On Cypherpunks, Harmon Seaver wrote:
"An article by a neurologist that I read years ago said that the human brain essentially runs out of RAM when it's trying to process a lot of graphics and sound and still think at the same time, that the graphics/sound combined with the scan line, flicker, etc. pretty much overides the brain's filters, especially when it's a fast paced news show, and people have a lot of difficulty then deciding whether to accept or reject what has just been fed them. So what happens is it just get accepted, for the most part."
(Copied without permission - it was Cypherpunks after all)
Sounds like snake-oil to me. Get out of the house and walk through the woods with your eyes and ears open - or even sit down on a grassy bank and watch the insects and plants. There is far, far more going on, far more complexity, far more detail, far more incident than on TV. Far more passes through your visual field walking outside than does when looking at a TV, which from the point of view of sensory stimulation is somewhere between a decent movie and wallpaper. Your brain has to use more processing power to look at a tree than to look at a TV screen.
Or do as I did to get to work just now and cycle through the streets of a large city in the rush hour - you keep awake and aware if only because you have to to stay alive. A feeling very similar to playing Doom, but again far far more detailed and complex (car drivers don't get it quite the same way because all that armourplate restricts their view and hearing - on a bike you notice far more).
TV is also much less socially complex (and less stressful) than interacting with real people. One of the troubles with today is that people, especially young children, are under-stimulated. Not enough happens, A house or flat with one or two parents, a child, and a TV, is much less complex than the environments most of our grandparents or great-grandparents grew up in, if only because of smaller families.
Our large brains seem mainly to be built to keep up with complicated social situations - we need to know which apes are our friends and enemies, relatives or strangers, which ones are likely to know where the juiciest termites are to be found. At that level of cognition an old-fashioned household with 6 kids, a grandmother, neighbours in and out of the kitchen all day, half a dozen domestic animals, and the kids playing in the street outside with all the other kids (or sulking at home because the other kids don't want to play with them) is far more complicated and demanding of brain power than a modern middle-class home where the 2.4 clean and tidy children are stuck in front of the TV or computer game whilst waiting for their overworked parents to drive them from their isolated suburban box to some organised, formal, organised, safe, indoor, social event.
By the time the kids are 4 or 5 years old and go to school they have already missed out on the most important years of training to be human. It takes them two years to learn to relate to their classmates - if they ever do. Never mind all too many poorer kids stuck in a tiny flat in the middle of some vast housing scheme with maybe just one parent who is afraid to let them out and sits at home without a car or job so all they see is the TV and the inside of their room.
TV is, compared with Real Life (or even reading) too slow, too unstimulating, too simple.
A kid (or adult) who watches TV all day is suffering from sensory deprivation. The input doesn't take up the bandwidth, they have to in effect turn their brains down to put up with it. The same doesn't occur with reading because you have a sort of flow control - you can increase the speed to whatever you are willing to cope with.
So passive, receptive, behaviour becomes the norm and kids with a normal healthy appetite for stimulation are diagnosed as mentally ill and get doped up with ritalin :-(
Of course reading is in a very real sense more interactive than TV (or film) because the reader is in control. You can look back and check. You can skip the boring bits, speed up. slow down. A sort of conversation develops between a skilled reader and a good writer. The imagination is engaged. Reading is inherently democratic because the individual reader is in charge. TV is inherently authoritarian because the director or producer or actor or speaker is in charge. You can turn it off and walk away but you can't influence what's happening on screen. But the reason it gets accepted is because it is full of simple, low-bandwidth, repetitive messages. Big Brother doesn't need to watch you if you spend all your time watching Big Brother.