Neuroscience
It has always struck me as odd that people criticize television watching as mindless entertainment. Hardly mindless. Attentional and memory demands, abstraction, requirements imposed by presentation of diverse vantage points, fast pacing, and so on, all point to fairly active neurocognition. Indeed, in some of my rehabilitation patients, I often assign choosing and watching a favorite TV show as an adjunctive and supportive "at home" task.
Steven Johnson provides an interesting perspective in tomorrow's New York Times Sunday Magazine, in an essay adapted from his new book, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.
~ Addendum - Information about the book by its author can be found at his blog:
click here
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Neuroscience
Must "C" TV: Cognitively Demanding Television
It has always struck me as odd that people criticize television watching as mindless entertainment. Hardly mindless. Attentional and memory demands, abstraction, requirements imposed by presentation of diverse vantage points, fast pacing, and so on, all point to fairly active neurocognition. Indeed, in some of my rehabilitation patients, I often assign choosing and watching a favorite TV show as an adjunctive and supportive "at home" task.
Steven Johnson provides an interesting perspective in tomorrow's New York Times Sunday Magazine, in an essay adapted from his new book, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.
Watching TV Makes You Smarter[ ... Read the full article ... ] (free registration required)
By STEVEN JOHNSON
The New York Times
Published: April 24, 2005
[snip]
For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ''24,'' you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ''24,'' you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all.
I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down.
[snip]
click here
- A Preliminary Psychology Of Binge Tv Watching
A new study in the Journal of Health Psychology is the first to provide a scholarly definition of binge TV watching and to investigate some of the factors that explain how much people indulge in it. According to Emily Walton-Pattison at Newcastle University...
- "all I Need Is A Tv Show..."
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- The Passionate Caudate
From tomorrow's New York Times: Watching New Love as It Sears the Brain By BENEDICT CAREY The New York Times Published: May 31, 2005 [snip] In the study, Dr. [Helen] Fisher, Dr. Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and...
- Reminyl (galantamine Hydrobromide)
From the New York Times: Johnson & Johnson Reports Reminyl Deaths By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: January 21, 2005 Filed at 5:08 p.m. ET RARITAN, N.J. (AP) -- Patients taking Alzheimer's drug Reminyl in a test for another use had higher...
- Interruptions & Watching Television
Apparently, television commercials serve a useful purpose in the enjoyment of television shows. Future Tense's Jon Gordon interviewed Jeff Galak, a doctoral candidate at NYU's Stern School of Business last week regarding Galak's research suggesting...