Can I Watch TV?

A couple of years ago, my family participated in a media study about preschoolers and television.  I was given a copy of the book The Elephant in the Living Room.  According to their research, television can actually affect the hardwiring of a developing infant’s brain.  Because technology advances so much faster than humans evolve, our brains are designed to process information in real time.  We deal with change at the speed that nature happens, which is mostly slow.  When visual information changes rapidly (it’s coming right for us!) our brains recognize that as unusual and important, and we shift into high gear to respond. To keep things interesting, TV scene cuts occur much more rapidly than what we see in real life can change. As adults, we know what is going on and can discount it.  But to an infant, all those scene cuts (now it’s Bert, now it’s Ernie) have the same biological effect as the charging lion.   If they watch too much TV, their brains receive a surfeit of visual information and they become high wired for stress.  It may look like they are fascinated by Baby Einstein, but biochemically speaking, they could be petrified.

 

Recently I read the truly wonderful book Free Range Kids.  And it occurs to me that at a higher cognitive level, the same thing happens to adults.  We may be able to disregard the “stress” that frequent scene cuts cause, but we are still susceptible to the stressful messages of the things we watch for entertainment.  For similar evolutionary reasons, the murder or abduction that we see on a fictional TV show gets subconsciously filed under “facts” in our brains (things we see with our own eyes go straight to the brain’s news desk).  So we are left with a sense that violence and “Stranger Danger” are much more common than they are in real life.

 

The premise of Free Range Kids is that this has led to the current overprotective state of parenting in America and deprived our children of necessary developmental experiences on their path to independent adulthood. I am totally on board with this message, and hope to write more about it later. But at the moment I’m wondering about technology.  I want my family’s brains to stay in real time and not be warped by high speed high drama imagery. But I also want my kids prepared for life in the modern age.  I don’t want to turn the TV off.  I want my kids to be tech and media savvy.  Is it possible to be technologically competent without becoming wired for stress? 

In the scientific community, it is a running joke that the conclusion of every research project is that more research is needed.  In the case of media, I hope that the research moves beyond identifying pro-social preschool programs into a deeper analysis of the way advanced technology affects our primitive bodies. And even better, how can we manage those effects without giving up our Blackberries?