7 ms·

Television viewing and cognitive decline in older age

289 points by casefields 7y ago

isuckatcoding 7y ago
Perhaps I should curb my Netflix binging habits.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- johnchristopher 7y ago
  The very definition of binging is about excess. That somehow it became a normal activity is telling something else.
copperx 7y ago
Is there a reason to believe that there's a difference between TV viewing and passive textual content consumption on the web? I used to think so, but nowadays I'm not so sure. Passive consumption of media designed to entertain, be it visual or textual, seems too similar.
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  How does one passively consume textual content? Reading engages the brain in an entirely different way than viewing images does. When you read you interpret meaning from text and construct a mental model of what's being described.
  - brujoand 7y ago
    You can’t passively consume anything. You say you have to interpret meaning from words. Sure, but.. What about faces? Tone of voice? Body language?
    - monkeycantype 7y ago
      You’re correct. It seems though that there’s something about the level of - I can’t think of a less ridiculous phrase than - adaptive engagement you marshall while performing tasks that’s important. a director watching a cut of a movie, weighs every detail with a focus that is quite unlike the mental state of the public audience. I think that changes the way they watch all films, always dissecting. So I’m assuming the importance of television isn’t that it’s television, but that it’s minimally stimulating activity, so easily within your cognitive capacity as to require neither physical nor mental discipline nor adaptation, requiring just enough from you to displace sleep. I don’t watch a lot of tv, but I choose to take this as a warning I need to do less scrolling Edit: one thing in particular that stands out is the discussion of television being fast paced, fleeting information, I wonder if I’m viewing adaptation incorrectly here, what if it’s that we are exhausting our adaptive capacity, training ourselves on static?
      - cgriswald 7y ago
        > a director watching a cut of a movie, weighs every detail with a focus that is quite unlike the mental state of the public audience. I think that changes the way they watch all films, always dissecting. Viewers do this as well. Analysis of literature and of television/film overlap to some degree, and both require an active consumer of the material. I think the question is: Given an equal amount of effort on the part of the consumer, does one medium convey more benefits than the other?
  - jl6 7y ago
    My completely unfounded theory is that reading and watching both exercise different portions of the brain, like running and swimming. But like running and swimming, there is a wide spectrum of available exercise intensity - and even in their most intense forms they don’t exercise the whole of the brain.
  - Mnephisto 7y ago
    I've long struggled with retaining what I read. It feels like I've trained my brain to enjoy the quick dopamine hits from, for example, reading short stories or, say, seeing a problem someone has that my brain can pretend to solve. Sites like Reddit or StackExchange. Yes, maybe I interpret text in my head and build mental models, but my brain just throws them away as soon as the story is over. Ask me what I read about 5 minutes later and I swear, I won't be able to tell.
    - jarfil 7y ago
      Ingesting data and evaluating it according to some model, sounds like what a good cluster node would do. No need to permanently store neither the data nor the output on the node itself, but you might want it to update its process via learning.
  - fiblye 7y ago
    Scrolling through reddit or HN threads takes almost no mental effort. I’d dare say it’s the sort of thing people do to relax after reading “hard” content like novels or research. Speaking personally, I can feel burnt out from reading a novel for a while. On the other hand, I can mindlessly scroll through internet comments, read them in full, and not notice that hours have passed and feel zero exhaustion from it.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
      I don’t feel exhausted, rather: bored by fiction and non-fiction alike. Having said that, it often feels like the internet speaks with one voice, even when it’s disagreeing with itself. Rarely does anyone say or write anything original. I guess HN feels more familiar though, more like family. And we’re probably driven by millions of years of evolution to seek that out.
      - friendlybus 7y ago
        Yes the Internet's voice is very homogenous. I crave the tiny YouTube videos that are posted by people that have truly different views and are articulated well. There's too much everyday garbage on the web, it's disappointing quantity is trumping form and quality. If YouTube loosened up it's monetization rules and went back to letting the producer set the form we could have more focused videos. The ten minute spam videos are the plague. HN is more rational and quantitative than other sites in general so I prefer this as a counter to other more abstract information sources.
    - paufernandez 7y ago
      I believe you can read a novel more or less mindlessly, as you can read HN. But HN is more surprising, and it's like a slot-machine (in the analogy that Tristan Harris makes with social media). For me it is like System 1 or System 2 taking charge (as in the book "Thinking Fast and Slow", by Kahneman).
- thundergolfer 7y ago
  If you're talking about Listicles (ie 'Top 10 X') then yeah they're probably just as bad, but the other reply you got makes the good point that reading is fundamentally an active cognitive activity in the way TV is not.
  - cgriswald 7y ago
    I’m not really convinced. That just sounds like an issue with quality of content. Viewers and readers can both be active or passive.
    - Tarsul 7y ago
      they can be. However, reading is probably "by itself" more active than watching TV, irrelevant of the content. Probably in the same vein that handwriting is better for your brain than typing.
      - falcor84 7y ago
        >handwriting is better for your brain than typing. {{citation needed}}
        diffeomorphism 7y ago
        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4710970/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4710970/
        Tarsul 7y ago
        thank you.
        cgriswald 7y ago
        This citation does not support the claim. The paper is about literacy in children during the development of literacy. Abstract: > Digital writing devices associated with the use of computers, tablet PCs, or mobile phones are increasingly replacing writing by hand. It is, however, controversially discussed how writing modes influence reading and writing performance in children at the start of literacy. On the one hand, the easiness of typing on digital devices may accelerate reading and writing in young children, who have less developed sensory-motor skills. On the other hand, the meaningful coupling between action and perception during handwriting, which establishes sensory-motor memory traces, could facilitate written language acquisition. In order to decide between these theoretical alternatives, for the present study, we developed an intense training program for preschool children attending the German kindergarten with 16 training sessions. Using closely matched letter learning games, eight letters of the German alphabet were trained either by handwriting with a pen on a sheet of paper or by typing on a computer keyboard. Letter recognition, naming, and writing performance as well as word reading and writing performance were assessed. Results did not indicate a superiority of typing training over handwriting training in any of these tasks. In contrast, handwriting training was superior to typing training in word writing, and, as a tendency, in word reading. The results of our study, therefore, support theories of action-perception coupling assuming a facilitatory influence of sensory-motor representations established during handwriting on reading and writing.
- tgv 7y ago
  Note that the article uses "verbal memory and semantic fluency" as a proxy for general cognition, so readers will almost automatically score better than viewers. They also seem to have modeled all factors as linear, and "cannot rule out (...) the possibility of reverse causality". So to answer your question: it depends on whether you consider all assumptions of the article relevant. One thing the article certainly doesn't contradict is the old adage "use it or lose it".
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    Or: it’s a physiology / social sciences paper, so probably nonsense / narrow in scope / “more research is needed”.
    - jakobegger 7y ago
      You could probably say the same thing about 90% of scientific papers. Almost all research is narrow in scope, and more research is always needed. And calling other research fields "nonsense" is also something that researchers from all fields do.
  - naravara 7y ago
    Reverse causality would be an interesting conclusion. Essentially asserting that articulate people with good memories are less likely to find TV appealing and would prefer to read or do something more interactive instead.
    - jvagner 7y ago
      There are probably a lot of reasons why people may watch a lot of TV, including depression or other forms of mental and emotional pain.
- uberduber 7y ago
  Older people have had more practice operating the TV. Just getting the phone to work is often a mental challenge. A ton of them are constantly inadvertently opening control center and then accidentally turning it on airplane mode or whatever. Another issue is that software changes constantly and any slight interface change they have no clue what to do.
  - war1025 7y ago
    At the farmers market earlier this fall, the seller was having a hell of a time getting his phone to work so that he could swipe our card on his Square. After looking a little, he was wrapping his hand behind the phone far enough that he had his fingers from that hand touching the screen while he tried to poke buttons with his other hand. Since there were multiple fingers on the screen, it kept interpreting them as gestures and not doing anything. Further, his case made it so the Square dongle thing wouldn't stay plugged in all the way. So when he finally did get it to the swipe screen, it wouldn't read the card. Finally ended up offering to look at it myself and manually entering my card info. The guy was so visibly relieved to be out of that situation. Smart phones aren't nearly so user friendly as a lot of tech people like to think.
    - jmercouris 7y ago
      Any tool requires learning and understanding- a time and effort investment. Using a cash register also requires training. The more power you put into a tool, (frequently) the more complex the interface becomes. This is a trade-off that must be weighed. Either you make your devices do less, or you require your users to learn how to use their tools. I do not think we should sacrifice the power of our devices in exchange for improved ease of use. Final note: Of course better interface design can help mitigate the increase in complexity of the tool with the increase in power of the tool, but I believe this has a limited effect.
      - wpietri 7y ago
        Sure, you think that now, because you're in the group that interfaces are designed for. But once you're the guy at the farmer's market, you'll think differently. Power only matters if one can get something done with it. A kilogram of plutonium is enormously powerful, but that's no reason to carry it around in your pocket. I'll also note that we have been sacrificing the power of our devices in exchange for improved ease of use since the 1980s and it's great. Manually configuring X-Windows in those days was enormously powerful, and enormously user-hostile. We sacrifice vast amount of computing power on the altar of usability, and that's exactly what we should be doing. Contrary to my early computing experience, I have never once had to rebuild the kernel on my phone, and I am very happy with that. And third, you mostly create a false dichotomy here. If we're talking about a typewriter or a steam loom or something, yes, power and user complexity go together. But the true power of software is the ability to hide most of the complexity most of the time. Most of the work of software development is pushing complexity down, wrapping it in abstractions that provide the next level up with a clean interface. A perfect example here is Google Search. It's a magic box into which I can type (and now, just say) anything, and it will apparently intuit what I want. The "powerful" version of that interface was 1980s search, where you carefully specified the various fields you wanted to search (because all data had to be carefully fed into the system's structure) and a painfully constructed, manually stemmed, boolean query. For maybe 1 search in 500, I still want that kind of power. But for the rest of the time, I'm very grateful that thousands of nice people at Google have made it so that their search's power has increased continuously, with users needing to learn less and less to get good results.
- LUmBULtERA 7y ago
  The article addresses this directly: "Indeed, it is of note that other screen-based activities such as video gaming and using the internet which involve more interaction can in fact have cognitive benefits, leading to higher levels of frontal and central EEG activity(21) and enhanced visual-spatial skills, problem-solving skills and cognition in older age(16), suggesting that it is this alert-passive interaction that is a key feature of the effects of television viewing." Also note in Table 1 there are activities such as "using the internet" and "reading a daily newspaper" that were examined.
- k__ 7y ago
  Well, you have to remember the memes so you can exhale more air from your nose when you see it next time.
- chewz 7y ago
  1965: He is so smart, he is watching so much TV 1990: He is so dumb, he is watching TV all day 2000: He is so bright, he spends a lot of time on the Internet 2020: He is so dumb, spending all day on the Internet.
  - GarrisonPrime 7y ago
    The difference is in quality and quality. Both media began with precious little content, most of it relatively high in value for the times and circumstances. (Even if it could be argued some content was low quality or utility, the simple access to a much wider array of thought was valuable.) But once they matured, of course they filled up with trash. Just like every medium. Given the quality of most books these days, someone “reading a lot” doesn’t mean much anymore, for instance.
    - Dontrememberit 7y ago
      Do you mean quality and quantity?
  - michaelcampbell 7y ago
    > 1965: He is so smart, he is watching so much TV I'm not sure this was ever the case. > Newton N. Minow spoke of the "vast wasteland" that was the television programming of the day in his 1961 speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_aspects_of_television#Negative_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_aspects_of_television#N...
  - 0xcde4c3db 7y ago
    One reason for this pattern is classism: the novelties of the upper classes are held up as glamorous and even virtuous, and that goes away when something is mass-marketed and becomes popular among the lower classes. Eventually, one might even hear words like "disgusting" and "poison" used to describe something that was once considered perfectly wholesome.
  - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    > 1965: He is so smart, he is watching so much TV This never happened.
Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
"Watching television for more than 3.5 hours per day is associated with a dose-response decline in verbal memory over the following six years, independent of confounding variables." associated Not "caused". It is still an interesting study, but this should be the first thing to recognize, whether it claims association or causation.
- prox 7y ago
  I also wonder if the type of programming matters : if watching quiz shows that jog memory and recall are different from watching soap opera, or sports, or learning programs for instance.
  - Lerc 7y ago
    It might not be that simple. I think intellectual effort of these shows varies more within type than across. Tipping Point and Only Connect are both quiz shows but the first has questions like How many degrees are there in a circle? The latter has questions like; What can come fourth in this sequence? All this happened more or less. Sherlock Homes took his bottle from the corner... There were four of us - George and William Samuel Harris...
    - petepete 7y ago
      To summarise; BBC4 - good, ITV - not so much.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
        Maybe there’s a progression though? I have no idea what came fourth in the sequence, does that mean I should expect rapid age-related cognitive-decline? I’m probably going to blame that on all the hard drugs I’ve abused, rather then my lack in other areas.
    - yrro 7y ago
      It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...
thundergolfer 7y ago
I am surprised that 3.5 hours a day is the threshold where decreased performance begins, as in my little life bubble that seems like an abnormally large amount of TV watching. However Wikipedia[1] tells me the average USA "consumer" is watching 4 hours a day! Yikes. To a layman like me this seems like great research. A lot of effort was put in to draw a rigorous conclusion about the effects of TV watching on some aspect of mental performance. I just read Amusing Ourselves to Death though, and I find myself compelled to be a lot more dramatic about the negatives of TV watching, on the late author's behalf. Yes it's pretty bad that (excessive) TV watching literally damages your cognitive ability to some degree, but I would say (and please point me to research) that before that damage starts to show it's already near devastated your personal 'knowledge-base'. To try and paraphrase Postman, the content on TV is either trivial or non-trivial but delivered in such a way as to keep you from holding onto any significance, meaning, or theory. TV as a medium is terribly fractured (commercial breaks, 'Now..This' segues) and fundamentally visual (rather than typographic). Human minds thrive in connectivity, interrelation, and continuity. Our minds thrive in the typographic world. At his most polemic, Postman argues that TV at is worst is totally incoherent, conferring basically no knowledge whatsoever. A person's mind might still performance just fine in tests, but having been starved of knowledge it is practically unintelligent. Think also of the opportunity cost. At an average of 4 hours a day, as USA 'consumer' watches 1460 hours of TV a year. An average person reads 200-250 words per minute. Taking the upper bound, and the average non-fiction book as 50,000 words. They could finish that average non-fiction book in 4.16 hours. So, they could be reading almost 1 book a day for a whole year instead. Now, that napkin-math result seems implausible to me, but imagine if I was off by an order of magnitude. Say this person could read 35 non-fiction books in a year if that wholesale swapped TV for reading non-fiction. 35 non-fiction books at ~42 hours per book. They would be enormously enriched by this alternative behaviour. As an extreme (but unfortunately not uncommon) example, instead of getting all red in the face hearing about Socialism coming to the USA from Fox news, our dear average USA 'consumer' could have read Das Kapital, and The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and The Road to Wigan Pier, and Capitalism and Freedom, and On Liberty, and... etc etc. You get the point. So yeah, I'm really onboard with the thesis of Amusing Ourselves To Death. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption
- 7y ago
uberduber 7y ago
I know a ton of these older adults. I think the true problem is that they are not socializing enough which is the cause of the mental decline and often paranoia. Some of them have moved somewhere cheaper to retire where they don’t have many friends, but most of the ones I know just watch tv instead of calling a friend to do something. The friend is the same even though they would love to hang out. I’ve tried nudging them with no success.
- criddell 7y ago
  My grandmother fought against leaving her house for a retirement home for a long time. When she was about 85 she finally gave in and was surprised to find out she loved it there. In her home she mostly passed the time watching TV and knitting. In the retirement home, she joined a choir, she ate with friends every day, she took advantage of regular trips to restaurants and shopping malls, and she was constantly playing cards. Having friends around and things to do with them was huge for her happiness.
subroutine 7y ago
The amount of TV watched might be correlated with cognitive decline, but is certainly not the cause. I doubt there is any activity that can accelerate the rate of decline apart from the things we put in our bodies (food & drugs). It's better to think of cognitive decline proceeding at some baseline rate and the mental and physical activities we engage in act to buffer this pace. Watching TV happens to be a poor buffer, especially over such long stretches of such passive stimulation (requires little mental or physical exertion). You would get the same low buffer effect staring at a wall, flipping through a picture book, or knitting a scarf for 3.5 hours. This might be obvious but TV isn't causing decline, it's just not helping to prevent it.
- Cougher 7y ago
  "is certainly not" What do you base your certainty on? It's certainly not fact. "I doubt there is any activity that can accelerate the rate of decline apart from the things we put in our bodies (food & drugs)." You missed oxygenation.
  - subroutine 7y ago
    Yes, oxygen goes inside our bodies. Also liquids. I base this certainty partially on my expertise in the field of cognitive decline, but mostly common sense principles. Cognitive decline is a natural part of aging. It happens to everyone regardless of how much TV one watches; even people who watch no TV whatsoever cannot avoid cognitive decline. Thus our best estimate of what causes cognitive decline points towards the aging of the underlying biological apparatus that supports cognition. Furthermore, there are likely to be infants and young children who watch as much TV, and view programming geared towards learning; and as they mature will see gains in cognitive abilities. How is that explained it TV causes cognitive decline.
john_moscow 7y ago
I think, the problem is deeper than just watching TV. The real question is what activities does it replace. 3.5 hours per day is a a significant portion of one's day, if you subtract sleep, food, shopping, doctor visits and other basic needs. I wouldn't be surprised if those who watch less TV fill that time with creative hobbies, socialization, reading of thought-provoking books, etc. As a matter of fact, I would love to see a paper trying to structure those activities and correlate the prevalent groups to the cognitive performance.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  Roald Dahl the famous writer used to love reading news and the like, saying he could do it all day. This problem has likely been around for a long time. I'd be curious what people do in cultures without the drip feed and their reaction to it.
Zenst 7y ago
I've often wonder the effect of refresh rate. Back in the days of NTSC/PAL TV days, Americans had NTSC running at 60Hz and the UK ran at 50Hz refresh rates (same as the electricity supply runs out btw). This would yield American friends/colleagues comming to the UK and for a few weeks watching TV would complain about the flicker. Reason for this was their visual system had got used to the higher refresh rate and suddenly seeing something lower, stood out and once noticed, was hard to un-notice and would for them make for a noticeable flicker. I've often wondered what effects refresh rate has upon the brain and how fast/how we process information and equally, how we adapt. So with all that in mind, I wonder how old people who grew up with a 60hz TV compare to those accustomed to 50hz and if the statistics of cognitive decline are not the same - more interesting questions.
- ygra 7y ago
  Personally, both 50 and 60 Hz are horribly flickery. Back when I used a CRT I couldn't stand anything below ~85 Hz and would get headaches. Now that the screen no longer flickers, I guess in terms of motion fluidity there's a perceivable difference between 50 and 60 Hz. Something I personally cannot unsee, though, is 2:3 pulldown, which is something you don't see in Europe (at the expense of slightly faster movies).
  - joshspankit 7y ago
    I’m pretty convinced on the theory that some people see “faster” than others. Most people can be taught to notice flicker, but I really feel like some see more naturally.
littlestymaar 7y ago
I wonder were the effect comes from: - is that the medium itself (and the fact we watch it passively)? - is that the fact that it replaces other activities? - is that the retarded content it shows? - is that the stressful content that appears in the news all the time (crimes, natural catastrophes, war, terror attack, etc.)? - is that the way it's shot (with non-stop movement, even when nothing happens,just to keep us watching)?
glaberficken 7y ago
Anedoctal evidence. Source: My own grandmother (80yo in 2019) I have observed in my grandmother that she displays markedly lower cognitive decline when compared to her peers (friends and family around the same age). Here are some (maybe biased) observations. In the early 80s (at 40+yo) my grandmother was working as a secretary in a small office and went through the change from mechanical typewriters to electronic ones. While she was doing this the majority of her friends where 100% house wives. In the early 90s(at 50+yo) my grandmother learned to use a T9 mobile phone by herself. Her friends didn't have a mobile phone for years, and even myself would only have a mobile phone much later than her. (in fact i remember her teaching me how to navigate a Nokia that she gave me when she upgraded) In the early 2000's (at 60+yo) my grandmother bought a Windows XP PC, learned how to use it from scratch (had never used a computer in her life) and started to browse the internet, write emails, copy photos from digital cameras on to the computer etc. At the same time, her friends had no clue how to use a computer. In the 2010's my grandmother quickly transitioned to iPad to browse the web / iPhone to keep up with grandchildren on social media. Her friends would only come to have a smartphone and join the social media revolution in the mid 2010s.
- cj 7y ago
  How much television does she watch?
  - glaberficken 7y ago
    A lot! Mostly football (not the US sport), any sport that is on TV really, news and hollywood movies. Also she is a chronic late sleeper (as in going to bed late and waking up late) which both me and my mom seem to have inherited.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
      There’s always outliers. Some tiny percent of the population can smoke and drink non-stop, never exercise, eat shit constantly, and die by getting hit by a bus while jogging at 02:30. Still not real helpful for us who didn’t win the genetic lottery.
sitkack 7y ago
The brain thrives on two things, movement and questions. Passively letting an uncritical experience wash over the mind wipes the chalk from the slate. Having active shared experiences with other people while asking and answering questions is what keeps us us.
- nkozyra 7y ago
  > Passively letting an uncritical experience wash over the mind I don't watch much television but I think that consuming and processing narrative is not entirely passive. Your brain is still doing work to connect dots in stories, you're building internal networks of events and characters. I think there's a lot more interaction on the receiving end there than you're giving credit. Truthfully what television removes (though not entirely) from story processing versus reading is a huge chunk of imaginative work and some memory requirements.
  - naringas 7y ago
    > consuming and processing narrative is not entirely passive. while I agree with this, modern television requires far less "interaction on the receiving end" than you give it credit for. It lacks novelty.
    - gruez 7y ago
      > modern television [...] lacks novelty. Can you elaborate on what you mean by “modern”? We’re in a golden age of television, according to some. I can think of at least a dozen shows released in the past few years that have deep and complex storylines.
      - robryan 7y ago
        I think it works both ways, we have some much choice now that you can easily seek out both ends of the spectrum. There is no shortage of mindless TV for people to watch if that is what they are after.
      - 7y ago
Merrill 7y ago
>Immediate and delayed verbal verbal memory were assessed using a word learning task in which participants were presented with 10 common words by a taped voice, one every 2 seconds. Participants had to recall as many words as possible immediately and after a short delay during which they completed other cognitive tests. This is the measure that declined in heavy television watchers. It is also a task that television watching doesn't require, since recall of previous spoken words is rarely needed to understand the next video sequence. It's also a task that I don't do well on. I do much better if the words are presented in writing. I can watch a TV show and not remember a thing about it later. It may be a way the brain has of protecting memory from being overwritten by nonsense.
- rightbyte 7y ago
  If your health is bad you probably watch more TV and listens to radio, though, since you can't go out as easily.
  - Merrill 7y ago
    True, although I know people who neither watch much TV nor have lots of social interactions with people. There engage in other passive activities like reading or they have a variety of hobbies, sports, etc. Some people have little need to listen to chatter, either from a box or face-to-face.
    - mlyle 7y ago
      The question is what causes what. We know that TV and cognitive decline in this population are associated. Does television watching cause cognitive decline? Does cognitive decline cause television watching? Does some other factor cause both television watching and cognitive decline? Knowing some people are inactive and read books doesn't help much in probing this. Because we're not asserting cognitive decline always causes television watching, or whatever.
- jperiasw 7y ago
  What if you are from a developing country and have to rely on subtitles to understand the sequence, and also you cant read fast enough and hence you need to rewind sometimes to retain the sequence. Is this good or bad?
gingerlime 7y ago
Interesting that the threshold is at 3.5. 3 hours or less is fine. I wonder if there’s a way to have TVs with watch timers. For better self-control. I notice at my parents house that the TV is almost always on. It personally drives me insane. I think they want to curb it down, but it’s a habit that’s hard to break... so maybe a screen-time app for the TV can help??
- wj 7y ago
  TVs have sleep timers where they turn off after the set amount of time. Or at least they used to. You might be able to use an Alexa plug between the TV and the wall to the same effect.
  - gingerlime 7y ago
    Yeah, but it's something you actively need to activate every time, and it doesn't count accumulated time over a 24 hour hour period... anyway, was just toying with the idea. (inspired by the iPhone screentime)
    - matwood 7y ago
      The streaming services will present a dialog asking if someone is still watching after a period of time. If I do not respond to that dialog, my ATV will eventually turn off which turns off my TV.
      - gingerlime 7y ago
        That sounds like a variation of a sleep timer. I'm talking about measuring (and maybe even alerting/stopping) excessive watch time. i.e. if someone is actively flipping channels for 5 hours a day, that's not healthy (according to this research)... Streaming services sadly have the reverse incentive in this case, to actually make you watch more.
JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
I don’t know enough to know the answer to this, but does the paper address the chance that people that have a cognitive decline watch more tv and it is an effect not a cause?
- paufernandez 7y ago
  That's exactly what I was thinking. The assumption that the TV is the culprit is so powerful that is not even questioned.
- thundergolfer 7y ago
  They say in the study that they looked for reverse causality, and that they checked for study participants that acquired a medical diagnosis of cognitive decline (eg. dementia) during the study period.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
papito 7y ago
It's like when they say "wine is good for your heart". And then a study analyzed over three million grocery receipts.. "The people who bought wine were more likely to place olives, low-fat cheese, fruits and vegetables, low-fat meat, spices, and tea in their carts. Beer drinkers, on the other hand, were more likely to reach for the chips, ketchup, margarine, sugar, ready-cooked meals, and soft drinks." Schatzker, Mark. The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor (p. 155). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. EDIT: What I am saying is - yes, television shuts off the thinking part of your brain, but then you also don't move, don't exercise. Causation here is VERY flaky.
- 300IQGAMER 7y ago
  They did also mention that video games were better for cognition, so it could be that passive activities are worse than active. Not necessarily to do with exercise.
  - papito 7y ago
    It totally makes sense that video games are good for cognition - reaction training, problem solving. BUT, when you are younger, your body can take a hit if you abuse it. Younger people binge-drink and watch Netlfix for hours, and can still be sharp and fit. But then activities become much more important after 30, as you've drained the gift of genes and youth. I bet there is not a lot of info on the results of 70-year-olds playing half-life :) Either way, I always skeptically view these studies that take two random things and tell you that they somehow directly relate to each other. Especially with humans, where the number of variables at play is nearly infinite.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Maybe. What are old people watching? If it’s anything like what I see at my relatives and at assisted living facilities, it’s also of cable news and weather. Staring at repetitive, content free crap cannot be good for your brain.
  - papito 7y ago
fortran77 7y ago
Wow! I'm 57 years old so I'm already into the sample set (they started at age 50). I wonder if my Sunday Afternoon TiVo binges of "Dr. Pimple Popper," "Below Deck," and an occasional "Judge Judy" are making me dumb!? I hope not. Oh, and I tried the new podiatric reality show: "My Feet Are Killing Me." I think I'm smarter because of it. Granted, I watch about 4-5 hours of TV a week, not 3.5 hours/day. But only because I don't have enough hours in the day. I enjoy television, and look forward to my Sunday binges.
kylek 7y ago
Ma was right, it’ll rot your brain!
NPMaxwell 7y ago
A randomized controlled experiment: Find a collection of 200 people who you will be able to test 5 years from now. Send copies of this report to a random selection of 100 of them. Send a similar article not about television to the other 100. Test after 5 years.
viburnum 7y ago
What else are you going to do but watch tv when your brain starts to go?
yalogin 7y ago
Instead of watching TV what if i browse reddit or HN and keep commenting? How is that any different? Sure I am not using my brain when watching tv but I am not really turning it off. I am still trying to process the visuals and in some cases trying to understand or predict what might happen. How different is that from mindless browsing?
finneganscat 7y ago
This study does not look at the content of the television watching. Would watching history documentaries result in the same decline as watching reality TV?
originalbryan2 7y ago
Me watch many tv and have great word speaking.
samantohermes 7y ago
It's probably because overload of long-term memory is related to Alzheimer's and other dementia: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12269167_Does_longer-term_memory_storage_never_become_overloaded_and_would_such_overload_cause_Alzheimer's_disease_and_other_dementia https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12269167_Does_longe...
vorotato 7y ago
Of course, cognitive decline could also cause television.

289 points by casefields 7y ago

isuckatcoding 7y ago

Perhaps I should curb my Netflix binging habits.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
johnchristopher 7y ago
The very definition of binging is about excess. That somehow it became a normal activity is telling something else.

copperx 7y ago

Is there a reason to believe that there's a difference between TV viewing and passive textual content consumption on the web? I used to think so, but nowadays I'm not so sure. Passive consumption of media designed to entertain, be it visual or textual, seems too similar.

newnewpdro 7y ago
How does one passively consume textual content? Reading engages the brain in an entirely different way than viewing images does. When you read you interpret meaning from text and construct a mental model of what's being described.
- brujoand 7y ago
  You can’t passively consume anything. You say you have to interpret meaning from words. Sure, but.. What about faces? Tone of voice? Body language?
  - monkeycantype 7y ago
    You’re correct. It seems though that there’s something about the level of - I can’t think of a less ridiculous phrase than - adaptive engagement you marshall while performing tasks that’s important. a director watching a cut of a movie, weighs every detail with a focus that is quite unlike the mental state of the public audience. I think that changes the way they watch all films, always dissecting. So I’m assuming the importance of television isn’t that it’s television, but that it’s minimally stimulating activity, so easily within your cognitive capacity as to require neither physical nor mental discipline nor adaptation, requiring just enough from you to displace sleep. I don’t watch a lot of tv, but I choose to take this as a warning I need to do less scrolling Edit: one thing in particular that stands out is the discussion of television being fast paced, fleeting information, I wonder if I’m viewing adaptation incorrectly here, what if it’s that we are exhausting our adaptive capacity, training ourselves on static?
    - cgriswald 7y ago
      > a director watching a cut of a movie, weighs every detail with a focus that is quite unlike the mental state of the public audience. I think that changes the way they watch all films, always dissecting. Viewers do this as well. Analysis of literature and of television/film overlap to some degree, and both require an active consumer of the material. I think the question is: Given an equal amount of effort on the part of the consumer, does one medium convey more benefits than the other?
- jl6 7y ago
  My completely unfounded theory is that reading and watching both exercise different portions of the brain, like running and swimming. But like running and swimming, there is a wide spectrum of available exercise intensity - and even in their most intense forms they don’t exercise the whole of the brain.
- Mnephisto 7y ago
  I've long struggled with retaining what I read. It feels like I've trained my brain to enjoy the quick dopamine hits from, for example, reading short stories or, say, seeing a problem someone has that my brain can pretend to solve. Sites like Reddit or StackExchange. Yes, maybe I interpret text in my head and build mental models, but my brain just throws them away as soon as the story is over. Ask me what I read about 5 minutes later and I swear, I won't be able to tell.
  - jarfil 7y ago
    Ingesting data and evaluating it according to some model, sounds like what a good cluster node would do. No need to permanently store neither the data nor the output on the node itself, but you might want it to update its process via learning.
- fiblye 7y ago
  Scrolling through reddit or HN threads takes almost no mental effort. I’d dare say it’s the sort of thing people do to relax after reading “hard” content like novels or research. Speaking personally, I can feel burnt out from reading a novel for a while. On the other hand, I can mindlessly scroll through internet comments, read them in full, and not notice that hours have passed and feel zero exhaustion from it.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    I don’t feel exhausted, rather: bored by fiction and non-fiction alike. Having said that, it often feels like the internet speaks with one voice, even when it’s disagreeing with itself. Rarely does anyone say or write anything original. I guess HN feels more familiar though, more like family. And we’re probably driven by millions of years of evolution to seek that out.
    - friendlybus 7y ago
      Yes the Internet's voice is very homogenous. I crave the tiny YouTube videos that are posted by people that have truly different views and are articulated well. There's too much everyday garbage on the web, it's disappointing quantity is trumping form and quality. If YouTube loosened up it's monetization rules and went back to letting the producer set the form we could have more focused videos. The ten minute spam videos are the plague. HN is more rational and quantitative than other sites in general so I prefer this as a counter to other more abstract information sources.
  - paufernandez 7y ago
    I believe you can read a novel more or less mindlessly, as you can read HN. But HN is more surprising, and it's like a slot-machine (in the analogy that Tristan Harris makes with social media). For me it is like System 1 or System 2 taking charge (as in the book "Thinking Fast and Slow", by Kahneman).
thundergolfer 7y ago
If you're talking about Listicles (ie 'Top 10 X') then yeah they're probably just as bad, but the other reply you got makes the good point that reading is fundamentally an active cognitive activity in the way TV is not.
- cgriswald 7y ago
  I’m not really convinced. That just sounds like an issue with quality of content. Viewers and readers can both be active or passive.
  - Tarsul 7y ago
    they can be. However, reading is probably "by itself" more active than watching TV, irrelevant of the content. Probably in the same vein that handwriting is better for your brain than typing.
    - falcor84 7y ago
      >handwriting is better for your brain than typing. {{citation needed}}
      - diffeomorphism 7y ago
        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4710970/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4710970/
        Tarsul 7y ago
        thank you.
        cgriswald 7y ago
        This citation does not support the claim. The paper is about literacy in children during the development of literacy. Abstract: > Digital writing devices associated with the use of computers, tablet PCs, or mobile phones are increasingly replacing writing by hand. It is, however, controversially discussed how writing modes influence reading and writing performance in children at the start of literacy. On the one hand, the easiness of typing on digital devices may accelerate reading and writing in young children, who have less developed sensory-motor skills. On the other hand, the meaningful coupling between action and perception during handwriting, which establishes sensory-motor memory traces, could facilitate written language acquisition. In order to decide between these theoretical alternatives, for the present study, we developed an intense training program for preschool children attending the German kindergarten with 16 training sessions. Using closely matched letter learning games, eight letters of the German alphabet were trained either by handwriting with a pen on a sheet of paper or by typing on a computer keyboard. Letter recognition, naming, and writing performance as well as word reading and writing performance were assessed. Results did not indicate a superiority of typing training over handwriting training in any of these tasks. In contrast, handwriting training was superior to typing training in word writing, and, as a tendency, in word reading. The results of our study, therefore, support theories of action-perception coupling assuming a facilitatory influence of sensory-motor representations established during handwriting on reading and writing.
tgv 7y ago
Note that the article uses "verbal memory and semantic fluency" as a proxy for general cognition, so readers will almost automatically score better than viewers. They also seem to have modeled all factors as linear, and "cannot rule out (...) the possibility of reverse causality". So to answer your question: it depends on whether you consider all assumptions of the article relevant. One thing the article certainly doesn't contradict is the old adage "use it or lose it".
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  Or: it’s a physiology / social sciences paper, so probably nonsense / narrow in scope / “more research is needed”.
  - jakobegger 7y ago
    You could probably say the same thing about 90% of scientific papers. Almost all research is narrow in scope, and more research is always needed. And calling other research fields "nonsense" is also something that researchers from all fields do.
- naravara 7y ago
  Reverse causality would be an interesting conclusion. Essentially asserting that articulate people with good memories are less likely to find TV appealing and would prefer to read or do something more interactive instead.
  - jvagner 7y ago
    There are probably a lot of reasons why people may watch a lot of TV, including depression or other forms of mental and emotional pain.
uberduber 7y ago
Older people have had more practice operating the TV. Just getting the phone to work is often a mental challenge. A ton of them are constantly inadvertently opening control center and then accidentally turning it on airplane mode or whatever. Another issue is that software changes constantly and any slight interface change they have no clue what to do.
- war1025 7y ago
  At the farmers market earlier this fall, the seller was having a hell of a time getting his phone to work so that he could swipe our card on his Square. After looking a little, he was wrapping his hand behind the phone far enough that he had his fingers from that hand touching the screen while he tried to poke buttons with his other hand. Since there were multiple fingers on the screen, it kept interpreting them as gestures and not doing anything. Further, his case made it so the Square dongle thing wouldn't stay plugged in all the way. So when he finally did get it to the swipe screen, it wouldn't read the card. Finally ended up offering to look at it myself and manually entering my card info. The guy was so visibly relieved to be out of that situation. Smart phones aren't nearly so user friendly as a lot of tech people like to think.
  - jmercouris 7y ago
    Any tool requires learning and understanding- a time and effort investment. Using a cash register also requires training. The more power you put into a tool, (frequently) the more complex the interface becomes. This is a trade-off that must be weighed. Either you make your devices do less, or you require your users to learn how to use their tools. I do not think we should sacrifice the power of our devices in exchange for improved ease of use. Final note: Of course better interface design can help mitigate the increase in complexity of the tool with the increase in power of the tool, but I believe this has a limited effect.
    - wpietri 7y ago
      Sure, you think that now, because you're in the group that interfaces are designed for. But once you're the guy at the farmer's market, you'll think differently. Power only matters if one can get something done with it. A kilogram of plutonium is enormously powerful, but that's no reason to carry it around in your pocket. I'll also note that we have been sacrificing the power of our devices in exchange for improved ease of use since the 1980s and it's great. Manually configuring X-Windows in those days was enormously powerful, and enormously user-hostile. We sacrifice vast amount of computing power on the altar of usability, and that's exactly what we should be doing. Contrary to my early computing experience, I have never once had to rebuild the kernel on my phone, and I am very happy with that. And third, you mostly create a false dichotomy here. If we're talking about a typewriter or a steam loom or something, yes, power and user complexity go together. But the true power of software is the ability to hide most of the complexity most of the time. Most of the work of software development is pushing complexity down, wrapping it in abstractions that provide the next level up with a clean interface. A perfect example here is Google Search. It's a magic box into which I can type (and now, just say) anything, and it will apparently intuit what I want. The "powerful" version of that interface was 1980s search, where you carefully specified the various fields you wanted to search (because all data had to be carefully fed into the system's structure) and a painfully constructed, manually stemmed, boolean query. For maybe 1 search in 500, I still want that kind of power. But for the rest of the time, I'm very grateful that thousands of nice people at Google have made it so that their search's power has increased continuously, with users needing to learn less and less to get good results.
LUmBULtERA 7y ago
The article addresses this directly: "Indeed, it is of note that other screen-based activities such as video gaming and using the internet which involve more interaction can in fact have cognitive benefits, leading to higher levels of frontal and central EEG activity(21) and enhanced visual-spatial skills, problem-solving skills and cognition in older age(16), suggesting that it is this alert-passive interaction that is a key feature of the effects of television viewing." Also note in Table 1 there are activities such as "using the internet" and "reading a daily newspaper" that were examined.
k__ 7y ago
Well, you have to remember the memes so you can exhale more air from your nose when you see it next time.
chewz 7y ago
1965: He is so smart, he is watching so much TV 1990: He is so dumb, he is watching TV all day 2000: He is so bright, he spends a lot of time on the Internet 2020: He is so dumb, spending all day on the Internet.
- GarrisonPrime 7y ago
  The difference is in quality and quality. Both media began with precious little content, most of it relatively high in value for the times and circumstances. (Even if it could be argued some content was low quality or utility, the simple access to a much wider array of thought was valuable.) But once they matured, of course they filled up with trash. Just like every medium. Given the quality of most books these days, someone “reading a lot” doesn’t mean much anymore, for instance.
  - Dontrememberit 7y ago
    Do you mean quality and quantity?
- michaelcampbell 7y ago
  > 1965: He is so smart, he is watching so much TV I'm not sure this was ever the case. > Newton N. Minow spoke of the "vast wasteland" that was the television programming of the day in his 1961 speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_aspects_of_television#Negative_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_aspects_of_television#N...
- 0xcde4c3db 7y ago
  One reason for this pattern is classism: the novelties of the upper classes are held up as glamorous and even virtuous, and that goes away when something is mass-marketed and becomes popular among the lower classes. Eventually, one might even hear words like "disgusting" and "poison" used to describe something that was once considered perfectly wholesome.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  > 1965: He is so smart, he is watching so much TV This never happened.

Erlich_Bachman 7y ago

"Watching television for more than 3.5 hours per day is associated with a dose-response decline in verbal memory over the following six years, independent of confounding variables." associated Not "caused". It is still an interesting study, but this should be the first thing to recognize, whether it claims association or causation.

prox 7y ago
I also wonder if the type of programming matters : if watching quiz shows that jog memory and recall are different from watching soap opera, or sports, or learning programs for instance.
- Lerc 7y ago
  It might not be that simple. I think intellectual effort of these shows varies more within type than across. Tipping Point and Only Connect are both quiz shows but the first has questions like How many degrees are there in a circle? The latter has questions like; What can come fourth in this sequence? All this happened more or less. Sherlock Homes took his bottle from the corner... There were four of us - George and William Samuel Harris...
  - petepete 7y ago
    To summarise; BBC4 - good, ITV - not so much.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
      Maybe there’s a progression though? I have no idea what came fourth in the sequence, does that mean I should expect rapid age-related cognitive-decline? I’m probably going to blame that on all the hard drugs I’ve abused, rather then my lack in other areas.
  - yrro 7y ago
    It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

thundergolfer 7y ago

I am surprised that 3.5 hours a day is the threshold where decreased performance begins, as in my little life bubble that seems like an abnormally large amount of TV watching. However Wikipedia[1] tells me the average USA "consumer" is watching 4 hours a day! Yikes. To a layman like me this seems like great research. A lot of effort was put in to draw a rigorous conclusion about the effects of TV watching on some aspect of mental performance. I just read Amusing Ourselves to Death though, and I find myself compelled to be a lot more dramatic about the negatives of TV watching, on the late author's behalf. Yes it's pretty bad that (excessive) TV watching literally damages your cognitive ability to some degree, but I would say (and please point me to research) that before that damage starts to show it's already near devastated your personal 'knowledge-base'. To try and paraphrase Postman, the content on TV is either trivial or non-trivial but delivered in such a way as to keep you from holding onto any significance, meaning, or theory. TV as a medium is terribly fractured (commercial breaks, 'Now..This' segues) and fundamentally visual (rather than typographic). Human minds thrive in connectivity, interrelation, and continuity. Our minds thrive in the typographic world. At his most polemic, Postman argues that TV at is worst is totally incoherent, conferring basically no knowledge whatsoever. A person's mind might still performance just fine in tests, but having been starved of knowledge it is practically unintelligent. Think also of the opportunity cost. At an average of 4 hours a day, as USA 'consumer' watches 1460 hours of TV a year. An average person reads 200-250 words per minute. Taking the upper bound, and the average non-fiction book as 50,000 words. They could finish that average non-fiction book in 4.16 hours. So, they could be reading almost 1 book a day for a whole year instead. Now, that napkin-math result seems implausible to me, but imagine if I was off by an order of magnitude. Say this person could read 35 non-fiction books in a year if that wholesale swapped TV for reading non-fiction. 35 non-fiction books at ~42 hours per book. They would be enormously enriched by this alternative behaviour. As an extreme (but unfortunately not uncommon) example, instead of getting all red in the face hearing about Socialism coming to the USA from Fox news, our dear average USA 'consumer' could have read Das Kapital, and The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and The Road to Wigan Pier, and Capitalism and Freedom, and On Liberty, and... etc etc. You get the point. So yeah, I'm really onboard with the thesis of Amusing Ourselves To Death. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption

7y ago

uberduber 7y ago

I know a ton of these older adults. I think the true problem is that they are not socializing enough which is the cause of the mental decline and often paranoia. Some of them have moved somewhere cheaper to retire where they don’t have many friends, but most of the ones I know just watch tv instead of calling a friend to do something. The friend is the same even though they would love to hang out. I’ve tried nudging them with no success.

criddell 7y ago
My grandmother fought against leaving her house for a retirement home for a long time. When she was about 85 she finally gave in and was surprised to find out she loved it there. In her home she mostly passed the time watching TV and knitting. In the retirement home, she joined a choir, she ate with friends every day, she took advantage of regular trips to restaurants and shopping malls, and she was constantly playing cards. Having friends around and things to do with them was huge for her happiness.

subroutine 7y ago

The amount of TV watched might be correlated with cognitive decline, but is certainly not the cause. I doubt there is any activity that can accelerate the rate of decline apart from the things we put in our bodies (food & drugs). It's better to think of cognitive decline proceeding at some baseline rate and the mental and physical activities we engage in act to buffer this pace. Watching TV happens to be a poor buffer, especially over such long stretches of such passive stimulation (requires little mental or physical exertion). You would get the same low buffer effect staring at a wall, flipping through a picture book, or knitting a scarf for 3.5 hours. This might be obvious but TV isn't causing decline, it's just not helping to prevent it.

Cougher 7y ago
"is certainly not" What do you base your certainty on? It's certainly not fact. "I doubt there is any activity that can accelerate the rate of decline apart from the things we put in our bodies (food & drugs)." You missed oxygenation.
- subroutine 7y ago
  Yes, oxygen goes inside our bodies. Also liquids. I base this certainty partially on my expertise in the field of cognitive decline, but mostly common sense principles. Cognitive decline is a natural part of aging. It happens to everyone regardless of how much TV one watches; even people who watch no TV whatsoever cannot avoid cognitive decline. Thus our best estimate of what causes cognitive decline points towards the aging of the underlying biological apparatus that supports cognition. Furthermore, there are likely to be infants and young children who watch as much TV, and view programming geared towards learning; and as they mature will see gains in cognitive abilities. How is that explained it TV causes cognitive decline.

john_moscow 7y ago

I think, the problem is deeper than just watching TV. The real question is what activities does it replace. 3.5 hours per day is a a significant portion of one's day, if you subtract sleep, food, shopping, doctor visits and other basic needs. I wouldn't be surprised if those who watch less TV fill that time with creative hobbies, socialization, reading of thought-provoking books, etc. As a matter of fact, I would love to see a paper trying to structure those activities and correlate the prevalent groups to the cognitive performance.

friendlybus 7y ago
Roald Dahl the famous writer used to love reading news and the like, saying he could do it all day. This problem has likely been around for a long time. I'd be curious what people do in cultures without the drip feed and their reaction to it.

Zenst 7y ago

I've often wonder the effect of refresh rate. Back in the days of NTSC/PAL TV days, Americans had NTSC running at 60Hz and the UK ran at 50Hz refresh rates (same as the electricity supply runs out btw). This would yield American friends/colleagues comming to the UK and for a few weeks watching TV would complain about the flicker. Reason for this was their visual system had got used to the higher refresh rate and suddenly seeing something lower, stood out and once noticed, was hard to un-notice and would for them make for a noticeable flicker. I've often wondered what effects refresh rate has upon the brain and how fast/how we process information and equally, how we adapt. So with all that in mind, I wonder how old people who grew up with a 60hz TV compare to those accustomed to 50hz and if the statistics of cognitive decline are not the same - more interesting questions.

ygra 7y ago
Personally, both 50 and 60 Hz are horribly flickery. Back when I used a CRT I couldn't stand anything below ~85 Hz and would get headaches. Now that the screen no longer flickers, I guess in terms of motion fluidity there's a perceivable difference between 50 and 60 Hz. Something I personally cannot unsee, though, is 2:3 pulldown, which is something you don't see in Europe (at the expense of slightly faster movies).
- joshspankit 7y ago
  I’m pretty convinced on the theory that some people see “faster” than others. Most people can be taught to notice flicker, but I really feel like some see more naturally.

littlestymaar 7y ago

I wonder were the effect comes from: - is that the medium itself (and the fact we watch it passively)? - is that the fact that it replaces other activities? - is that the retarded content it shows? - is that the stressful content that appears in the news all the time (crimes, natural catastrophes, war, terror attack, etc.)? - is that the way it's shot (with non-stop movement, even when nothing happens,just to keep us watching)?

glaberficken 7y ago

Anedoctal evidence. Source: My own grandmother (80yo in 2019) I have observed in my grandmother that she displays markedly lower cognitive decline when compared to her peers (friends and family around the same age). Here are some (maybe biased) observations. In the early 80s (at 40+yo) my grandmother was working as a secretary in a small office and went through the change from mechanical typewriters to electronic ones. While she was doing this the majority of her friends where 100% house wives. In the early 90s(at 50+yo) my grandmother learned to use a T9 mobile phone by herself. Her friends didn't have a mobile phone for years, and even myself would only have a mobile phone much later than her. (in fact i remember her teaching me how to navigate a Nokia that she gave me when she upgraded) In the early 2000's (at 60+yo) my grandmother bought a Windows XP PC, learned how to use it from scratch (had never used a computer in her life) and started to browse the internet, write emails, copy photos from digital cameras on to the computer etc. At the same time, her friends had no clue how to use a computer. In the 2010's my grandmother quickly transitioned to iPad to browse the web / iPhone to keep up with grandchildren on social media. Her friends would only come to have a smartphone and join the social media revolution in the mid 2010s.

cj 7y ago
How much television does she watch?
- glaberficken 7y ago
  A lot! Mostly football (not the US sport), any sport that is on TV really, news and hollywood movies. Also she is a chronic late sleeper (as in going to bed late and waking up late) which both me and my mom seem to have inherited.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    There’s always outliers. Some tiny percent of the population can smoke and drink non-stop, never exercise, eat shit constantly, and die by getting hit by a bus while jogging at 02:30. Still not real helpful for us who didn’t win the genetic lottery.

sitkack 7y ago

The brain thrives on two things, movement and questions. Passively letting an uncritical experience wash over the mind wipes the chalk from the slate. Having active shared experiences with other people while asking and answering questions is what keeps us us.

nkozyra 7y ago
> Passively letting an uncritical experience wash over the mind I don't watch much television but I think that consuming and processing narrative is not entirely passive. Your brain is still doing work to connect dots in stories, you're building internal networks of events and characters. I think there's a lot more interaction on the receiving end there than you're giving credit. Truthfully what television removes (though not entirely) from story processing versus reading is a huge chunk of imaginative work and some memory requirements.
- naringas 7y ago
  > consuming and processing narrative is not entirely passive. while I agree with this, modern television requires far less "interaction on the receiving end" than you give it credit for. It lacks novelty.
  - gruez 7y ago
    > modern television [...] lacks novelty. Can you elaborate on what you mean by “modern”? We’re in a golden age of television, according to some. I can think of at least a dozen shows released in the past few years that have deep and complex storylines.
    - robryan 7y ago
      I think it works both ways, we have some much choice now that you can easily seek out both ends of the spectrum. There is no shortage of mindless TV for people to watch if that is what they are after.
    - 7y ago

Merrill 7y ago

>Immediate and delayed verbal verbal memory were assessed using a word learning task in which participants were presented with 10 common words by a taped voice, one every 2 seconds. Participants had to recall as many words as possible immediately and after a short delay during which they completed other cognitive tests. This is the measure that declined in heavy television watchers. It is also a task that television watching doesn't require, since recall of previous spoken words is rarely needed to understand the next video sequence. It's also a task that I don't do well on. I do much better if the words are presented in writing. I can watch a TV show and not remember a thing about it later. It may be a way the brain has of protecting memory from being overwritten by nonsense.

rightbyte 7y ago
If your health is bad you probably watch more TV and listens to radio, though, since you can't go out as easily.
- Merrill 7y ago
  True, although I know people who neither watch much TV nor have lots of social interactions with people. There engage in other passive activities like reading or they have a variety of hobbies, sports, etc. Some people have little need to listen to chatter, either from a box or face-to-face.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    The question is what causes what. We know that TV and cognitive decline in this population are associated. Does television watching cause cognitive decline? Does cognitive decline cause television watching? Does some other factor cause both television watching and cognitive decline? Knowing some people are inactive and read books doesn't help much in probing this. Because we're not asserting cognitive decline always causes television watching, or whatever.
jperiasw 7y ago
What if you are from a developing country and have to rely on subtitles to understand the sequence, and also you cant read fast enough and hence you need to rewind sometimes to retain the sequence. Is this good or bad?

gingerlime 7y ago

Interesting that the threshold is at 3.5. 3 hours or less is fine. I wonder if there’s a way to have TVs with watch timers. For better self-control. I notice at my parents house that the TV is almost always on. It personally drives me insane. I think they want to curb it down, but it’s a habit that’s hard to break... so maybe a screen-time app for the TV can help??

wj 7y ago
TVs have sleep timers where they turn off after the set amount of time. Or at least they used to. You might be able to use an Alexa plug between the TV and the wall to the same effect.
- gingerlime 7y ago
  Yeah, but it's something you actively need to activate every time, and it doesn't count accumulated time over a 24 hour hour period... anyway, was just toying with the idea. (inspired by the iPhone screentime)
  - matwood 7y ago
    The streaming services will present a dialog asking if someone is still watching after a period of time. If I do not respond to that dialog, my ATV will eventually turn off which turns off my TV.
    - gingerlime 7y ago
      That sounds like a variation of a sleep timer. I'm talking about measuring (and maybe even alerting/stopping) excessive watch time. i.e. if someone is actively flipping channels for 5 hours a day, that's not healthy (according to this research)... Streaming services sadly have the reverse incentive in this case, to actually make you watch more.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

I don’t know enough to know the answer to this, but does the paper address the chance that people that have a cognitive decline watch more tv and it is an effect not a cause?

paufernandez 7y ago
That's exactly what I was thinking. The assumption that the TV is the culprit is so powerful that is not even questioned.
thundergolfer 7y ago
They say in the study that they looked for reverse causality, and that they checked for study participants that acquired a medical diagnosis of cognitive decline (eg. dementia) during the study period.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

papito 7y ago

It's like when they say "wine is good for your heart". And then a study analyzed over three million grocery receipts.. "The people who bought wine were more likely to place olives, low-fat cheese, fruits and vegetables, low-fat meat, spices, and tea in their carts. Beer drinkers, on the other hand, were more likely to reach for the chips, ketchup, margarine, sugar, ready-cooked meals, and soft drinks." Schatzker, Mark. The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor (p. 155). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. EDIT: What I am saying is - yes, television shuts off the thinking part of your brain, but then you also don't move, don't exercise. Causation here is VERY flaky.

300IQGAMER 7y ago
They did also mention that video games were better for cognition, so it could be that passive activities are worse than active. Not necessarily to do with exercise.
- papito 7y ago
  It totally makes sense that video games are good for cognition - reaction training, problem solving. BUT, when you are younger, your body can take a hit if you abuse it. Younger people binge-drink and watch Netlfix for hours, and can still be sharp and fit. But then activities become much more important after 30, as you've drained the gift of genes and youth. I bet there is not a lot of info on the results of 70-year-olds playing half-life :) Either way, I always skeptically view these studies that take two random things and tell you that they somehow directly relate to each other. Especially with humans, where the number of variables at play is nearly infinite.
Spooky23 7y ago
Maybe. What are old people watching? If it’s anything like what I see at my relatives and at assisted living facilities, it’s also of cable news and weather. Staring at repetitive, content free crap cannot be good for your brain.
- papito 7y ago

fortran77 7y ago

Wow! I'm 57 years old so I'm already into the sample set (they started at age 50). I wonder if my Sunday Afternoon TiVo binges of "Dr. Pimple Popper," "Below Deck," and an occasional "Judge Judy" are making me dumb!? I hope not. Oh, and I tried the new podiatric reality show: "My Feet Are Killing Me." I think I'm smarter because of it. Granted, I watch about 4-5 hours of TV a week, not 3.5 hours/day. But only because I don't have enough hours in the day. I enjoy television, and look forward to my Sunday binges.

kylek 7y ago

Ma was right, it’ll rot your brain!

NPMaxwell 7y ago

A randomized controlled experiment: Find a collection of 200 people who you will be able to test 5 years from now. Send copies of this report to a random selection of 100 of them. Send a similar article not about television to the other 100. Test after 5 years.

viburnum 7y ago

What else are you going to do but watch tv when your brain starts to go?

yalogin 7y ago

Instead of watching TV what if i browse reddit or HN and keep commenting? How is that any different? Sure I am not using my brain when watching tv but I am not really turning it off. I am still trying to process the visuals and in some cases trying to understand or predict what might happen. How different is that from mindless browsing?

finneganscat 7y ago

This study does not look at the content of the television watching. Would watching history documentaries result in the same decline as watching reality TV?

originalbryan2 7y ago

Me watch many tv and have great word speaking.

samantohermes 7y ago

It's probably because overload of long-term memory is related to Alzheimer's and other dementia: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12269167_Does_longer-term_memory_storage_never_become_overloaded_and_would_such_overload_cause_Alzheimer's_disease_and_other_dementia https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12269167_Does_longe...

vorotato 7y ago

Of course, cognitive decline could also cause television.