A revealing study by Scientific Reports asserts that television watching can have adverse consequences for the memory of the aged. Passivity intrinsic to television watching does not allow cognitive faculties to be utilised adequately.
Manaf S. Manu is a psychologist – based in Bhopal.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t does not need to be reiterated that spending excessive amounts of time watching television is not good for anybody. There are a large number of studies that have established a linkage between watching television for longer hours and low levels of concentration among children; these imply that watching television for a long period of time leads to attention deficiency and the inability to concentrate among children and young adults.
A recent study has come up with the revelation that not only does watching television for long hours impact the concentration skills of children, it also hampers memory of old people. The study has found that when old people end up watching television for more than 3.5 hours a day, there was a steady decline in their verbal memory over a period of time.
The study which shows how watching excessive television can drastically impede the memory of older people has been published in Scientific Reports. The findings of the report were revealed after researchers at the University College London, UK collected data and analysed it for a period of six years in a longitudinal study about the Ageing section of the population.
To test how televisions watching impacted verbal memory, the participants of the study were required to memorise and remember a large list of words within a provided period of time or recall names of places/things beginning with a particular alphabet within a given frame of time.
The study found out that those who watched television for 3.5 or more hours per day showed a steady decline of 8-10% as far as their memory was concerned and could not do sufficiently well in word-language memory.
And the report revealed that people who watched television for a lesser time, showed only a loss of 4-5% memory over time. The study also asserts that watching excessive television in old age can risk people of dementia. It is widely known that the rapidly changing and fragmentary dense sensory stimuli provided by TV may lead to a lack of agency and passivity among viewers.
The report reminds us that watching excessive amounts of television impacts our memory by creating cognitive stress. The argument provided is that since watching television is broadly an act of passivity and it may have several psychological impacts due to the watching of graphics, suspense scenes or other stimulating content- those who engage in it for longer have a declines sense of agency in responding to concrete situations that require cognitive skills.
Reading, playing a board game, cultural activities etc that require people to engage their own agency in the real world become ways in which the mind gets used and people display their agency but when the mind becomes used to only excessive television watching, it becomes lethargic. What this means is that while television watching does have implications for our memory, one of the bigger damages that it does to us is that it takes us away from activities in the real world that need our agency.
The passivity needed for television watching does not allow us to use our own agency and creativity and therefor does not give adequate opportunity to test our memory as well. The findings of the study are immensely important given the fact that in our contemporary sedentary lifestyles we devote a great amount of time to television watching or on our computer/phone screens. It warns us of the damaging consequences of excessive indulgence.
