TV brain

Warn your nanny and grandmother: television is for development what fast food is for health. Anthropologist Stephen Juan not only states this, but also suggests what to do*.

What is the TV brain and how is it formed? Learning specialist Jane Healy believes that a child’s growing brain can be physically shaped by television as it is shaped by other repetitive situations. The bottom line is that the developing brain interacts with the environment, determining which synaptic connections to strengthen and preserve, and which to weaken or lose forever. TV programs manipulate the brain through visual or sound influences. Television programs and advertisements, including those made specifically for children, use the brain’s involuntary responses to close-ups, panoramas, loud sounds, and bright colors to keep it in an unnaturally excited, but more reactionary, rather than thinking, way. The overall effect of these manipulations forms the TV brain, that is, the brain that feeds on television and nothing else. The TV brain can affect a person in the same way as a “lazy eye” that leads to blindness. If a child suffers from a “lazy eye”, a bandage is temporarily put on the healthy eye to make the “lazy” one function normally. If this is not done, then the “lazy eye” as a result will be perceived by the brain as useless and blind.

Work of the brain

The neurological foundations for reading, analytical thinking, attention management, and problem solving depend on the experience you gain every day. The brain continues to grow even in adolescents, which is why the quality of the information received is extremely important. Watching TV for a long time can reduce your child’s active attention time. This is confirmed by experiments. When children first watched dynamic programs and then completed tasks such as reading or solving complex puzzles, they noted impaired attention. Television also affects language. Although programs increase a person’s vocabulary and broaden their horizons, they do not develop a person’s literate speech and the ability to structure the information received. Television can have a hypnotic effect and cause neurological addiction. It changes the frequency of electrical impulses in the brain, blocking active mental activity and creating slow alpha waves, in which mental activity is usually absent.

Live “here and now”

Today, children not only watch TV for a long time, but also play computer games. This is one of the reasons why teachers notice that today’s students think much worse than before. They have a reduced ability to explore a problem deeply and thoroughly, their active attention spans are short, they have difficulty in mastering their native language, and their ability to listen is reduced. How to protect them? One solution is to turn off (permanently) the TV, put away gadgets and the computer. But it’s unlikely to help. It is just as pointless to complain and remember the “good old days.” We must understand that during the school years the brain of children is excessively malleable, and try to offer them, among other things, a well-planned training program that will develop the intellectual abilities of children, whatever they may be in our age of information and high speeds.

* S. Juan “Oddities of our brain” (Ripol classic, 2008).

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