3. ARTIFICIAL TOUCH AND HYPERACTIVITY
Images on television are not real. They are not events taking place where the person who views them is sitting. The images are taking place in the television set, which then projects them into the brain of the viewer. Direct response to them would therefore be more than absurd. So whatever stimulation is felt is instantly repressed. Although seeing the images may stimulate the impulse to move, the impulse is cut off. The effect is a kind of sensory tease, to put the case generously. The human starts a process and then stops it, then starts it again, then stops it, vibrating back and forth between those two poles of action and repression, all of it without a purpose in real life.
There is mounting evidence that this back-and-forth action is a major cause of hyperactivity; fast movement without purpose, as though stimulated by electricity. The physical energy that is created by the images, but not used, is physically stored. Then when the set is off, it comes bursting outward in aimless, random, speedy activity. You can see it over and over again with children. They are quiet while watching. Then afterwards they become overactive, irritable and frustrated.
Dr. Matthew Dumont says that television causes hyperactive response. But Australian psychologists Merrelyn and Fred Emery, in their study of television, have gone so far as to absolutely predict that television is directly related to the increase in hyperactivity. In extreme cases the frustration inherent in the TV experience can lead to violent activity, whatever the content of the program. Artificially teased senses require resolution. It is bizarre and frightening, therefore, that many parents use television [video game, video, Internet] as a means of calming hyperactive children. It would be far better to calm them with physical exercise, sports, wrestling, hugging, bathing and a lot of direct attention that gives them wide-ranging sensory and intellectual stimulation. Changes in diet would also help. The worst thing one can do for a hyperactive child is to put him or her in front of a television set. Television activates the child at the same time that it cuts the child (or adult) off from real sensory stimulation and the opportunity for resolution.
4. TELEVISION IS SENSORY DEPRAVATION
A parallel has been drawn previously between modern life and conditions of sensory deprivation. Artificial environments themselves reduce and narrow sensory experience to fit their own new confined reality. The effect and purpose of this narrowing is to increase awareness and focus upon the work, commodities, entertainment, spectacles and other drugs that society uses to keep us within its boundaries.
We can consider television to be an advance on that already prevalent condition. Sitting in darkened rooms, with the natural environment obscured, other humans dimmed out, only two senses operating, both within a very narrow range, the eyes and other body functions stilled, staring at light for hours and hours, the experience adds up to something nearer to sense deprivation than anything that has come before it. Television isolates people from the environment, from each other, and from their own senses. In such a condition, the two semi-operative senses cannot benefit from the usual mix of information that humans employ to deduce meaning from their surroundings. All meaning comes from this very narrowed information field.
We know that it is an accepted truth about sensory-deprivation conditions that subjects have no recourse but to focus on the images in their brain. And we know that in sensory-deprivation conditions, having no resources aside from mental images, the subject is unusually susceptible to suggestion.
When you are watching TV, you are experiencing mental images. As distinguished from most sense-deprivation experiments these mental images are not yours. They are someone else's. Because the rest of your capacities have been subdued and the rest of the world dimmed, these images are likely to have an extraordinary degree of influence. Are we saying this is brainwashing or hypnosis or mind-zapping or something like it? Well, there is no question but that someone is speaking into your mind and wants you to do something.
First, keep watching.
Second, carry the images around in your head. Third, buy something.
Fourth, tune in tomorrow.
VII. THE INGESTION OF ARTIFICIAL LIGHT
1. FROM Starlight TO TELEVISION
When you are watching television the major thing you are doing is looking at light. The philosopher John Brockman was the first person to put it that way, remarking that this in itself represents an enormous change in human experience. For four hours a day, human beings sit in dark rooms, their bodies stilled, gazing at light. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
Previous generations looked at starlight, firelight and moonlight, and there is no doubt that these experiences stir important feelings. There are cultures that spent time gazing at the sun, but there is no culture in all of history that has spent such enormous blocks of time, all of the people together, every day, sitting in dark rooms looking at artificial light.
EFFECTS OF TELEVISION ON THE BRAIN, PAGE 9 |
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