I recently came across a puzzling little article in the New York Times. It was about the effects of watching television on your intelligence.
You can guess what they found: the effects are bad.
Apparently, researchers with nothing better to do followed the TV-viewing habits of more than 3,000 people. The researchers were trying to match people’s physical activity level, and their TV-watching habits, with their ensuing mental abilities.
They followed these people for an unbelievable 25 years!
When I say “followed,” of course, I don’t mean that literally. That would be creepy. What they did was give their subjects questionnaires every five years about how much TV they watched, how much they exercised, and the like.
At the end of 25 years, they gave everyone three tests of mental “acuity.”
Then they wrote up their findings, for the JAMA (Journal of American Medicine) Psychiatry.
Apparently, the folks with the worst scores in “mental acuity” coincidentally also spent the greatest amount of time watching television…and had the least amount of physical activity.
It’s nothing your mother didn’t tell you already: “Turn that thing off and go play outside before your brain turns to mush!”
You don’t have to be a neurologist to figure that one out.
It just stands to reason. If you’re watching television, you’re probably not out rowing; jogging; or building rope bridges across the canyon.
“Maybe in the olden days, Mom,” says one of my darling children.
“What are you talking about? And since when was twenty five years ago ‘the olden days’?”
“Never mind that, Mom. The point is, nowadays people can watch TV on their cell phones, anywhere, doing anything. You can be dirt biking, or playing volleyball…”
“Maybe other people can — but if you ever try a stunt like that, it will be the end of us paying your cell-phone bill. You got that?”
“I’m not stupid, Mom.”
“That’s good.” But apparently, somebody in this study is. For one thing, they never even administered the mental tests to people until the whole thing was over. So there’s no knowing how smart (or stupid) the test subjects ever were, in the first place.
It gets worse.
Apparently, for all the other information, the researchers depended on people “self-reporting.”
For those of you not familiar with this complicated scientific jargon, that means “lying your head off.”
I know what I would do with a questionnaire like that: “I run five miles every day; I watch nothing but the PBS Newshour and the History Channel, with nightly episodes of ‘Jeopardy’ for recreation.
The rest of the time I’m in my study, at my Standing Desk, correcting definitions and spelling mistakes in Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.”
And they only gave the questionnaires every five years!
I can’t remember what I was watching five days ago, let alone five years — what is the point of even asking?
“As if watching TV could ever be mentally stimulating, anyway!” I exclaim, to my spouse. “I only watch it to relax.”
“Don’t be so judgmental, Judy. You have to admit, you learned something from that episode of ‘Naked and Afraid” we were watching.
“Yeah, never to pitch my flimsy shelter of sticks under a Poisonwood Tree. Also never to go camping while naked.”
“And you used to like watching ‘Mythbusters’ with the boys.”
“It’s true — you never know when it will come in handy to know that it’s bad to fire a frozen turkey through an airplane cockpit window.”
I am scratching my head about this study altogether.
At first, I thought it might tell me something valuable about how best to use my spare time. But I was disappointed. “We can’t separate out what is going on with the TV watching,” the Times quotes Dr. Kristine Yaffe as saying. Well, neither can I; but Dr. Yaffe is a professor of psychiatry and neurology at UCLA, and the lead author of the study. If she can’t figure out what she’s saying, why bother to write it up at all?
I am left with a hypothesis of my own. I think it’s just barely possible that the researchers have been watching a little too much television, themselves.
