TV harms the brain – Science and Life

Looking at the TV “box” for more than three hours a day, you run the risk of their mental abilities.

We hear so often about harm from the TV that someone probably could appear question – whether there is any evidence of this damage? Well, as an example to show the latest article from JAMA Psychiatry – there Kristin Yaffi ( Kristine Yaffe ) from the University of California at San Francisco and colleagues from other scientific and medical centers talks about how the habit of watching television affects the brains.
 

Abusing this device, you run the risk of their brains. (Photo Style-Photography / Westend61 / Corbis.)

  The study involved more than 3,000 people aged 18 to 30 years, which has been monitored for 25 years: they are regularly asked how much time they spend watching television, and whether they are engaged in some kind of exercise. Then, 25 years later they were asked to perform a series of cognitive tasks, with which it was possible to determine the rate of assimilation of information, verbal memory (ie a volume of said person may at the same time keep in mind), and the ability to organize their own activities (that is, the ability to plan, allocate attention between different tasks, etc.).
 

  The results were as follows: those who spent before the TV three or more hours a day in mental ability tests (not all, but a few) have shown results are below the other. Those who have practiced enough – exercise was assessed by time and intensity – showed weak results in any one test. As for those who watched a lot of television and, while neglecting physical exercise, the likelihood that they failed some of the tests doubled.
 

  On the one hand, there is, of course, take into account the own answers of respondents, that is, they reported how much time they watch television and how often practiced, can sin subjectivity. On the other hand, we watched them for a long time – as much as 25 years. The authors of the work can not say that for specific physiological mechanisms associated time spent in front of TV, and the deterioration of mental abilities (note that this deterioration had happened yet not quite old people).
 

 For the content of television programs in this case should not, so obviously, the whole thing here in the proverbial immobility; presumably, long sitting in front of a computer monitor or a laptop can lead to exactly the same consequences. From this perspective, there is nothing new – there is a lot of work on the correlation between physical education, sports, yoga and so on. and brain state. Here we can recall two years ago an article in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience , which states that the exercise helps the brain to deal with old age, providing a good blood supply to the brain regions that are particularly important for the implementation of higher cognitive tasks.
 

 Or, for example, there is a very recent article in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society – its authors have reported that long daily walks improve memory in the elderly. However, most of such studies carried out fairly quickly, and they usually focus on the elderly. As for long-term projects, such as the fact that we have described above, they are, for obvious reasons, will be much less, but the results they look more convincing – and more frightening: it turns out that thinking about the state of their own brains need to youth when very few people can do.
 

   According to the materials MedicalXpress.