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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."'"
I am an avid TV watcher and have no problems pa...
Oh look a bunny!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
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?
Cemil.
And in related news, scientists are reporting the polar ice caps are cold.
This correlation was discovered at _LEAST_ 30 years ago... I remember hearing about it when I was a child.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Oooooo, look! Shiny!
The phrase 'Boob tube' was coined long before late night Cinemax was available.
tl;dr
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.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Maybe you should be sent to concentration camp... you know... to learn to concentrate.
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.
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.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
... reporting that too much television may be linked to a bad attention span ...
Wait until they study the effects of too much internet!
Maybe you should be sent to concentration camp... you know... to learn to concentrate.
Right on. Do they have TV there?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The spike (+1 hour) occurred between 1986-1988, and the first episode wasn't until 1989. I'm guessing Miami Vice :)
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.
...has anyone noticed that building there before?
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]
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
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.
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
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.
so here is a bunny with a pancake on its head
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.
No TV, just a nifty 'arbeit macht frei' sign.
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.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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.
All programming to be broadcast in ADHDTV by 2007
Monstar L
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.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
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
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.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
...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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The summary was too long to bother... what is this story about anyway?
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.
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 ?
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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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
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
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.
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.
I don't respond to AC's.
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.
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.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
You know, they don't call it the lobotomy box for nothing.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
"...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?
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.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
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
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.
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.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
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.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Oh look, a butterfly!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
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.
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.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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?
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
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."
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.
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.
...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?
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
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.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
Until they talk about this study on TV!
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!
Arnold Schwarzenegger Presidential Library
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Green Giant.
What?
"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.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
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.
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.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
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
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
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.
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).
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.
It may not have been intentional, but he actually did beg the question.
Yep the Jewish is Kyle, but Kyle's cousin is also named Kyle... ;)
I wish... Here it's more like 10-15 _seconds_.
ISO certified == THX certified
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
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.
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.
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.
... except about the "Internet age."
Kids that surf the internet have lowered attention spans...
Ha! Funniest thing I've seen in days. I love it.
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?