re:it makes sense...

[Radres]

Ruining them? Or improving them?

Re:it makes sense...

[CastrTroy]

They say that shows like Sesame Street are really bad for this, because they consist entirely of 30 second commercials for things such as "the letter T" or "The Number 7". Shows which contain an actual story for them to follow, like Dora the Explorer, tend to be much less harmful to their attention spans. What I like is that most kids shows on PBS, Treehouse, and other networks tend to be commercial free, because they've found that most parents don't want their kids subjected to so much advertising.

Re:it makes sense...

[DragonWriter]

You get five minute clips of your show, followed by 30 seconds of commercials.

That's an interesting theory as to the source of the problem; to test it, one might try to studying the effect of commercial-free viewing vs. commercial-laden viewing (and even different levels of commercial frequency and duration). There is a considerable difference, IME, in viewing experience between watching series on Showtime, HBO, etc. vs. broadcast networks from the lack of commercials, but it'd be interesting to see how that relates to effects like the one studied here.

OTOH, the effect may not be from commercials so much as short cuts in the main body of the program, which are very common in modern TV and movies, in which case programs without commercials might not have a big difference (though the series on the premium cable outlets might still average better; at least the ones I've seen seem not to favor quick cuts as much as broadcast shows do.)

Re:it makes sense...

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> 30 second commercials for things such as "the letter T"

I'd like to buy a vowel, please.

Re:it makes sense...

[SpaceLifeForm]

The depends upon the SPF rating.

Re:it makes sense...

[HTH NE1]

There is a considerable difference, IME, in viewing experience between watching series on Showtime, HBO, etc. vs. broadcast networks from the lack of commercials There's getting to be an annoyingly less difference with Showtime, now that they're taking to advertising their original series in the lower quarter of the screen every 15 minutes or putting a SHO bug in the lower right corner or covering half the credits with promos for the premieres of their series. Even on their HD channel!

Hello, Showtime? Station identification every 15 minutes is only for broadcasters, not premium cable channels!

Crap like that is making me consider dropping Showtime from my line-up. I only keep it for Dexter and an occasional HD movie.

Why is it

[BlowHole666]

I was wondering why it is that back in the 1950's you never heard about people having attention problems. I know doctors have learned a lot about attention problems since the 1950's but you can still tell based on grades, interest in social activities etc. We may have not had a name for it in the 50's but if it was around it would have been documented. But now it just seams that cases of ADD and ADHD are just popping up all over the place. Could it be that parents are no longer at home? The dad does not get the joys of working 9-5 and coming home to his wife and dinner like in leave it to beaver? So the kid spends a lot of time away from their parents because the parents are at work. So the child must think up new ways to entertain them self and it just spirals out of control and the brain tricks the child into always wanting to daydream? So naturally the child sits in front of the TV and that just spurs the imagination, but maybe the imagination should only be used so much before it is always on. So if you think of the your imagination as downloading an mp3, and getting caught as ADHD. If you download one song you will probably be ok. If you download songs 24/7 you will probably get caught.

Re:Why is it

[Jafafa Hots]

Because back then any kids who DID have attention problems were considered to be WITCHES and they were summarily killed. It's true, I saw something on TV about that.

Re:Why is it

[decipher_saint]

In the 50s if you had a problem you were just "funny", if it was too much for the family to handle they'd drop you off at the funny farm and pump you full of drugs.

I wonder sometimes about exactly how "good" attention span is defined. I mean back in the 50s they used to have intermission for motion pictures. Maybe inattentive behaviour went unnoticed? (It would explain the Edsel).

Re:Why is it

[BlowHole666]

Yes you were considered funny. But in the back of your mind you knew that if you acted up the teacher was going to smack the crap out of you, or your dad was going to kick the crap out of you at home. I think it all just comes down to parenting and paying attention to the child rather then just dropping them in front of the TV, computer, or video game console. Parents are just getting lazy and they do not discipline.

Re:Why is it

[hatchet]

It's because in the 1950's people with attention problems were just stupid.
Similarly, retards became mentally challenged and cripples became paraplegic or physically challenged

Re:Why is it

[Ubergrendle]

Its more complicated than that, but you're on the right track. Can't remember the exact details of the show, but a CBC Radio program called Ideas had a sociologist on one episode talking about the separation of humanity from nature and doing things 'real'. Nature in all its aspects is beaten back, controlled, dominated, destroyed. We are having generations of children grow up with absent parents, 24/7 electronic media, and a complete segregation from spontaneous childhood play. -- the last one being the MOST troublesome. I was fortunate to grow up in a suburb that had lots of wild spaces to play in, and before parents had kids lined up in supervised after school programs 7 days a week. Kids nowadays only see a flowing river in Legends of Zelda; they see a forest on TV.

Recently a TV program on the Food Network, Jamie Oliver's School Dinners, really hit this mark home for me. The majority of kids in a classroom couldn't identify an unprocessed carrot from a potato. (!!!)

Over dependence upon TV is a symptom, not the cause IMHO. Yes TV has some detrimental effects, but there are some communicative benefits as well. Lack of physical activity, lack of access to 'nature', lack of spontaneous play, hyper-compressed 'quality' time with children as both parents work...these are all problematic, ontop of TV exposure.

Re:Why is it

[bwindle2]

Maybe it didn't happen (as much) in the '50s because TV was less entertaining back then. Then: 3 channels of fuzzy, black&white content without so much as a knee exposed, and certainly no sex and hardly any violence. Now: You get 500 channels of crystal-clear content, oft sprinkled with half-naked women, violence, and sex.

Re:Why is it

[Jarjarthejedi]

Mod Parent Up. Much as modern entertainment is unlikely to be a cause behind modern violence but more likely a channel used by those who already have those tendencies. In other words, it's not that T.V. causes ADD, it's that ADD goes (semi-)well with T.V.

One interesting note is that I know that I, and my friend who was actually diagnosed with ADD, both don't watch T.V. because it's way too boring. Honestly I don't have the attention span for T.V., and I'm not ADD.

I wonder what percentage of ADD diagnosed children actually watch T.V. voluntarily nowadays, I would imagine that it's much smaller than the percentage of ADD diagnosed people who spend most of their time online as that is a much faster, more controllable form of entertainment. If one site gets boring just go to another.

In addition, with the modern extremely broad definition of ADD I wonder how we can make any generalizations about ADD diagnosed people. Remember that officially diagnosed friend of mine? We regurally play multi-hour sessions of Age of Empires, and he stays focused the entire time no problem. He also gets great grades, and doesn't take any medications at all. When someone who doesn't need any meds to do well in school and pay attention for hours can be diagnosed with ADD then I personally believe the diagnosis of ADD is far to wide. Right now it seems like if you get bored easily with things adults consider important, which are 9 times out of 10 extremely boring, then you're ADD.

Re:Why is it

[BlowHole666]

No that is the reason kids shoot up the school. Not ADD. Or is it video games, or music?? Do not know what the excuse is now.

Re:Why is it

[mark-t]

The reason it is more common now than it used to be is two fold: one, our society has improved mechanisms for detecting neurologically atypical activity due to improved social programs and medical technologies; and two, there actually _are_ more people in the world with these disorders than before. The reason for the latter is connected with how medical technology has advanced over the past century or so. Before, people with either mental or physical disabilities would not usually be able to be successful, and thus would not typically survive in a competitive world. These people would have relatively few offspring, and the genes associated with those disabilities would not be very common. Enter ever-more improved medicines, the ability to control or limit the effects of the disabilities, allowing people with the genes associated with them to reproduce as commonly as people with typical human gene structures. The result is that the gene pool contains an increasing amount of "flawed" genetic material, increasing the likelihood that a child would be born with some disorder or another.

Re:Why is it

[blindd0t]

I don't know if the parent should be mod'd off-topic or funny. This person went from talking about people in the 1950's to justifying why it should be OK to download music illegally on occasion (with several other topics in-between). :-)

Re:Why is it

[Knuckles]

Recently a TV program on the Food Network, Jamie Oliver's School Dinners, really hit this mark home for me. The majority of kids in a classroom couldn't identify an unprocessed carrot from a potato. (!!!)

I recently read about a study being done in German schools that allegedly found that 30% of kids aged 6 to 11 could not walk backwards.

Re:Why is it

[Anonymous Coward]

consider this, in the 1950's sexual transmitted diseases that caused mental disorders, like syphilis, where not classified like they are now. back then they would call it dementia or something like it, people in the medical profession know what it was, but it was a different society. having to even tell someone that you had a problem was bad enough, let alone telling them you have a mental disorder, let alone telling them you had a sexual transmitted disease! but this kind of act wasnt left to just stds but also for alot of medical disorders, it was simply thought of as shameful.

to be honest, i blame the 60s generation. stupid hippies made it so physical punishment, which is one of the most effective forms of conditioning, became taboo. other taboos, like mental illness, became more socially accepted. etc...
to make matters worse, things like add and adhd have become social scapegoats for any deviant or bored child. situations where teachers incest that a child be prescribed medication or a neglectful parent that just wants a cowed child and the like, as opposed to a doctor being allowed to do his or her job.

when you think about it, children are also not allowed to get away with nearly half the things older generations where able to. what ever happened to boys will be boys? why are children required to be anything but children? to assume that a child is able to sit and do one thing for longer then say 20 mins, with perhaps the exception of videogames and tv, is just silly. heck, if a child is that focused i would wager that there is something wrong with that one child and not the rest of the children that are bouncing off the walls, because thats what children do.

the thing about adhd and add kids is that they have problems controlling their impulses for as long as normal children. to may kids are though to have some disorder when in reality they are just kids! we should focus on helping the ones who need help, not pandering to our social munchausens and collective hypochondria.

wait, what was i talking about?

Re:Why is it

[BlowHole666]

Sorry I was using downloading music to express the point I was trying to make. It just happened to be off topic and funny :)

Re:Why is it

[mcmonkey]

In the 50s if you had a problem you were just "funny", if it was too much for the family to handle they'd drop you off at the funny farm and pump you full of drugs.

Tell me more about these funny farms. Do the have conjugal visits?

Re:Why is it

[tsstahl]

...or the incidence of occurrence for these traits has stayed the same in proportion to the entire population. And as population has exploded, the percentage of "flawed" people is the same, but are physically more numerous because the human census is greater.

Re:Why is it

[Xtravar]

I was thinking the same thing - "if a child doesn't pay attention to what *I* want him/her to pay attention to, the child has an attention problem." Sorry, it doesn't work that way.

Perhaps the best way to get kids to pay attention is to raise them to appreciate things for which you want them to be interested in... and then not kill the opportunity with boring school teachers.

I've got the same problem with TV, too. I have always needed to do something /while/ watching TV... whether that's play with Legos as a child or surf the interweb as an adult. Perhaps I'm just able to better divide my attention... I doodle at meetings too (and no doubt some people think I'm not paying attention).

Re:Why is it

[SpaceLifeForm]

You gotta admit though, June was hot!

Re:Why is it

[kharchenko]

I think that the style of TV cinematography contributes to that. Modern TV changes the scene every few seconds.

You get used to that when you watch a lot of TV, but I stopped watching TV regularly a few years back, and every time I see it now it's highly annoying how each scene is yanked from under my eyes as soon as I get comfortable with it.

Re:Why is it

[fonetik]

And they didn't have the drug to sell, so they hadn't invented the disease yet.

Re:Why is it

[bitslinger_42]

Sure, that must be it. More flawed genetic material. Couldn't possibly be that drug corporations are allowed to advertise individual products directly the consumers of the drugs, and have figured out that they get a much better revenue stream if, instead of curing diseases, they develop drugs that are a) "prescribed" by grade school counselors, b) taken daily, and c) have to be taken continuously for the life of the customer.

There are certainly some people who suffer from an inability to maintain concentration, so much so that their livelihood is severely affected, but the sharp rise is much more likely due to the pervasive attitude that anyone who doesn't conform must be sick, and therefore in need of life-long doping.

Re:Why is it

[zifferent]

In addition, with the modern extremely broad definition of ADD I wonder how we can make any generalizations about ADD diagnosed people. Remember that officially diagnosed friend of mine? We regurally play multi-hour sessions of Age of Empires, and he stays focused the entire time no problem. He also gets great grades, and doesn't take any medications at all. When someone who doesn't need any meds to do well in school and pay attention for hours can be diagnosed with ADD then I personally believe the diagnosis of ADD is far to wide.

That's right. You, in you're near infinite wisdom know more than all the psychologists and psychiatrists combined.

If I see one more idiot non-psychologist person drag out this uneducated screed, I'm gonna screem. ADD was actually poorly named, because they didn't completely understand the disease at first. It would be more accurate to call it Attention Control Deficit Disorder.

Most people can shift their focus fairly easily, so easily in fact that they don't even notice. An ADDer has no control.

For instance, when walking into a room with a television on, I can barely talk to a person without being completely distracted by the TV. On the other hand during some intense activities an ADDer like myself can fall into a sort of HyperFocus in which the rest of the world doesn't exist. This is what your friend is doing while playing the game.

Before medicine I would often be doing some work on my computer and become so engrossed that my boss would be literally standing beside me, yelling my name and I wouldn't even notice him there.

Re:Why is it

[butterwise]

Are you kidding? August was off the charts!

Re:Why is it

[plague3106]

ADD and ADHD are just excuses to drug children. Amazing how many new "diseases" have come about since the drug companies were allowed to advertise.

Re:Why is it

[mark-t]

Even if what you were saying were true, the effect I described above would still be equally present. Besides being unnecessary to explain the situation, it introduces all the complexities that any conspiracy theory has. Occam's razor suggests your proposal to be superfluous at best, incorrect at worse.

Re:Why is it

[CastrTroy]

My 15 month old can do that. I find it very disturbing that a 6 year old could not do that, let alone an 11 year old.

Re:Why is it

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding? In the 50's there were like 10000 TV's in the whole world. Besides, have you ever seen TV from the 50's? Nobody wanted to watch that shit.

Look at the "advances" in advertising and programming (more, more, more, faster, faster) in the last 50 years then we'll talk about attention span.

Re:Why is it

[jedidiah]

> That's right. You, in you're near infinite wisdom know more
> than all the psychologists and psychiatrists combined.

That's probably not saying much. The problem with people that claim to actually
understand the human mind is this: the human mind is probably the single most
complicated thing we could possibly study. It's probably worse than economics
and sociology (which we are also pretty bad at).

Now add on to this inherent complexity the fact that we can't apply many of
the same research techniques that we might apply to chemicals, subatomic
particles, mice or chimps. We are really hamstrung by what we can ethically
do in terms of experiments.

So you will just excuse my skepticism as I experience members of the mental
professions creating pathologies out of things that should not really be
in the DSM-IV and making claims that are often falsified by simple every
day experiences.

The term QUACK is very appropriate.

Get past the organic chemistry and you are really in uncharted territory (despite claims to the contrary).

Re:Why is it

[Knuckles]

I find it very disturbing, too.

Re:Why is it

[bitslinger_42]

Ok, take away the conspiracy theory. Perhaps the problem isn't that there are more people with concentration problems than before but that our current environment makes such problems more noticeable. Perhaps there is the same ratio of "normal" to "atypical", it is just that with population increasing over the past 50 years ago, the absolute numbers have increased to noticeable levels. Perhaps there isn't an increase, either in ratio or in absolute value, but the for-profit press is making us more aware of the issue in an attempt to gain readership (West Nile Virus crisis anyone?)

The simple fact is that people are hugely complex entities. Regardless of what Merck/CNN tell us, the odds that watching TV is the sole cause of ADD are extremely low. There are some medical events for which a strong causal relationship can be shown (i.e. preventing oxygen from reaching the brain causes death), the rest of medicine is murky at best. The press loves to simplify medical findings, and with the litigious nature of our society, being able to say asbestos or saccharin causes cancer is easy and profitable, but by no means 100% accurate. Mental health is even more fraught with problems, as rigorous scientific study of behavior is an exceedingly recent practice. Combine that with the short age of television and the rapid rate of change in the past 100 years, and it becomes very, very difficult to be able to point at two events and say that A conclusively, exclusively causes B.

Could there be a relationship between watching television and concentration problems? Sure. Will I be limiting the amount of television my children watch? Probably, although it will be because I believe that most television is unmitigated crap and not that I believe it will rot my kids' brains.

Re:Why is it

[jedidiah]

It is in the interests of big-pharma for you to take drugs you don't need. This is trivial. It is the same force that drives all companies that want to sell you something. It's like a force of nature. Actually, it's a force of human nature.

Deny it is much like trying to deny gravity.

What would Occam think of that?

Big-pharma courts the doctors. They also advertise to the customers to push the doctors from both directions. Many find themselves in a "prescribe or die" situation.

The "consipiracy" is in your face. It's hardly hidden. Although I don't know if your family physician would admit to being wined and dined by Merck and friends.

Re:Why is it

[Knuckles]

I should add that the study was specifically done in Berlin, so we are mostly talking about kids from the city. But still ...

Re:Why is it

[Anonymous Coward]

I was wondering why it is that back in the 1950's you never heard about people having attention problems. I know doctors have learned a lot about attention problems since the 1950's but you can still tell based on grades, interest in social activities etc. We may have not had a name for it in the 50's but if it was around it would have been documented.

You apparently never met some of my relatives. The difference was simply that they skipped school when they got too restless and ran around like maniacs, and it was the 50s and small town America so no one cared.

Of course, I do think attention problems are overdiagnosed today. My coworker told me a story about a little girl back in the 40s who couldn't sit still. She was always fidgeting and getting up and moving around and getting in trouble, so her mother took her to the doctor to see what was wrong with her. The doctor checked the little girl out, then said he wanted to speak to the mother outside the room. As the doctor left, he turned on the radio. As he and the mother stood outside the room, they watched as the little girl got up and then started dancing around. "See?" The doctor said. "There's nothing wrong with her. She's a dancer. Get her some dance classes."

Today she'd be Martha Graham on Ritalin.

Re:Why is it

[mark-t]

That is arguably a very valid point... but to presume it is the primary cause would be to dismiss or at the very least lessen the implications on the gene pool of an ever-growing number of "atypical" people successfully breeding. If disabilities and disorders are, in fact, genetically caused, then improved medical technologies are only furthering the abilities of people who cary these genes to successfully reproduce, where left to their own devices these atypical genes would simply die out because of unsuccessful or at least extremely limited reproduction.

As for the connection between tv and concentration disorders, Attention deficit doesn't mean the person cannot concentrate at all, it only means that typical real-world levels of stimulation are insufficient to enable them to effectively concentrate, and it's easy to see that the typically fast pace of TV could desensitize younger children to otherwise normal stimulation levels. I still highly doubt it's actual the cause, however... more likely just the trigger of a disposition that may already be present in the individual. A child benefits far more from personal interaction than watching TV anyways, so the only excuse to put a kid in front of television for an extended period would be because of lazy adults.

Re:Why is it

[mark-t]

I didn't deny it... I only said it was unnecessary, given the implications that modern medicine is already enabling people with atypical genes to successfully reproduce and diluting the human gene pool with people with disabilities or disorders (including myself). So even at best, the proposition is superfluous... and unlikely to be a significant factor, given the evolutionary implications of atypical genes surviving.

Re:Why is it

[bitslinger_42]

If there is a genetic factor, and if persons with this genetic factor are successfully breeding, why is the atypical attention span a disorder? Why isn't it an evolutionary measure that the species is developing to deal with the rapid pace of change that has developed?

My personal (albeit admittedly paranoid) view is that our society still believes that different==sick. Couple that attitude with the other factors mentioned elsewhere (both parents working outside home, the ease of using the TV as a babysitter, the chronic desire in the United States to separate ones actions from the responsibility to deal with the consequences of those actions, and the profit-driven nature of the modern pharmaceutical corporations), and I see a fairly clear reason why atypical attention spans are being treated as a disease rather than an adaptation.

Re:Why is it

[Per Wigren]

The problems people with ADD/ADHD experience are very real. What's next? Will you claim that depressions don't exist?
Let me tell you, as a 30 year old with ADD I'm VERY good at hiding the symptoms to others.

When it's really really important I can collect enough mental energy to be able to deal with boring and/or bureaucratic things (like paying my bills or doing stuff at work) for a short while, but then I can get exhausted to the point that I can barely remember my name until I get some mental rest. That's the hypofocus/hypoactive part.

When I get an idea that will revolutionize the world (and I get those a lot) or find some new and upcoming piece of exiting technology that I just HAVE to learn I get so sucked up in it that I don't hear the phone ringing, I don't feel that I'm hungry or tired until I literally pass out and fall off the chair (it really has happened). I even get pissed off when I have to pee because it's interrupting me. When in this mood (hyperfocus) I get depressed if I'm not allowed to focus on this. Multitasking is not an option.

Do you call these fake or nonexisting problems?

People who meet me occasionally never notice these things, not even most people I work with and meet almost every day. I have (and still am) developed strategies for coping with the problems, thanks to being diagnosed. Your anecdotes as an observer mean jack shit as things are rarely what they seem to be.

Re:Why is it

[mark-t]

If there is a genetic factor, and if persons with this genetic factor are successfully breeding, why is the atypical attention span a disorder?

Because without medical treatment, a person's survivability and ability to pass on their genes is inhibited. I'm not saying that it's better to let people who are sick suffer with their illness without treatment, I'm only saying that our improved medical technologies that are supposed to make us healthier have only evolved our people to be increasingly dependant on it, which is brutally ironic. Of course, I admit that the conspiracy theory fits well into this at this point, but it doesn't dismiss the evolutionary aspect of what I've been saying, and isn't necessary to explain the situation.

Re:Why is it

[sugrshack]

I believe you could get a beer in the movie theater back then... maybe the intermission was for the pee break?

Re:Why is it

[myowntrueself]

I was wondering why it is that back in the 1950's you never heard about people having attention problems.

Maybe because back then TV ads, such as they were, were *live* events, every one different. They were *worth* watching just for the bloopers.

Re:Why is it

[jahudabudy]

The problem is it is impossible to get completely beyond our own very subjective experience of the mind (except, as you say, with the org. chem. which currently does little to explain most human emotions/motivations). Most of us have most things in us, but experience them to much different degrees and in different combinations.

I think Freud is a wonderful example of the problems inherent in psychology. Freud was a genius, and very accurately diagnosed a host of human mental tendencies. Of course, they were all his tendencies, and don't necessarily translate well to 95% of the population b/c Freud was quite abnormal. But the things that he found to be powerfully motivating for himself are there in most of us, just toned down to a degree that make them irrelevant when it comes to any practical self-analysis. I mean, sure, there was a point in my life when I fixated on what went in my mouth and out my butt. However, those experiences are no longer relevant to my emotional processes b/c they have been eclipsed by other experiences that are so much more significant than the minuscule impact oral/anal fixations have on me at this point.

Re:Why is it

[Anonymous Coward]

ADHD is not particularly broadly defined, the DSM has some specific criteria for it. I'm disagnosed with it myself. It's not unusual for those with the disorder to be able to pay attention to novel or stimulating tasks. We can all read well written and intriguing novels quite easily (should we have interest in it). However, you ask us to read a textbook and we may find ourselves rereading the same paragraph a few times without picking up a single concept. We may not even know we're rereading it.

Stimulation is key in all those who have ADD, which is why our medication consists of stimulants. Tasks that stimulate pose no problem. Tasks that do not stimulate drop our attention like rocks.

Re:Why is it

[DerangedAlchemist]

Half of parents believe their children are hyper active. About half to 2/3 of American adults are over-weight, largely due to inactivity.

Which behavior is abnormal.

Re:Why is it

[zifferent]

Negative karma be damned: You are a completely ignorant and a vain bigoted asshole to boot!

Go out. Get some books. Learn about a subject before spewing out your mouth about that which you don't know.

Since you obviously don't have a clue, it is very easy for me to say that you have no idea what goes on in other people's heads.

And you don't seem to grasp some of the basic concepts of science, observation and experimentation to say that psychologists just pull these pathologies out of thin air.

Most brain diseases have been studied extensively. If you bothered to learn you will be surprised to find that these are rigorous studies, with measurable results, that can be repeated. From studies of rare brain injuries in identical twins to mapping the brains with MRIs to cleverly designed tests and experiments that carefully discern bits of information, these all go together to paint a larger picture of the various abnormalities of the brain. These are real things which you can never grasp from behind your ignorance, yet you seemed to have developed a [ill informed] opinion about.

Re:Why is it

[Qrlx]

Healthy skepticism is great, but to dismiss the entire field of mental health as the work of QUACKS is ridiculous. You sound like Tom Cruise.

Do not dismiss the role of Big Pharma in codifying new conditions that can now be treated, in pill form. "Ask your doctor if {INSERT EXPENSIVELY CRAFTED NOUN HERE} is right for you."

We are an Instant Gratification culture, we'll always choose the diet pill over exercise.

In essence, you're blaming the market for providing products people (think they) want.

Socialization, i.e., reducing the pressure from market forces on the health-care decision making process, is probably the most effective fix.

Re:Why is it

[Gnostic Ronin]

Well, I have my own theory.

Back in 1955, if a kid didn't do as he was supposed to, the kid got in trouble. Today, if a kid doesn't do as he is told, he doesn't get in trouble. In fact many times it gets him a bribe. "Do your homework, and we'll go out for icecream!". So the kid doesn't ever learn to do things that simply *have* to get done. He stays a child for his entire life (at least as far as maturity goes.

Secondly, our entire culture is set up around people catering to you. A kid in 1955 or even 1965 wasn't trained to think that he had to have all kinds of toys and video games. He wasn't used to the idea that school was supposed to be entertaining. We're essentially an instant gratification society -- one that expects -- DEMANDS -- that we get everything we want quickly and easily without effort.

I don't think TV is as much to blame as the culture in general. We're trained to seek instant gratification. Doing a page of math problems is not instant gratification, and unless a child learns to delay gratification he can't focus on boring math problems. That's not biological problems. It's culture.

Re:Why is it

[Eccles]

Your behavior sounds a lot like my son's. What did you do for treatment?

Re:Why is it

[praxis]

I think it improbable that attention deficit disorders became more prevalent in our gene pool over a period of a hundred years. I do not have hard numbers on this though, so I'd like to see yours.

I think it more likely that medical diagnosis has changed over the last hundred years. No, whether these disorders have existed all along and have become diagnosable and treatable, or have been misrepresented by an overzelous medical establishment funded primary by private monies from big pharma, I have no idea.

I would be very surprised though if it can be shown that these disorders have appeared in our gene pool in the last hundred years, as you assert.

Re:Why is it

[inKubus]

Sounds like caffineosis.. You might want to cut out coffee and start taking a vitamin and going for long walks in the evenings before bed. Keep yourself from ripping through things by taking mandatory breaks. And stop worrying so much.

Re:Why is it

[mark-t]

They haven't appeared in the last hundred years... they've always been there, they just weren't as common before because people with these disorders would not typically reproduce before.

Re:Why is it

[StikyPad]

The axiom is that "correlation does not imply causation," not that "correlation excludes causation." There's a high incidence of cavities among people who eat lots of sugary foods. Do sugary foods promote cavities, or do cavities compel people to eat sugary foods? It's always worth *considering* that your causes are reversed (or affected by some unknown/unconsidered external factor, such as oral hygiene), but in many cases the reverse just doesn't make sense. If cavities promoted a sugary diet, you'd expect to see people eat more sugary food as they accumulate more cavities. Sure, you might find correlation in otherwise unrelated data -- the inverse ratio of pirates to global temperature is the typical example I believe -- but that's more of a warning to take your results with a grain of salt, not to dismiss them out of hand. (And actually, piracy is rampant in many parts of Africa and Asia today, not to mention that temperature data (arguments of validity aside) goes back well before there were any tall ships in the Caribbean, so that particular citation isn't accurate).

In this particular case, it's worth *considering* that ADD causes more TV viewing, but do the kids really have much of a say in it? Not if the parent has a backbone, and you could easily refine your data to exclude cases where the parent lets the child decide, assuming you could contact the parents to ask them. Essentially, the will of the child is irrelevant.

Re:Why is it

[bckrispi]

Well, I have my own theory.

Back in 1955, if a kid didn't do as he was supposed to, the kid got in trouble. Today, if a kid doesn't do as he is told, he doesn't get in trouble. In fact many times it gets him a bribe. "Do your homework, and we'll go out for icecream!". So the kid doesn't ever learn to do things that simply *have* to get done. He stays a child for his entire life (at least as far as maturity goes.

With all due respect, your "theory" is a crock of weasel shit not even in the same multiverse as reality. If you were ever to have the misfortune of raising a child with ADD/ADHD, you would soon come groveling back here to beg the forgiveness of every parent that has been through the pure HELL of this disease.

My stepson has had symptoms of ADHD for about five years. A's and B's in school suddenly and inexplicably fell to straight D's and F's: The reason? He wasn't turning in homework... any of it!! So instantly, the hammer fell. No, TV, no video games, no friends, NOTHING, until the behavior changed.

Guess what, Einstein?

It had *no* effect!

We pulled him out of all of his extra-curricular activities that he *loved* doing.

No effect!

We'd try a less strict and more positive 'carrot and stick' approach.

Still, no effect!

We would sit with him as homework was done - micromanaging every aspect of his schoolwork. We would make sure that each assignment was completed and put into a folder so the following morning, all he had to do was hand it to the teacher to get an 'A'... A week later, we'd get a call from his teacher letting us know that none of the work was ever turned in!

By this point, (almost two years into it) he was getting straight F's. Against the risk of being held back, my wife and I dropped $13,000 (THIRTEEN FUCKING THOUSAND DOLLARS - ON A 14 YEAR OLD!!) for a private tutor at a learning center.

And guess what???

No.... Fucking.... Effect!!

Finally, three years after the problems first started, his psychiatrist found a combination of meds that worked. The grades (and his attitude) started to stabilize. But even with that, it is still a struggle every...fucking...day to keep him focused on the job that needs to get done.

So next time you have an idea to spout off another "Theory", shut your mouth and actually learn about the subject you're trying to talk about.

Re:Why is it

[Maelwryth]

"Your anecdotes as an observer mean jack shit as things are rarely what they seem to be."

Doctors are observers too.

Re:Why is it

[Per Wigren]

But hopefully you are slightly more open and honest to your doctor and tell them about all the stuff you don't want to tell or show the people you don't share your life with...

Re:Why is it

[pikine]

He wasn't turning in homework... any of it!! So instantly, the hammer fell. No, TV, no video games, no friends, NOTHING, until the behavior changed.

I would personally resent this if I were your step son. How long has he been your step son until his school performance started to suffer?

We would sit with him as homework was done - micromanaging every aspect of his schoolwork. We would make sure that each assignment was completed and put into a folder so the following morning, all he had to do was hand it to the teacher to get an 'A'... A week later, we'd get a call from his teacher letting us know that none of the work was ever turned in!

Sounds like a kid who is determined to make your life miserable. Refusing to turn in completed homework is his only feeble attempt at civil disobedience, and then you drug him to compliance. One flew over the cuckoo's nest.

Re:Why is it

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh GOD, here we go again!!!

When it's really really important I can collect enough mental energy to be able to deal with boring and/or bureaucratic things (like paying my bills or doing stuff at work) for a short while,

Boring things are difficult for EVERYBODY to focus on. That's WHY THEY'RE CALLED "BORING".

but then I can get exhausted to the point that I can barely remember my name until I get some mental rest. That's the hypofocus/hypoactive part.

EVERYBODY gets exhausted to the point of failed memory performance until they get some mental rest. That's why interrogation techniques work.

When I get an idea that will revolutionize the world (and I get those a lot)

or you THINK you do. EVERYBODY is prone to overestimate their talent, especially if they have a naive point of view where they don't know about the ten other people the idea has already occurred to.

or find some new and upcoming piece of exiting technology that I just HAVE to learn I get so sucked up in it that I don't hear the phone ringing, I don't feel that I'm hungry or tired until I literally pass out and fall off the chair (it really has happened). I even get pissed off when I have to pee because it's interrupting me. When in this mood (hyperfocus) I get depressed if I'm not allowed to focus on this. Multitasking is not an option.

That's called "PASSION". EVERYBODY gets involved in a task to the point where they block out disturbances, be it reading or tinkering or working or having sex. If you do it a lot, you have a lot of passion.

Try a NEW medication I've invented: I call it DEALING WITH LIFE.

But that's just too fucking mundane for self-absorbed angsty shits like you, isn't it? Go on and give yourself a heart attack on your crack^H^H^H^H^H ritalin pills, see if I care.

Re:Why is it

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the real problem is parents who just can not understand that half of children are below average. They absolutely REFUSE to accept the fact that their children could possibly be "below average" or even dumb and be on any other path than an ivy league school. So when they start getting C's in school, they take them to a doctor who does the usual hearing and vision tests. This is often not enough, so soccer mom frantically demands to the doctor that SOMETHING be done. Off to a psychologist, who then after putting them in a stark empty white room for a half hour, notices they get a little antsy. Aha! This is it! They have ADD/ADHD! Mommy now knows what she knew all along- her son wasn't dumb, he just has a medical condition. Give Johnny a few pills a day and he will back on Harvard's mailing list in no time.

Ok so I am being a bit dramatic, but this is not too far off the mark of what I have seen. This trend seems to have started when I was in middle school, and now that I look back on my friends that were on Ritalin and the like all had to varying degrees helicopter parents, and siblings that were smarter than them.

Another factor is that in the past, school wasn't as important as it is now. You didn't need to be an A student with a bachelors/masters to make a living and raise a family. With a high school diploma, you could buy a modest house in the suburbs and live a nice life working in a factory or as a tradesman of some sort. Blue collar work is stigmatized now and it has resulted in it being very difficult to find a good plumber or carpenter, at least in the NYC metro area. And with the rates they charge, they make a better living than most cube dwellers I know!

Re:Why is it

[Per Wigren]

I'm glad to hear that you have found a way to "deal with life" that works for you.
Fortunately I have also (finally) found ways that work for me most of the time for most situations.
However, everybody is different, have different needs and different thresholds. Simply put we all have different connection paths in our neuron networks. You may call me a self-absorbed angsty shit but you don't know me and you don't know what happens in my brain in different situations, how I feel. You're a selfish prick for assuming that just because you are able to deal with situation X everybody else must be also.

Re:Why is it

[arbarbonif]

[quote]Sounds like a kid who is determined to make your life miserable. Refusing to turn in completed homework is his only feeble attempt at civil disobedience, and then you drug him to compliance. One flew over the cuckoo's nest.[/quote]

This is interesting to me, since I had the same problem as this kid in college. Doing my homework (physics labs were the worst) and just forgetting to turn it in. I didn't 'refuse' I just forgot... alot. I was also pretty depressed at that time, so I'm not sure if it is ADD or depressions/self-destruction as a cause. I do have to pay attention to where I sit in bar/restauants, since if there is a TV in my field of view I cannot reliably hold a conversation with anyone.

Nowadays I self-medicate with caffiene and deal with it pretty well, but I wouldn't assume that the homework this is 'civil disobedience'...

Re:Why is it

[zifferent]

Concerta at first and , as well as therapy. I also did some heavy research into the disease and successful coping mechanisms. (the book: "You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!" by by Kate Kelly and Peggy Ramundo was tremendously helpful.)

Several months into Concerta and was I finding that the Ritalin ups and downs were too much for me to handle. One 12 hour Concerta would last roughly 9 hours, which was fine while I was at work, but the trough of the wave actually brought me lower than my normal ADD baseline making me useless after I came home. The Psychiatrist gave me follow on Ritalin pill but if I took it, then I was completely exhausted by the end of the day.

Now I'm completely off of the stimulants and I'm taking Strattera, and while it doesn't work quite as well as the Ritalin did, it works well enough without having to deal with any side-effects like the aforementioned stimulant treadmill. The only unwanted side-effect is that I have to eat before taking my pills in the morning. Otherwise I end up with some pretty heavy nausea.

Re:Why is it

[Gnostic Ronin]

First off, I agree that *some* ADD exists. However, I think at least 75% of the time the problem isn't that the kid has an actual mental disorder, it's that the parents never bothered to teach them responsibilty in the first place. Brain disorders do exist, but when half of the average public school seems to have ADD, I don't think it's the kids.

I work at a cafeteria, and I was in charge of teenagers for a long time. It seems to me, just from observing their behavior that they'd never been *expected* to do a task to completion -- ever. They would pretty much look at you and laugh when you told them that they had to fill up all the cereals for the next morning, or that I was *shock* *horror* serious when I said that the tables were sticky and they'd have to wash them again. These kids were normal, of average intelligence, and they expected to get away with not doing what they were supposed to be doing. I gave up because the boss wasn't interested in getting rid of the lazy ones.

I actually sorta feel sorry for these kids, because once they get into the real, adult world, they're in for a world of hurt. The boss isn't going to accept a half finished report, and isn't going to stand over them to make sure they're working when they're supposed to be. And the bill collectors aren't going to be swayed by their sob stories. They'll have to learn to be responsible on their own as an adult, rather than having been properly taught when they were kids.

And we absolutely are an instant gratification society. We don't save for months to buy a new toy, we put it on credit. We get impatient at red lights and standing in line at the store. Our most popular programs are game shows where a contestant has a chance to be simply handed a prize worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't think its a healthy way to run a society.

Re:Why is it

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like caffineosis.. You might want to cut out coffee and start taking a vitamin and going for long walks in the evenings before bed. Keep yourself from ripping through things by taking mandatory breaks. And stop worrying so much.

WOW! Is that your professional opinion there Doc? Caffineosis, that sounds serious! Shit.

So no really, what's you're background in, because it's completely obvious that your a conceited asshole who lets his personal politics trump science fact. Don't let the truth get in the way!

Good luck with that!

They think TV is causes problems...

[Subm]

... reporting that too much television may be linked to a bad attention span ...

Wait until they study the effects of too much internet!

Don't blame Baywatch :)

[jayemcee]

The spike (+1 hour) occurred between 1986-1988, and the first episode wasn't until 1989. I'm guessing Miami Vice :)

People are not wearing enough hats.

[Mr. Flibble]

CHAIRMAN: ...Which brings us once again to the urgent realization of just how much there is still left to own. Item six on the agenda: the meaning of life. Now, uh, Harry, you've had some thoughts on this.
HARRY:
        That's right. Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and, uh, what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: people are not wearing enough hats. Two: matter is energy. In the universe, there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this soul does not exist ab initio, as orthodox Christianity teaches. It has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved, owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.
        [pause]
BERT:
        What was that about hats, again?
HARRY:
        Oh, uh, people aren't wearing enough.
CHAIRMAN:
        Is this true?

EDMUND:
        Certainly. Hat sales have increased, but not pari passu, as our research initially--
BERT:
        But when you say 'enough', enough for what purpose?
GUNTHER:
        Can I just ask, with reference to your second point, when you say souls don't develop because people become distracted,...
        [rumble] ...has anyone noticed that building there before?

Re:People are not wearing enough hats.

[$RANDOMLUSER]

My God, whoever modded that "troll" wasn't paying attention... errrr, never mind.

Three hours a day!

[japhmi]

From TFA:

"Those who watched more than two hours, and particularly those who watched more than three hours, of television per day during childhood had above-average symptoms of attention problems in adolescence,"

Any parent who lets their kid watch 3 hours a day every day of TV is insane. I get mad at myself because I let my kids watch 2 hours on a weekend and 1/2 an hour most weekdays.

Re:Three hours a day!

[Anonymous Coward]

Any parent who lets their kid watch 3 hours a day every day of TV is insane. I get mad at myself because I let my kids watch 2 hours on a weekend and 1/2 an hour most weekdays.

After reading comments about this article I have concluded that my children's attention span is important and will now point a hose into the box to clean it rather than letting them out. That letting them out to watch a half hour of TV on Saturdays was definitely messing them up.

Blame parents

[bhmit1]

Watching TV leads to parents yelling at kids to stop wasting all the time doing nothing. So kids learn to get their viewing in quickly. There's also the issue with advertisements and multiple channels. People learn to not focus too much on one show because their ad will be over in the important channel in 2 minutes, but dvr's are fixing that. I still like blaming parents, well them and society, since they made things so bad in the world that the den is the last semi-safe place for kids to play. Whatever happened to the innocence of riding a bike down the middle of the street with a toy gun playing cops and robbers?

We now return to the regularly scheduled "what were you talking about" jokes.

I have no idea what you are talking about

[everphilski]

so here is a bunny with a pancake on its head

Re:I have no idea what you are talking about

[TheLink]

I see TWO pancakes.

I suppose that means I don't have

Hey that's a cute bunny!

Re:I have no idea what you are talking about

[Raideen]

That's actually a dorayaki. Apparently, it's a Japanese bunny. mmm... dorayaki

I prefer hot grits, myself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you.

Scope of Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I certainly agree that viewing TV impacts a persons attention span. I can't bear to watch TV for more than say 15 minutes, maybe a half hour a day at most. The quality of TV lately has sucked the fun of turning on the 'Idiot Box'.

Oh you mean attention AWAY from the TV.. I see, well, no wonder people have low attention spans, it goes with the programming the are accustomed to. TV continues to pander to the lowest common denominator, and it keeps getting lower and lower.

Re:Scope of Problem

[couchslug]

"The quality of TV lately has sucked the fun of turning on the 'Idiot Box'."

It sucked even more when I was growing up in the 1960s.
I'm fortunate my parents forbade excess TV watching at such an early age I never grew fond of it. I grew to appreciate that TV isn't much more than a pacifier for morons.

Videogames

[king-manic]

Wouldn't video games be the obvious cure to TV induced ADD? Most video games require hours of dedication and concentration to finish. I suppose those with ADD will be more attracted to ADD games (almost anything on the wii right now). So in the interest of public health we should promote the playing videos games that aren't shitty mini game collections.

Save a mind, ban wario ware.

Re:Videogames

[tsstahl]

Wouldn't video games be the obvious cure to TV induced ADD?

No. Absolutely not. Video games are a form of hyper stimulation. Basically, you get into a trance like state with an intense focus on the rules of the game universe. ADD/ADHD folks are already hyper-stimulated, hence their condition.

There has been work done using game like simulations to treat ADD, but you could only compare them to a videogame in the most rudimentary sense.

The 'cure' is simply large quantities of quality time with educated parents/teachers/circle of love members learning how to cope.

Re:Videogames

[king-manic]

Do you perchance work at the University of Alberta? I am aware they had a trial program similar to what you describe.

Re:Videogames

[tsstahl]

No. Just a parent continually looking for the best way to reach my son. :)

Re:Videogames

[CastrTroy]

almost anything on the wii right now

Except Zelda, Twilight Princess. I'm 40 hours into the game, and there's no end in sight. And you can't accomplish anything unless you plan on spending at least 1 hour, probably close to 2 hours.

Re:Videogames

[Sibko]

Wouldn't video games be the obvious cure to TV induced ADD? Most video games require hours of dedication and concentration to finish. I suppose those with ADD will be more attracted to ADD games (almost anything on the wii right now). So in the interest of public health we should promote the playing videos games that aren't shitty mini game collections.

Save a mind, ban wario ware. This could've been a good post, if it weren't for the trolling. I'm astounded you were modded insightful, actually. This is not the place to rant about your perceived problems with a videogame console. Grow up.

Re:Videogames

[king-manic]

This could've been a good post, if it weren't for the trolling. I'm astounded you were modded insightful, actually. This is not the place to rant about your perceived problems with a videogame console. Grow up.

Grow up? I have a vendetta against crappy mini-game collections. You have an emotional attachment to a electronics product. I think we're both just about the same emotional level. I own a Wii, it's not a knock on the system but at the current crop of games. If they release more Zelda clones and less Wario ware clones I'd be a much happier gamer.

Obligatory Onion

[antifoidulus]

All programming to be broadcast in ADHDTV by 2007

I Call BS

[eno2001]

When I was a kid I watched a TON of television and I have an incredibly long attention span. I can sit and write code for hours. Or work on music for hours (piano, guitar, synths, audio workstation). I can have a long conversation on a particular subject (over dinner, in the car, etc...). My average viewing day at age three during the week was:

7:00AM-11:00AM (Cartoons, Little Rascals, Brady Bunch)
3:00-5:00PM (Rin-Tin-Tin, more Little Rascals, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Looney Toons, etc...)
7:00PM-9:00PM (Anything my folks watched which could have been Star Trek, Hogan's Heroes, any number of 70s cop shows and of course the news occasionally in the 6:00-7:00PM time slot.

Weekends were usually:

7:00AM- 12:00PM (Cartoons)
1:00PM-5:00PM (Local hosted movies "Superhost" in Cleveland)
6:00PM-7:00PM (Star Trek)
8:00PM-11:00PM (Any number of "family shows" in the 70s, Love Boat and Fantasy Island on Saturday nights, and maybe a movie on Sunday nights)

It had no impact on my attention span.

Re:I Call BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, one person watched tons of tv but doesn't have a short attention span. You're right; that must mean the study is completely bogus!

Re:I Call BS

[mh1997]

I have an incredibly long attention span. I can sit and write code for hours.

Based on the timestamp of your post (2:27PM on a Wednesday) I would suggest that your boss may not agree with your ability to code for hours. Of course, looking at my timestamp black pots and kettles come to mind.

Re:I Call BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but did you read the article? Didn't think so. ;)

Re:I Call BS

[crabpeople]

I would assume they are talking about newer more invasive television. In the 1950s (i assume thats when you grew up with brady bunch and all that) marketing and PR were new concepts and barely just taking off. Nowadays babies are programmed to want things before they can even speak. Ive watched TV with my friends kids and the comercials are mindblowingly, dare I say criminally, coercive.

Its easy to see this result with the young pups on instant messengers. They'll send a bunch of one word messages as sort of a heart beat, rather than sending a paragraph or few lines of text. It is not just growing up with instant messengers either, as I used ICQ back in 97 and do not have this disorder.

Re:I Call BS

[eno2001]

Oh yes I did. And I know that the study was done on kids a few years younger than me (I was born in the earliest 70s). Try again.

Re:I Call BS

[eno2001]

:) How old are you? 20-something? No, I'm not slamming you or trying to be offensive. You actually gave me a pretty good chuckle pinning me for growing up in the 50s. I'm a product of the 1970s. However, I honestly and totally accept that fact that the Brady Bunch may as well be Laurel and Hardy shorts to anyone born after 1980 because TV changed a LOT since my childhood. When I was a kid we only had six TV stations in my market. Today the same market has ten stations, but they take a back seat to cable and satellite. I didn't grow up with cable but it's likely you did. And you probably also had the options of video games and lots of stuff on video. And my daughter is now growing up with a completely different take on television since it's totally controlled by her parents. She watches at most 60 to 90 minutes per day and only about 45 minutes of that is "live" from PBS Kids Sprout. The rest is stuff on DVD with no commercials. And since my wife and I watch NO television until after she's asleep she actually sees FAR less television than we did when we were kids. Interestingly enough, my daughter prefers playing outside or in her room with her toys (she's under three) by a large margin to watching TV. I think she finds TV boring.

And of course the other difference for kids of the 70s vs. kids of the 80s, 90s and today is that we had to wait until our favorite episode was aired again to see it again. The VCR and later the DVR and today's media centers changed all that. Now it's possible for children to indulge in my childhood fantasy of being able to watch your favorite episode over and over and over again. Back in the 70s the best anyone could do (no I didn't do this because my parents wouldn't allow it) was to go to the same movie in the cinema repeatedly. I knew kids who claimed to have seen Star Wars 25 times when it debuted. My daughter, on the other hand likes to watch any two of her six favorite episodes of the Berenstain Bears (each at 13 minutes a pop) each night before her bed time snack. And that's more a ritual than anything else.

IM does worry me a bit though. I'm hoping that my daughter will find e-mail or blogging more interesting than IM. IM seems to cater to the lowest common denominator. But then again, so does most of the net nowadays. The glory days of the 80s and 90s internet are far behind us.

Re:I Call BS

[yoyoofthemilk]

Ditto. Only I grew up watching cartoons on Cartoon Network all day in the 90s (I'm 18 now). I do NOT have a short attention span, in fact I've stopped watching TV now that I've gotten older because they won't stay on one subject long enough for me.

Re:I Call BS

[Anonymous Coward]

> When I was a kid I watched a TON of television and I have an incredibly long attention span. I can sit and write code for hours.

Then I call autism :D

Re:I Call BS

[moogyboog]

I presume you didn't flip around with the clicker...it sounds fairly consistent with prolonged activity. The remote control is almost forgotten in the sense that today you could just click out of a commercial...this is what became for the most part Add. The coercive ideology or story would be unable to exert control over your mind, in the same sense that in the past you would rather sit through the commercial rather than get up to change the channel. There are some people with real add but I would bet that maybe the majority are people that are trying to avoid being programmed by the tv, family members, religions, ideologies. This drives marketers insane, thus the "disease" of people that will not sit still for the commercial and their hijacking of the branding process.

Re:I Call BS

[eno2001]

Well... I did score pretty damn high on an informal test of autistic tendencies. But I'm not an autistic person nor an "aspie". The test said I was borderline. Still, I call BS because it was informal. And besides, I don't like labels.

Re:I Call BS

[Anonymous Coward]

It had no impact on my attention span.

Well thankyou for that interesting anecdotal data point that totally invalidates the stated hypothesis. No further research need ever be done since you have so thoroughly disproven it for all possible variables.

Re:I Call BS

[eno2001]

That's true... remote controls were for rich folks when I was a kid. This was back in the era when remote controls would send ultrasonic signals to the TV which would then cause a motor to turn the analog knob on the TV set. (I'm not kidding) I remember this one family that my mom did cleaning for who had a set up like that. There were buttons to turn the TV on and off, change the channel and raise or lower the volume. Everything was motorized. My family didn't have a remote controlled TV until 1999 (although we had a remote for the VCR in 1984).

no way !!

[dinofile]

Well I for one am glad these masterminds put that little theory to rest. Who would have thought all these ad bombardments and flickering scene changes would have caused attention problems or difficulty in relating to boring real life. I am shocked I tell you, shocked !
Next it will be jingles are catchy and ads are only there to sell us stuff. mmmmmmm

Or for those on a budget

[jbeaupre]

Send them outside. They can be mighty creative with just stuff in the yard. Both of mine are under 2, so my wife insists I go with them (might be just a ruse to get rid of me too). But even a stick and a rock seem mighty entertaining to them. The 17 month old thinks I'm a god just pushing the rock with a stick, while the 4 month old thinks his brother is a god for being able to pick up the stick without losing an eye. No, they aren't retarded (that's the official line, anyway). Kids can just make anything fun if given a chance.

Meanwhile I'm amassing a Lego and Brio empire for when they are a bit older. I might even let them play with it.

Re:Or for those on a budget

[Knara]

Are you crazy?!?! That rock might have a pedophile behind it! And that stick might have a terrorist watching it for tasty American child-flesh to come along! Outside?? I've never heard such irresponsible advice!

The ability to concentrate...

[Kjella]

...is a learned skill as well. Everyone that's worked in a cubicle or "open landscape", learn how to tune out most (if not all of it). Find a farmer or lumberjack and place him there and he'll go crazy with all the chattering until he learns. If you got zero attention span, the TV is also the easy way out, it's a constant series of impressions to keep you sitting there. You don't have to actually learn to sit down and get some attention span.

Then again, I rarely get to do that at work either. If I had a single checklist of things to do, and could work my way down then all would be well. Instead it's definately got multitasking, I'd say at times multithreading, preemption and there's always someone trying to hog the scheduler. I make it sound all bad but I don't really feel it that way - but it's definately not for the really long attention spans.

Re:The ability to concentrate...

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

...is a learned skill as well. Everyone that's worked in a cubicle or "open landscape", learn how to tune out most (if not all of it).

Having worked in such an environment, I must disagree. You learn to deal with the noise, but you cannot simply tune it out; it will always have some impact on you. Personally, I cannot stand it and I start getting terribly irritated by the noise makers. Since I'm not allowed to scream at them to STFU, I either have to wear ear protection or work someplace else. It's unfortunate that management typically doesn't care that the noise level in the office is affecting workers. I've tried suggesting solutions like installing sound dampening materials, but management isn't interested as they don't think noise is a problem.

Do some searching and you'll find many studies discussing noisy workplaces and their negative effects on employees and productivity.

Re:The ability to concentrate...

[myowntrueself]

The ability to concentrate is important?

No shit, Sherlock!

Why do you think those ever-efficient Germans set up concentration camps?

By the way, they were invented by the British; in South Africa back in the 1800s to help the Boers to develop some focus.

Anyone?

[pragma_x]

The summary was too long to bother... what is this story about anyway?

Oblig. Frank Zappa

[Critical Facilities]

I'm the Slime

I am gross and perverted I'm obsessed 'n deranged
I have existed for years
But very little has changed
I'm the tool of the Government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you

I may be vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious
With the stuff that I say
I'm the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I'm the slime oozin' out
From your TV set

You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don't need you
Don't go for help . . . no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold

That's right, folks . . .
Don't touch that dial

Well, I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livin' room floor

I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, lookit me go

I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livin' room floor

I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, lookit me go

Well, Duh

[curmudgeon99]

I have some personal information to add to this one. In eighth grade--at the age of 14--I was addicted to watching television. So, I made a decision to go cold turkey. Sure, NOVA was hard to miss (pre-cable days). But after a few months, I no longer missed it. While I was a regular tv watcher, I could not stand to read a book because it put me to sleep. Well, six months away from the boob tube, I could read for a much longer period--hours, even--without losing focus or concentration. So, I must confess that I totally agree with this article and have found personally that it is true. TV is rotting your brain, guys.

Presentation style could be to blame.

[ayjay29]

Coming up in this post...
Views on TV and attention span

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You really need an attention deficiency problem to watch most TV these days.

Coming up next...
More views on TV and attention span

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Previously in this post
Views on TV and attention span

I've tried watching stuff like Myth Busters that I downloaded, and it seems like it's not designed to be watched as a program, but rather byte sized pieces.

Coming up next...
Even more views on TV and attention span

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Previously in this post
Other views on TV and attention span

Compare that presentation style with that of the BBC, where the documentary is actually intended to fill an hour time slot with no ad breaks. In some circumstanced this kind of TV will help kids to focus on one subject for a longer period of time.

Coming up in the next post...
Another view on TV and attention span

Re:Presentation style could be to blame.

[jsiren]

The purpose of the program is to get people to watch the advertising:

(TV guide says program should start now; 15 minutes of commercials follow)
(theme music)
In the previous post - Opinions on TV and attention span.
When we come back: a witty reply.

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Watch This Bad Movie
Ask Your Doctor About This Condition We Invented For You.
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Previously in this post - some opinions on TV and attention span.
We have a witty reply. Stay tuned.

Break
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Buy Useless Stuff
Ask Your Doctor About This Condition We Invented For You.
End of Break

Next week on Slashdot: a witty reply to opinions on TV and attention span.

(credits squeezed to half screen to make room for commercials, which continue for another 15 minutes)

a short attention span is not necessarily bad

[netsavior]

I HATE how people call it attention deficit "disorder" and how they say the net effect is "averse".

screw you, I am happy with my short attention span. It serves me financially and personally to have a "short attention span".

Because I VALUE MY TIME(short attention span) more than other people, I am more efficient and I deal with less bullshit because I don't want to. Call it a disorder if you want, I call it an evolutionary advantage.

Re:a short attention span is not necessarily bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, nice application of christian logic. Now go drown yourself please.

Re:a short attention span is not necessarily bad

[tomstdenis]

Doesn't work well when you get into a traffic accident because you're zooming from one lane to another to try and get 3 seconds ahead.

Also doesn't work well on decisions that are of a longer standing impact. Oh gee, that 50-year mortgage looks great! just put it next to the $60K lease for my 8MPG land yacht.

Being able to consume and deliberate over more things [over a longer period] isn't a bad thing.

I'd say a mixture of both is probably better. Being able to skim over things of little importance to focus on those things of higher importance...

Re:a short attention span is not necessarily bad

[metlin]

I'd say a mixture of both is probably better. Being able to skim over things of little importance to focus on those things of higher importance...

It's the little things that make up the big things.

I am in R&D and all the *good* people I know are those that are extremely focussed on what they do and can tackle a problem until they can find a solution. I would not trust an engineer who suffered from excessive ADD mostly because I would not be sure that all the components of his system received his full and complete attention. I mean, imagine people like the parent poster building bridges. Oh yeah, it would simply be wonderful.

And think of adventure sports -- can you imagine a mountaineer with ADD reaching out for that handhold and then going, ooh shiny! Evolution at work, right there.

I am yet to see a convincing argument on why ADD isn't a problem -- now, I do not believe that medicating kids with ADD is the solution. When I was younger, I was distracted by, "Ooh! Shiny!" ever so often myself. But with effort and help, my concentration has improved. That's probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. It gives me the ability to sit down for several hours and focus on a problem and solve it -- persistence is often the key to solving hard problems because no matter how intelligent you are, some problems require a good degree of effort to solve.

Anyone who cannot consistently provide that effort without being distracted cannot give their very best to what they are doing.

Re:a short attention span is not necessarily bad

[netsavior]

[i]I am yet to see a convincing argument on why ADD isn't a problem[/i]

That is probably because you have no idea what ADD is. ADD includes a trait called "Hyperfocus"... Like the developer who finishes coding a system in 30 hours straight because he is "in the zone" this is hyperfocus. Many people with ADD pay much more attention to detail than those without because they are less likely to be blinded by the "forest" because they stop to look at the trees.

Re:a short attention span is not necessarily bad

[crabpeople]

Yeah, and people like you are the ones who have to make 4 different phone calls while in line at the bank, disturbing everyone with their noise, instead of just quietly waiting their turn.

you see them standing in line
you watch them going insane
because they're wasting their time
While they're waiting in vain

Re:a short attention span is not necessarily bad

[Anonymous Coward]

...people call it attention deficit "disorder" and how they say the net effect is "averse".

I was just thinking about that the other day.

Imagine that the brain has some built in mechanism for feeling bored with repetitive tasks. Someone who genetically lacked the ability to get bored would focus on some specific task (say mental arithmetic) and get really good at it. They would become an autistic savant.

The problem is that if you spend all your time doing mental arithmetic then you aren't getting married and raising a family. You might even be so incapacitated you don't notice the saber-toothed tiger that's about to eat you.

On the other hand, if you become bored too easily you will never be able to develop any specialized skills and you will spend all your time on high interest activities (i.e. partying).

Essentially, to be evolutionarily successful you have to have a mechanism that is tuned to exactly the right amount of boredom with repetitive tasks.

What's even better though is to recognize the consequences of repetitive activities. For example, ordinarily I'm bored out of my mind by mental arithmetic but that would change dramatically if I knew that a few days of mental arithmetic would result in me getting a billion dollars.

Re:a short attention span is not necessarily bad

[Fantastic Lad]

Because I VALUE MY TIME(short attention span) more than other people, I am more efficient and I deal with less bullshit because I don't want to. Call it a disorder if you want, I call it an evolutionary advantage.

Maybe you don't actually have a short attention span. --If you are efficient, then that suggests to me that you have the ability to stay tuned to a problem long enough to find a quick route from A to B. Problematic short attention spans typically don't allow people to stay focused long enough to be effective in any of the tasks they attempt.

I read hundreds of pages of data on all manner of subjects every week. After many thousands of pages, certain patterns become apparent. I have learned to recognize those patterns and to skim past the fluff in order to find the meat. Often the meat itself is a reiteration of something I already know, and so I skim through that as well. It is uncommon that I will actually take the time to read through a document with my full attention from the top left word to the bottom right. When that does happen, it means I've found a document which offers something new and fascinating. Then my attention wakes up and I am riveted to the material. Otherwise, I might appear to all to be of quite a short attention span.

Does this describe you to some degree? If you are truly fascinated by a subject or task, can you focus your attention for long periods of time, or does your mind wander even then?

-FL

Looking at that schedule...

[Anonymous Coward]

...your attention span might be ok, but it's quite obvious that you really need to get a life!

TV makes you dumb

[DogDude]

TV makes people dumb in lots of different ways. This really isn't surprising. What is really interesting how relatively recently TV used to be a ubiquitous thing that a large majority of people consumed, and today there are large percentages of intelligent people simply dumping TV altogether. In another 10 years, TV (broadcast, cable, etc.) viewers will probably be even more disproportionately uneducated compared to the rest of the population.

Re:TV makes you dumb

[sgt_doom]

I don't wish in any way to offend, but a more articulate phrasing of your thought might be:

TV is a land of delusion. Watching TV is wallowing in delusion. Therefore, people think and behave in a more delusional fashion from watching too much TV.

21st Century Reading List:

The Bush Agenda by Antonia Juhasz, American Dynasty by Kevin Phillips, Blood Money by T. Christian Miller, Hostile Takeover by David Sirota Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast, Other People's Money by Nomi Prins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins, No Place To Hide by Robert O'Harrow, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against The Middle Class Thom Hartmann, War is a Racket by General Smedley Butler, Licensed to Kill by Robert Young Pelton, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace by Gore Vidal

Re:TV makes you dumb

[Gryle]

I beg to differ. I consider myself fairly intelligent and I enjoy TV as much as the next guy. I'm selective about my programming, but I don't dismiss it altogether as something for the unwashed masses.

Not the cause, but an indicator

[Shivetya]

Why?

Because parents who let their kids stay in front of a TV for hours on end are not teaching their kids responsibility. All they are teaching is selfishness and the like. I say this because I have seen ADD kids do just fine playing games for hours on, its because they want to do it. ADD is just an excuse for not teaching a child that there is a time and place for everything. Its because you don't take an active interest in what they are doing, as such they do not know what to place importance on. Don't claim they don't know how to focus , the do damn well when its what they want to do.

Occupy their time. Involve them. You would be amazed at the difference between children of parents who actively engage them throughout the day and those that don't. I bet you can tell which children are which. ADD should renamed ARD - Adult Responsibility Disorder.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[Vancorps]

It's a shame you got modded as flamebait there but it is worth mentioning that those with actual ADD cannot play games for hours. The kids you are describing do not have it. A lot of parents pressure doctors for that diagnosis which has led to a disproportionate amount of people in this country taking medication for an illness they do not have because parents didn't teach them how to behave.

Of course a lot of parents just want to be friends with their kids these days too, that's part of the problem. There is a fine line between having your kid like you and being a friend that will do anything to make them happy.

Of course occupying their time would mean that you have to occupy more of your time to teach them which is also part of the issue. So many people working a lot of hours, that doesn't leave a lot of room to properly raise your kid. It's a hard line to draw between being poor raising kids responsibly or having some extra to be able to take everyone on a vacation every now and again. I see it with my sister who's taken the being poor approach. She's stressed out and often unhappy. Versus some other friends I have who have taken the other approach who are living stress free lifestyles taking their kids to Disneyland.

Parenting, it ain't easy, I'm glad I'm not a parent at this point but I have a lot of respect for people that are. Assuming they haven't abandoned their responsibility that is.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[Jerrry]

My son has ADD and he has absolutely no interest in watching TV. He'd much rather read a book or write programs on his computer. In fact, if the TV is on and he's around, he'll just ignore it.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[virgil_disgr4ce]

I wholeheartedly agree with you. However, I must point out: All stimulus on developing brains has a hugely fundamental influence on the way the neural networks of the brain wire themselves up. Children unexposed to language before 10-12 can't (truly) learn it ever, and babies who are restricted from moving around and exploring shapes and colors will be severely limited in their abilities to understand, conceptualize, and utilize shapes and colors in general. Evidence of this, as well as extremely compelling neural net models that explain it, have been piling up since the 80s.

It follows that a developing brain exposed to a significant amount of very rapidly changing images (and not even just images but dialog and things and entire scenes) will overdevelop the ability to deal with that speed, with the result that long, drawn out concentration could be almost impossible.

In any case, it's the most cogent biological evidence for the idea of moderation I've ever heard! It's obvious, and it's common sense, but moderation and a large variety of experience for a developing brain is utterly crucial. Just saying this to add to your point regarding parental influence.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[Notquitecajun]

Wow, my experience was almost the exact opposite. Mom stayed home, Dad worked outside (and we didn't hit the mid-middle class until just before I became a teenager). We never lacked anything when I was a kid, especially my older brother who is more or less ADD. Mom and Dad were good disciplinarians and made sure we didn't watch too much tv.

We didn't do a whole lot of vacations, and we were HAPPY.

Sometimes both parents working is way too much stress as well...I wish that more families would do a cost analysis on whether or not a second job is actually profitable (day care, gas, extra car, etc). Good parenting makes up for toys and games and all the "extras" that society says we need.

Giving kids stuff isn't good parenting.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[Per Wigren]

It's a shame you got modded as flamebait there but it is worth mentioning that those with actual ADD cannot play games for hours. Bullshit!
If it wasn't for the fact that I have to occasionally go to the toilet I'd be able to play a game for a week straight, or until I passed out because of hunger or sleep deprivation.

People with ADD/ADHD can't control their (our) focus. It's called hyperfocusing and it's very common for ADDers to hyperfocus on things that they are interested in while being completly unable to focus on uninteresting things, except for short periods of will-power bursts when it's something very important, resulting in mental exhaustion or depression.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[cromar]

A lot of parents pressure doctors for that diagnosis which has led to a disproportionate amount of people in this country taking medication for an illness they do not have because parents didn't teach them how to behave.

Man... I wish I could pressure doctors into giving me prescriptions for amphetamines and/or methylphenidate that easily.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's a shame you got modded as flamebait there but it is worth mentioning that those with actual ADD cannot play games for hours."

Many can. They can play games, they can watch TV, they can read books. Especially if it's action oriented. Anything that stimulates or excites is significantly more accessible to someone with ADHD than someone without. It's uninteresting or mundane tasks that are most problematic over the norm. School, textbooks, just sitting still, and even driving (I constantly miss my exits) for those that have it into adulthood.

I like to describe it to people as being tired without being sleepy. You don't want to go to sleep, but your focus drifts like you do. Loud and exciting things can help combat it. Heck, coffee can do wonders!

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[Lurker2288]

So, they can focus intently on things that interest them, but they have a lot of trouble focusing on things that don't interest them? So, what part of that is the 'disordered' part?

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[zifferent]

So, they can focus intently on things that interest them, but they have a lot of trouble focusing on things that don't interest them? So, what part of that is the 'disordered' part?

The disordered part is the control bit. The key word is "can't" As in I'm browsing the web and it takes 5 minutes just for my wife to get my attention (hyperfocus) and I despise televisions because I often can't focus on anything else in a room if one is turned on. In either case I barely have control over where and how deeply I can focus on something.

Granted there are degrees to the thing, but the most part, without medicine (and no I don't take stimulant based medication, thank you very much) it can be exhausting to swing my focus around and keep it centered on something that doesn't engross or distract me. With medicine my focus becomes a little more controllable.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[Vancorps]

Sounds good, my sister had three kids though. I think you're right though, my sister chose to stay home with the kids while my bro-in-law went and worked as much as he could to get ahead. The kids are still very young though and that is a very stressful time for parents. They don't know right or wrong at the age of 1 or 2 and you have to run after them constantly. Now they one niece is 7 and one niece is 3 things are getting better for them.

You're right that parents should do a cost analysis though, most situations I come across it's been less expensive just to have one of the parents stay home.

There is also a far cry from staying couped up with three kids all day everyday. My sister finds things for them to do that are inexpensive like apple picking and going to the park, various activities out in the town. They aren't that bad off but it's definitely stressful for them sometimes.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[speaker of the truth]

There's a sure fire way to see if your kid has ADHD (although you shouldn't do this to get the initial diagnosis, but simply to ensure the diagnosis is correct). Put the kid on Ritalin (or some other tablet that's meant to help control ADD/ADHD) and if they settle down and become normalish kids, then they've got ADD/ADHD. If however they become even more excited and even harder to handle, they're either normal kids or you're a terrible parent. But they DON'T have ADD/ADHD so get them off those tablets immediately!

The reason for this is the tablets are little more then speed. How speed works in ADD/ADHD kids is the complete opposite on how it works on every other kid. So its pretty easy to know if your kid has been misdiagnosed.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[speaker of the truth]

I wish that more families would do a cost analysis on whether or not a second job is actually profitable (day care, gas, extra car, etc). I wish more families would do a cost analysis on whether or not they can afford to have one parent not work. Having good stuff is no substitute for having a parent around.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[speaker of the truth]

it's very common for ADDers to hyperfocus on things that they are interested in while being completly unable to focus on uninteresting things I believe this is incorrect, sort of (my own brother had ADHD so I know what I'm talking about to a degree). What is common is for children to be unable to focus however when they become adults this changes to hyperfocusing. I'd say there's a good chance you hyperfocus because that's the way your ADHD manifests itself at you're current age.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[Vancorps]

Could you update Wiki then cause hyperfocus is not a symptom of ADHD?. There are a number of other conditions which only allow a person to focus on one thing at a time. It is fairly common in old age but it can happen at anytime. In short, if you were diagnosed with ADHD and you can play a game for a week then you were misdiagnosed. Any medication would only make it worse. You're describing what happens when a normal person takes Ritalin or Adorale (SP). Those in college often take it for that very reason.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[Vancorps]

Find yourself another doctor then. I'm sure Rush Limbaugh could refer you. People do it all the time. On second thought, you've got a good doctor, might want to keep them around.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[kimvette]

I started reading your post but got bored after the second sentence so I moved on. Oh, did I mention I have ADD?

*apologises to the nice folks here who actually have ADD, even though they won't make it far enough in this post to read my apology* ;)

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[caranha]

I say this because I have seen ADD kids do just fine playing games for hours on, its because they want to do it. ADD is just an excuse for not teaching a child that there is a time and place for everything. I share your feeling, but I wonder if those "ADD kids" really do have anything at all to begin with.

A story I'm often told is this: When I was a kid, my mother took me to a doctor to see whether I was hyperactive (I believe what we call ADD today was the hyperactivity in the 80ies, right?). I was a pest. The first thing the doctor asked was if I ever sat down to watch TV. When my mother replied 'yes', he said: "Then your kid is not hyperactive. REAL hyperactive kids are not able to sit down even to watch TV."

There seems to be a trend of mistaking ADD and simple lack of discipline.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[brunascle]

yup. except that has nothing to do with ADHD.

if the kid really does have ADHD, there is nothing the parent can do. parenting skills cannot offset a learning disability. a much better bet is to load them up on caffeine, sugar, and other stimulants.

trust me, it exists. and in severe cases, it can be hell. just because you have no trouble concentrating doesnt mean that others who do are faking it.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[PachmanP]

I really wanted to read you comment cause it was modded insightful, but I started to read it and realized I wanted to watch tv. After a scubs rerun I remembered what I was doing, started reading again and really had to play some peggle. I really wanted to read it so I came back and completely forgot what I was doing.
So in true /. fashion I'll just post with out reading the article. BLAME M$!!!!111

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[abertoll]

Yes... and no... I'm sure I have whatever qualities it takes to be classified with ADD. My attention span is short. But it's really no excuse, and I've never considered myself as having a "problem." I don't think you can just explain away ADD in its entirety to "bad parenting," but I do think we make too much of a big deal about it, and do think that it doesn't require medication to deal with.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[Per Wigren]

First, you are wrong. Try to google for adhd hyperfocus. I don't know how many hits you need to read to get the point but there are about 42000 of them. Some of them may be from persons with IBD (Ignorant/insensitive Bully Disorder) though, they sometimes have an agenda to make other people smaller and their problems less important or questioning them altogether.

Second, you are wrong again. I don't take any medication at the moment. Concerta and Ritalin DO help me control my focus, meaning I can let go of the things my brain desperately tries to (hyper-)focus on and I get more mental energy to focus on the uninteresting things I'm supposed to do. However, they both make me temporarily more or less impotent, which is worse (for me) than having ADHD symptoms, so I don't eat them. I'm supposed to try some other medication though, I've been on my way to see my doctor to do just that like forever and I've had several appointments that I didn't show up to (because I forgot, or because I thought some other thing was more important at the time, like playing Zelda: Twilight Princess for a week with almost no sleep or food).

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[Atario]

I think it is possible to be prepared for something like media onslaught. When I was a kid — I forget exactly when, but it could very well have been in that 10-12 window you mention, maybe a little later — I saw some kind of film in school that pointed out the simple fact that talk show appearances by celebrities are little more than highly-couched advertising (for whatever book/movie/TV show/album the celebrity is there to plug), and that you should be on your toes to notice when an agenda is being pushed on you generally. Just that simple thought, I believe (together with some related material on what propaganda is and how it works), has made me immune to the ill effects everyone puts down to TV. I think TV would lose all the evil powers it is assigned if only kids were prepared to deal with it — and it doesn't take that much.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[Jarik_Tentsu]

Exactly.

And TV is easy to switch attention. Get bored of one program? Switch to another channel.

Getting a kid to do something constructive is another thing...if they are trying to engage in an interesting project, then if they 'switch off', it doesn't get done.

I know when I was younger, my parents would buy me heaps of kits and stuff, where you literally built stuff. Hell, even lego - while you're playing with Lego, if you go off and do something else suddenly, it isn't finished...

~Jarik

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[h2g2bob]

Radio 4 had an interesting half-hour documentary on the effects of TV on very young children, which you can listen to here.

It discusses similar research to the NS article and has some rather interesting comments from the makers of television programmes for tots'.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Children unexposed to language before 10-12 can't (truly) learn it ever,

Really?

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[budgenator]

I think the brain can be trained to have longer attention spans, but it takes a lot of work and ADD tends to run in families so the end result is the primary trainers don't have the attention span to do the training. How much longer is the key question, I've seen kids that had ADD so bad that the final result will certainly be institutionalization, probably prison.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[JCSoRocks]

Of course occupying their time would mean that you have to occupy more of your time to teach them which is also part of the issue. So many people working a lot of hours, that doesn't leave a lot of room to properly raise your kid. It's a hard line to draw between being poor raising kids responsibly or having some extra to be able to take everyone on a vacation every now and again. I see it with my sister who's taken the being poor approach. She's stressed out and often unhappy. Versus some other friends I have who have taken the other approach who are living stress free lifestyles taking their kids to Disneyland.

woah, what? Stress free and taking their kids to Disneyland? Most people that I know where both parents are working aren't stress free. The parents are thrashed from working full time jobs, maintaining the house, "raising" the kids, etc. The kids spend far more time in school / daycare than they do with their parents. Once they're older they act out to get attention. It's not a "stress free" situation and it's not an optimal way to raise your child.

I also have a sister who has chosen not to get a job so that she can be home with her children. Are they rich? Not at all - but her kids respect her, she's around them enough that she can instill the values she feels are important in them. Respect for authority, compassion, the value of family, self-control, etc.

IMO these things are going to serve a child far better than a trip to see mickey. I've never seen a kid arrested because they didn't get to see a goofy guy in a mouse outfit. I've had plenty of friends arrested because they had to respect for authority and completely lacked self-control. They were never taught these things by their parents. Honestly, I felt sorry for them.

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[virgil_disgr4ce]

As far as I know, Genie doesn't have a normal command of language for her age, which is what I originally meant. I don't think she ever learned normal syntax, for instance. It *is* a hotly debated subject in psycholinguistics, but I'm personally impressed by the neural network model experiments that give a pretty compelling explanation for the importance of language acquisition during the first 10-12 years. Check out Manfred Spitzer's work and his book, "The Mind Within the Net."

Re:Not the cause, but an indicator

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a distinction between ADD and ADHD. A person without the H (Hyperactivity) could easily watch TV for extended periods, and both kinds can hyperfocus.

jump cuts

[jollyreaper]

I don't have scientific proof or anything but I'm convinced that editing styles are proof of shrinking attention spans. You watch older shows and movies, you get lingering scenes, sometimes sticking with a camera for a minute or three before going to the next one. Now you can't even watch a live performance of anything without the camera operators trying to give you motion sickness. Ok, camera tracking overhead, cut to floor camera zooming in, cut to camera far in back to show the audience but make sure it's panning like they're trying to track a blue angels fly-by, puke! Slow the hell down, let me take it in.

Now some people might say that digital nonlinear editing makes it easier for people to go crazy with the cuts, the same way novice web designers go crazy with animated gifs and horrible fonts. (thank god blink is redacted.) But I'm thinking it's more about keeping short attention spans engaged.

Re:jump cuts

[Timothy Chu]

I second that. I dread watching any "action" movie these days. I sat down to watch the Transformers movie last night, and all I could think was "give me the DVD so I can watch the action sequences in slo-mo." My wife on the other hand loved it, and called me "old". Grumble grumble...

Re:jump cuts

[jollyreaper]

I second that. I dread watching any "action" movie these days. I sat down to watch the Transformers movie last night, and all I could think was "give me the DVD so I can watch the action sequences in slo-mo." My wife on the other hand loved it, and called me "old". Grumble grumble... I felt queasy just watching the trailers. I read a review that said you could replicate the robot effects in Transformers in the following way: weld a giant ball of car and robot parts together, set it rolling down a hill, and focus the camera tightly on the center of the ball so none of the hillside shows through. That's Michael Bay's Transformers. Don't get me wrong, I'm a sucker for the handheld camera stuff when it's being used to make something feel real. But there's a huge difference between footage that looks like it was shot on a crappy handheld versus a $50k camera with quality filmstock that should obviously be on steadycam but isn't. Look, Saving Private Ryan's combat sequences felt real, the same way the ground combat in Strangelove felt real. But that's because people were in combat. When they're sitting down in a calm moment, the camera's not still bobbing and weaving like a punch-drunk boxer. Contrast that with Battlestar Galactica where shaky-cam is used even when people are just sitting and talking at a bloody table.

Re:jump cuts

[amyhughes]

Actually, the current level of scene cutting is calculated to trigger your instinctual urge to investigate motion. Too much motion and you don't understand what you are seeing and lose interest. Too little motion and the TV doesn't draw your attention away from something else.

Shareholder value at work. Shareholders did not have the benefit of such advanced manipulation science in the 70's.

A does not cause B, B attracts A.

[Anonymous Coward]

The study is not proof that TV viewing causes attention problems, Landhuis notes, because it may be that children prone to attention problems may be drawn to watching television. Now if only someone would admit that about violent video games as well..

5 hours? bah!

[brian0918]

The only time I wasn't watching TV was when I would pass out from exhaustion every couple days and sleep for a few hours. It hasn't affected my attent

[5 hours later]

Oops, forgot to submit.

Mmmmmmmmm.... TV

[Nonillion]

You know, they don't call it the lobotomy box for nothing.

Re:Mmmmmmmmm.... TV

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

*shudder* The scary think about television is that you can actually feel it putting you in a zombie state.

I hardly watch any network television these days, instead opting to invest in a large DVD collection. When I do watch something like a news broadcast, I find that I sometimes don't notice a commercial break has started and will actually listen to the first one or two commercials before realizing what's going on and either switching the channel or hitting mute.

Lobotomy box indeed.

ah..Life according to TV guide...

[denis-The-menace]

I did this, too.
I had good marks in school but that's it.

My attention span is OK but I am told that people have to repeat stuff when they talk to me.
It drives my wife nuts.
The reason: I think about other things and tune out.

Since I've been able to watch TV/movie on a PC and do other stuff on the PC at the same time, I think it's getting worse.

Therefore I think it's just a bad habit, not a medical condition.

Re:ah..Life according to TV guide...

[eno2001]

That sounds more likely. Because these days I watch a fairly small amount of television and none of it is broadcast. I take DVDs out of the local library, and download programming that is not available in the U.S. with Bittorrent. (U.S. television is complete crap) As a result most of my TV viewing is done if I have free time. And typically not more than about 45 minutes a day thanks to the lack of television commercials that DVD and foreign television provide. I'd be interested to see a study regarding the differences between the effects of television on attention span with subjects who grew up in the 70s vs. kids today vs. people who watch television with little to no advertising. Of course that study will likely be done in about 25 year's time.

Imagine how bad YouTube is screwing us up...

[Loligo]

If 30 minute episodes of TV are bad, just think what 30 second YouTube clips are doing to our attention spans.

It's gonna get to the point that we won't be able to go more than ten seconds without being distracted by something shiny.

  -l

It's all crap.

[core_dump_0]

What is an attention "problem?" Perhaps that's just their personality?

ADD/ADHD is an invented disease designed by the government ("public") school system to control boys. It's that simple. If people can't pay attention, that's just how they are. If they are hyper, unless it becomes violent and/or psychotic, it is just how they are.

It's just like "acid reflux disease" and "child obesity." No one wants to take responsibility for themselves, their bodies, their eating habits, and their children. So they invent a disease for it and make themselves victims.

Different people have different personalities. No need to invent diseases and give kids unnecessary and potentially dangerous pills to shut them up.

What about Wikipedia?

[_damnit_]

If they thought TV was bad. Wait until their studies get to a generation brought up on Wikipedia and the rest of the internet. I don't know how people with severe attention deficit disorder cope with an internet connection.

Mod parent +5 insightful!

[Per Wigren]

I have ADD and have similar experiences, and I know many others who do also. All these "ADD is fake and they are just lazy bastards" posts are making me sad.

Re:Mod parent +5 insightful!

[Anonymous Coward]

I get ADD if I eat certain preservatives. It's a really weird experience.

My advice: stay away from teriyaki jerky. It never helps.

TV hasn't affected MY attention span, because...

[n6kuy]

Oh look, a butterfly!

Maybe It's The Remote

[Anonymous Coward]

Until the 1970s, televisions did not routinely come with a remote. To watch something else, you had to get up and make a decision to change the channel, and settle on something to watch before sitting down. With the power of the remote came 'channel surfing' (whence the 'surfing the Web' terminology of today). And surfing begat commercials whose messages last no more than ten seconds, and viewers with the attention span of grapefruits.

Or not.

Mod Parent Up

[mpapet]

Whoever modded this comment flamebait either isn't being very honest or isn't a parent.

While the comment drifts a bit, the basic idea is right on. The problem of short attention spans begins with parents letting the TV babysit their child.

Limited and structured television is fine. We use it to watch movies, travel shows and other stuff as a family, for a finite amount of time not to exceed the length of a movie or the television show. Why? Because there should be something to talk/laugh about afterwards. If it can't pass that simple test, it's time wasted.

Does my kid still ask to watch TV? Yes, she's a kid. But she's got other options including doing kid-parent stuff.

Step 1 to eliminating tv is getting rid of the giant screen whatever and getting a 17" or less and putting it in a cabinet that closes so it's not around.

Re:Mod Parent Up

[zifferent]

You haven't been paying attention. Perhaps you have ADD (Joking)

ADD is so much more than your kid going "But I don't wanna!" and you also seem to have causation and correlation mixed up. The TV doesn't cause ADD (I can't see how it helps much either) ADD kids are drawn to the television, particularly in homes where it's left on all the time. I hate TVs left on for that exact reason and will turn it off if someone left it on in my house, because it is so potentially distracting to me. Kids with ADD that are allowed to watch too much television, will watch too much television. A normal child may become bored, an ADD child will lose track of time. It's actually very important for parents of ADD children (who often suffer from ADD themselves) to train their kids when to shut of the boob tube. Which isn't as easy as it sounds, but is one of many important coping mechanisms for ADDers.

Re:Mod Parent Up

[speaker of the truth]

The problem of short attention spans begins with parents letting the TV babysit their child.

Limited and structured television is fine. This is bullshit and fairly common these days for parents to force way too strict rules onto their kids. I watched tv all the time growing up, I'm now a healthy adult who watches it about as much as any other adult would. Whenever I'm busy with other stuff the tv is also the first thing to be sacrificed.

mythbusters hell yeah

[crabpeople]

AMEN to that!

Mythbusters drives me insane. Before every commercial break they tell you what they are going to do, then after the break they tell you what they just did, and what they are going to do... AGAIN!. Easily half of mythbusters, while a greatly entertaining show, is mythbusters talking in the third person about mythbusters. I got pretty good now at knowing exactly when new content will start so that I can fast forward properly, but hey are sneaky and always word the recap a bit differently with different footage after the breaks.

Its like they are making that show for stoners who cannot store a memory for the two minutes that a commerical is on. What was I watching again?

Animal Planet

[boris111]

Ever watch Animal planet "Most Extreme..." It has some interesting facts, and I'm glad they make Science appealing for kids, BUT they repeat the same facts over and over again. Think maybe ADD is a defense mechanism for boredom... I can see it in the kid's head now "Oh the announcer guy will just repeat what he just said 5 times so I'll just veg out until after the next commercial break."

You watched a lot of TV, didn't you?

[Anonymous Coward]

It explains a lot of apparent illiteracy at slashdot (and on the internet in general).

I was wondering why it is that back in the 1950's

You weren't paying attention when they talked about apostrophes.

We may have not had a name for it in the 50's

Correction: We may have not had a name for it in the '50s (again, see Bob)

But now it just seams that cases of ADD and ADHD are just popping up all over the place.

You weren't paying attention when they taught spelling, either, although this might not be TV's fault, depending on your age. My kids had a thing in kindergarten where they spelled words any way they wanted; neither of them, not the "special" one nor the "gifted" one can spell worth a damn. So it might be your school's fault (actually it is anyway, as they should have teaching methods that would be considerate of an ADD child's special needs) or the over-reliance on spell checkers these days. The word is "seems". A "seam" is the line where your shirt is stitched together.

Could it be that parents are no longer at home?

My mom worked, my dad was out of town a lot, so I don't think OOH LOOK A NEW VERSION OF LINUX!

Agreed.

[DocSavage64109]

Amen to that. Even silly fluff like Buffy the Vampire Slayer is fun and entertaining when you have some 100+ hours of storyline backing it up.

At one time, I was wanting to buy all of the season DVDs for 24. But then I noticed how completely outrageous the prices were, and now I just use netflix for my entertainment fix. With all the commercials on TV and the price of DVDs, it's almost like they're both *trying* to drive people away.

What if ADD isn't real? What if..

[TigerPlish]

...instead of being a separate entity it is a symptom of something else?

I just throw that up for discussion, because I have many of the hallmarks of ADD.. can't sit still, fidget, must always be doing *something*, had a devil of a time "paying attention" at the spoonfed crap at school..

Is it possible all that jazz is linked to something else, like, say, bi-polar disorder? Because *that* one the docs are fairly sure I got.

Is it further possible that the idiot box had a big hand in developing that?

You said "begs the question"...

[Anonymous Coward]

...you must be new here.

Re:You said "begs the question"...

[toddestan]

It may not have been intentional, but he actually did beg the question.

Re:You said "begs the question"...

[munpfazy]

Ha! Funniest thing I've seen in days. I love it.

I can't wait...

[Z80xxc!]

Until they talk about this study on TV!

Attention Span

[navtal]

Will someone for the sake of all that might be Holy do a study that corelates short attention spans and the ability to multi task....oh and maybe they arnt paying attention because it's BOARING!

Welcome to the

[iminplaya]

Arnold Schwarzenegger Presidential Library

Brought to you by...

From the Valley of the Jolly, HO HO HO...
Green Giant.

Economics favors psychiatry that don't fix things

[Anonymous Coward]

(Sorry about the bad grammar, but I wanted it to fit...)

Take two hypothetical psychiatric treatments for a mental ailment. One path of treatment fixes your problem for life in a small and fixed number of visits to a psychiatrist. The other requires recurring visits twice a month for the rest of your life. If you assume equal efficacy for both treatments, which one will provide greater economic incentives for its practitioners? Which approach will therefore attract more and more adherents over time?

It's kind of obvious which category modern psychiatry falls into.

I'll believe in psychiatry and psychology when I see tapeworms helping their hosts make themselves parasite-free. Because the entire discipline is incentivized wrong.

Not quite so simple.

[Fantastic Lad]

Although I completely agree about the foolishness of feeding kids pills to shut them up, I think it's easy to over-simplify the problem.

Having worked with children, I am in a position to say that kids before a can of Coke and after a can of Coke are like Puppies v.s. Hyenas. Is that ADD? Well, since ADD is just a label people came up with to explain a measurable phenomenon, maybe it is. I'd be tempted to call it a case of narcotics abuse, but that's just me.

There are many other substances in our food supply and pollution-rich world which cause strange psychological reactions in both kids and adults, and television certainly is one of them. This stuff is measurable.

You mentioned child obesity. Check out this short Peter Jennings report on the subject.

-FL

Oh, god!

[Fantastic Lad]

My stomach actually seized up while reading your post and I remembered why I took a pair of bolt cutters to my TV cable several years ago.

I haven't looked back. Being free of that monkey has given my life back. I have no question whatsoever that TV is a mind-control device designed to make people stupid and easily manipulated. Brrr.

-FL

I have a different theory to offer you...

[RogueWarrior65]

Imagine that the reason this thing cannot be identified is because it prefers not to be. IMHO, if 99% of the teachers out there were worth a sh*t and taught in such a way as to keep the kids interested in the material we wouldn't be in the academic sh*thouse of the world. I'm living proof. When a regular teacher couldn't get through to me, a really good tutoring teacher did.

10-15 minutes?

[funkdancer]

I wish... Here it's more like 10-15 _seconds_.

I second that...

[Belial6]

I second that. I was right in there with the heavy TV watching, although, not quite as much during the week. I also let my child watch lots of television. I attribute part of his extreme intelligence to television. We truly live in a golden age for children's television. There is more quality kids shows on in a day now than was produced in a year when I was a kid (early 70s). Unfortunatly, our primary education source, public schools, are on a downward slide.

Using TV as an excuse for ill behaved kids is just more of modern societies insistence on blaming other people for their crappy parenting. It also doesn't help that there is a constant stream of "experts" advising parents who seem to think that good parenting is done by retarding kids.

Of course poor attention spans are not limited to kids. I have found that most adults cannot grasp an explanation that takes more than three sentences.

Re:I second that...

[eno2001]

My wife also brought up a good point while we were discussing this topic last night. How much of the attention span issue might be connected to parents who just plunk their kids down in front of the TV and don't pay attention to them vs. the ones that actually interact and even watch the programming with their kids? I'm certain there's a bit of a factor in there since television was largely a social activity when I was a kid. I didn't watch it alone. I usually watched it with my folks, my cousin (who may as well have been a kid sister), and other kids. We talked through the shows, I asked questions about things in the shows, etc... There has to be an effect there.

slight mischaracterization

[misanthrope101]

I don't think it's that parents "don't want to teach their kids how to behave." I think it's that kids aren't behaving, and parents just don't consider this fact to be a reflection on their own abilities|character. They do teach them things, such as how to have a high sense of entitlement, be impatient with other people, expect instant gratification, prefer infotainment to critical reading, etc--all taught by copious example. These parents don't have a conscious disinclination to teach, rather they think that they example they set, and what they consciously teach, are just fine and dandy, and they don't consider the kids misbehavior or short attention span a natural extension of what they have been taught. It's like the people who buy Rottweilers and then don't feel responsible when the dog mauls someone--the common thread here is that they want to do whatever strikes their fancy, but they don't feel responsible for any unintended consequences. I'm not disagreeing with your main idea, only quibbling over phrasing.

what I've found

[misanthrope101]

after a few years with no TV (meaning nothing on the TV other than occasional DVDs, none of which are of TV shows) is that TV writing is execrably bad. It's to the point that, if I find myself somewhere where a sitcom (that Raymond show comes to mind) is on, I actually wonder if it's bad writing, or a caricature of bad writing. Is there a meta-joke here that I'm almost getting? Are they satirizing bad writing? I can't tell the difference between satire and what passes for creative TV writing. And don't get me started on the news. Fox News is the most egregious, but that's like saying Hitler is worse than Pol Pot.

Re: commercial breaks

[giafly]

You forgot commercial breaks, which make our attention stop and go and stop and go...

Exactly: the net effect of television seems to be adverts.

What of 12 bunnies singing about toilet paper

[mishehu]

I'm surprised that nobody mentioned commercials. Even as an adult, I find it damn hard to concentrate when every 6 to 8 minutes my train of thought is interrupted by 12 dancing bunnies singing about their brand of toilet paper... Thank goodness for DVDs, MythTV, etc. to get rid of those unwanted interruptions.

Amusing Ourselves To Death

[Organic Brain Damage]

From Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death:

Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering grey light. This, in turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems even strange.

There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now almost complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane.

It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example ... that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality ... and that television speaks in only one persistent voice -- the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms. Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. This is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.

Main points:


1. Watching a lot of TV changes the way your brain works.
2. Those changes leave TV watchers with significantly less ability to think through complex problems.
3. As a direct result, we elect morons like George W. Bush who lead us into disasterously stupid wars.

Mod Parent Up

[Anonymous Coward]

No, really, I mean it - MOD PARENT UP!!

Waiting for the same thing...

[evilninjax]

... except about the "Internet age."

Kids that surf the internet have lowered attention spans...

Re:Presentation style. You are damn right !

[Anonymous Coward]

You demonstrate brigthly the point : it is not TV itself which is to blame for attention-deficit disorder, but the disorderly way in which it is cast to children and adults. It is clear that no mind could stand such a kaleidoscope of unrelated message without getting in trouble trying to (inconsciously) establish correlations, and as no correlations can be made because none exists, the mind finally does not try to correlate anything anymore.

Question : is that a side effect, or is it exactly what is intended ? Even without raising old ideas like a "plot theory", we can admit that nobody in either the business or political world (well, *almost* nobody) can be very interested in having citizens clever enough to mind their own interests rather than doing what they are told to do.

Hmmm... It might be time to read the SF works of Pohl and Konbluth again...