TV Viewing Linked to Attention Problems

oDDmON oUT writes "While your mother may have told you that sitting too close to the TV was bad for your eyes, the folks over at New Scientist are reporting that too much television may be linked to a bad attention span 'The study is not proof that TV viewing causes attention problems, Landhuis notes, because it may be that children prone to attention problems may be drawn to watching television. "However, our results show that the net effect of television seems to be adverse."'"

Re:No, really?

[cp.tar]

You forgot commercial breaks, which make our attention stop and go and stop and go...

Re:No, really?

[ackthpt]

Gosh, you mean watching Tv with 1/2 second shots changing quickly will shorten my attention span? What's next, water that gets you wet?

Ever notice how stuff on TV in most countries is peppered with advertising? Start a story, ad, ad, ad, some more of the story, ad, ad, ad, ad, a preposterous climax/cliff hanger, ad, ad, ad, ad, some sort of resolution which returns things back to the way they were at the beginning of the show.

I don't watch TV anymore as I find it frustrates the heck out of me. I read books now, play the occasional video game, but have suffer no doubts maintaining my attention span is quite a challenge. I must have 5 or more thoughts pass through my mind each minute I'm listening to someone talk, then find I can't remember their name.

Re:Why is it

[decipher_saint]

In the 50s if you had a problem you were just "funny", if it was too much for the family to handle they'd drop you off at the funny farm and pump you full of drugs.

I wonder sometimes about exactly how "good" attention span is defined. I mean back in the 50s they used to have intermission for motion pictures. Maybe inattentive behaviour went unnoticed? (It would explain the Edsel).

Re:Why is it

[Ubergrendle]

Its more complicated than that, but you're on the right track. Can't remember the exact details of the show, but a CBC Radio program called Ideas had a sociologist on one episode talking about the separation of humanity from nature and doing things 'real'. Nature in all its aspects is beaten back, controlled, dominated, destroyed. We are having generations of children grow up with absent parents, 24/7 electronic media, and a complete segregation from spontaneous childhood play. -- the last one being the MOST troublesome. I was fortunate to grow up in a suburb that had lots of wild spaces to play in, and before parents had kids lined up in supervised after school programs 7 days a week. Kids nowadays only see a flowing river in Legends of Zelda; they see a forest on TV.

Recently a TV program on the Food Network, Jamie Oliver's School Dinners, really hit this mark home for me. The majority of kids in a classroom couldn't identify an unprocessed carrot from a potato. (!!!)

Over dependence upon TV is a symptom, not the cause IMHO. Yes TV has some detrimental effects, but there are some communicative benefits as well. Lack of physical activity, lack of access to 'nature', lack of spontaneous play, hyper-compressed 'quality' time with children as both parents work...these are all problematic, ontop of TV exposure.

Re:Obligatory.

[TheWanderingHermit]

Yep. It's nowhere near new. I used data like this in a speech I had to do in public speaking around 1979 in high school. When I worked in Special Ed, many teachers had noticed that the kids who talked more about TV were the ones that tended to have less of an attention span. There's a lot of experience that leads one to believe that kids that watch too much TV tend to have an attention span that's about 10-15 minutes, or the length of time between commercials.

On the other hand, I've seen a huge number of kids who are supposedly ADD or ADHD show an amazing attention span when they sit down with a copy of Harry Potter. It makes me wonder if part of the problem with attention spans in school is due to inappropriate expectations for a child's age and boring teachers that just don't have the skills teachers did in years past.

Re:Why is it

[mark-t]

The reason it is more common now than it used to be is two fold: one, our society has improved mechanisms for detecting neurologically atypical activity due to improved social programs and medical technologies; and two, there actually _are_ more people in the world with these disorders than before. The reason for the latter is connected with how medical technology has advanced over the past century or so. Before, people with either mental or physical disabilities would not usually be able to be successful, and thus would not typically survive in a competitive world. These people would have relatively few offspring, and the genes associated with those disabilities would not be very common. Enter ever-more improved medicines, the ability to control or limit the effects of the disabilities, allowing people with the genes associated with them to reproduce as commonly as people with typical human gene structures. The result is that the gene pool contains an increasing amount of "flawed" genetic material, increasing the likelihood that a child would be born with some disorder or another.

I Call BS

[eno2001]

When I was a kid I watched a TON of television and I have an incredibly long attention span. I can sit and write code for hours. Or work on music for hours (piano, guitar, synths, audio workstation). I can have a long conversation on a particular subject (over dinner, in the car, etc...). My average viewing day at age three during the week was:

7:00AM-11:00AM (Cartoons, Little Rascals, Brady Bunch)
3:00-5:00PM (Rin-Tin-Tin, more Little Rascals, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Looney Toons, etc...)
7:00PM-9:00PM (Anything my folks watched which could have been Star Trek, Hogan's Heroes, any number of 70s cop shows and of course the news occasionally in the 6:00-7:00PM time slot.

Weekends were usually:

7:00AM- 12:00PM (Cartoons)
1:00PM-5:00PM (Local hosted movies "Superhost" in Cleveland)
6:00PM-7:00PM (Star Trek)
8:00PM-11:00PM (Any number of "family shows" in the 70s, Love Boat and Fantasy Island on Saturday nights, and maybe a movie on Sunday nights)

It had no impact on my attention span.

The ability to concentrate...

[Kjella]

...is a learned skill as well. Everyone that's worked in a cubicle or "open landscape", learn how to tune out most (if not all of it). Find a farmer or lumberjack and place him there and he'll go crazy with all the chattering until he learns. If you got zero attention span, the TV is also the easy way out, it's a constant series of impressions to keep you sitting there. You don't have to actually learn to sit down and get some attention span.

Then again, I rarely get to do that at work either. If I had a single checklist of things to do, and could work my way down then all would be well. Instead it's definately got multitasking, I'd say at times multithreading, preemption and there's always someone trying to hog the scheduler. I make it sound all bad but I don't really feel it that way - but it's definately not for the really long attention spans.

a short attention span is not necessarily bad

[netsavior]

I HATE how people call it attention deficit "disorder" and how they say the net effect is "averse".

screw you, I am happy with my short attention span. It serves me financially and personally to have a "short attention span".

Because I VALUE MY TIME(short attention span) more than other people, I am more efficient and I deal with less bullshit because I don't want to. Call it a disorder if you want, I call it an evolutionary advantage.

Re:No, really?

[anagama]

I'm with you, though I go for the convenience of netflix. I quite watching broadcast/cable TV in 1993. On the once every other year chance I watch a show at a friend's place, I'm constantly annoyed at the breaks in the story. Aside from years of training, I don't see how people can tolerate it.

What I prefer is to have a whole season on DVD -- the story becomes a video-novel that way. Even feature films start to feel like short stories when compared to the pleasure of a commercial free movie about 20+ hours long per season.

Re:Obligatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually ADD/ADHD is a bit of a misnomer. It is more about an extreme difficulty in controlling one's attention. So frequently it is in deficit. But at other times people enter hyper-attention and get lost for hours at a time. This can be wonderful. But all-in-all the inability to "turn it off" can also be destructive (missing meals, social commitments, etc). Not being able to control one's focus sucks.

At least it does for me. I don't know whether it was the cause or the symptom, but as a child practically all I did was watch TV. It was my baby sitter and my friends. Even now I can easily get sucked in for hours on end if I'm not careful. The funny thing is that I don't feel like I absorb much in front of the TV most of the time. It's just a way to go numb. Anyway, I'm not judging TV, or other poeple's use. Just reporting my biased, subjective experience which is that I have ADD and as a child I easily watched 5+ hours of TV a day.

Re:Videogames

[tsstahl]

Wouldn't video games be the obvious cure to TV induced ADD?

No. Absolutely not. Video games are a form of hyper stimulation. Basically, you get into a trance like state with an intense focus on the rules of the game universe. ADD/ADHD folks are already hyper-stimulated, hence their condition.

There has been work done using game like simulations to treat ADD, but you could only compare them to a videogame in the most rudimentary sense.

The 'cure' is simply large quantities of quality time with educated parents/teachers/circle of love members learning how to cope.

A does not cause B, B attracts A.

[Anonymous Coward]

The study is not proof that TV viewing causes attention problems, Landhuis notes, because it may be that children prone to attention problems may be drawn to watching television.

Now if only someone would admit that about violent video games as well..

Mmmmmmmmm.... TV

[Nonillion]

You know, they don't call it the lobotomy box for nothing.

Re:Obligatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

"...or the length of time between commercials."

But that begs the question. Is it the TV program that hurts attention span, or the frequency with which it's interrupted?

Animal Planet

[boris111]

Ever watch Animal planet "Most Extreme..." It has some interesting facts, and I'm glad they make Science appealing for kids, BUT they repeat the same facts over and over again. Think maybe ADD is a defense mechanism for boredom... I can see it in the kid's head now "Oh the announcer guy will just repeat what he just said 5 times so I'll just veg out until after the next commercial break."

What if ADD isn't real? What if..

[TigerPlish]

...instead of being a separate entity it is a symptom of something else?

I just throw that up for discussion, because I have many of the hallmarks of ADD.. can't sit still, fidget, must always be doing *something*, had a devil of a time "paying attention" at the spoonfed crap at school..

Is it possible all that jazz is linked to something else, like, say, bi-polar disorder? Because *that* one the docs are fairly sure I got.

Is it further possible that the idiot box had a big hand in developing that?

Amusing Ourselves To Death

[Organic Brain Damage]

From Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death:

Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering grey light. This, in turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems even strange.

There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now almost complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane.

It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example ... that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality ... and that television speaks in only one persistent voice -- the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms. Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. This is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.

Main points:


1. Watching a lot of TV changes the way your brain works.
2. Those changes leave TV watchers with significantly less ability to think through complex problems.
3. As a direct result, we elect morons like George W. Bush who lead us into disasterously stupid wars.