Strategically placed on a bookshelf in our den, a small TV screen has for some time gone largely unwatched. We could stream innumerable bits of entertainment, I’m told, if we’d only take the time to research the options, pay the subscription prices, and devise a viewing schedule. And though My Lovely Wife and I have on occasion discussed the possibility of perhaps figuring out how to watch a show together, neither of us have mustered enough interest to suggest a definitive course of action.
There’s another TV in the basement family room that has also been neglected. This one was once connected to a cable box that fed it programs at the touch of a button. I dropped that service — and the monthly expense — a couple of baseball seasons ago, when coverage of games featuring my hometown team was no longer offered. The antenna that perches in the window or on the coffee table (depending on the channel) often struggles to corral a signal, further dampening my already tepid interest in the pursuit of cheap entertainment.
This, of course, is a far cry from my experience with TV during my 1950s youth, when the medium emerged as a fascinating novelty and gradually became something of a national addiction. Yet its fundamental simplicity — switch it on, select one of the channels — tended to discourage efforts to temper our usage back in the day. Nor did warnings of its potential to produce brain rot do much to reduce its appeal.
I can’t say that, some 70 years later, it’s those neurological risks that have me lounging on the living room couch immersed in an obscure 19th century British novel rather than catching a (free) World Series game on the tube downstairs. Recent research, however, suggests those risks may be a factor worth considering.
A study out of the University of Southern California found that those participants who reported the highest frequency of TV viewing during midlife exhibited more than 20 years later a loss of volume in the areas of the brain associated with memory as well as higher levels of white matter hyperintensity (WMH), which is known to increase the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and stroke.
“Our findings indicate that frequent TV watching was associated with adverse brain structural outcomes, including lower cortical volume in AD-related regions and greater WMH lesion volume,” lead study author David Raichlen, PhD, writes in Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.
Raichlen and his team have long been exploring the effects of various sedentary behaviors (SB) on cognitive function. In this study, they reviewed data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) database to determine links between “context-specific” sedentary habits and brain structure.
They compared self-reported TV-viewing habits from 1,712 middle-aged ARIC participants with their brain scans during a 22-year follow-up period. They found that those who reported watching “very often” were more likely than their less-devoted counterparts to exhibit damage to their brains, after adjusting for various demographic, behavioral, and clinical factors — including carrying the APOE genes most associated with Alzheimer’s.
“Reading is cognitively stimulating, and this stimulation seems to reduce brain atrophy and strengthen neuronal connectivity.”
It’s not simply about sitting around, Raichlen notes. It’s about what your brain is doing while you’re sitting around. “While frequent TV watching was consistently associated with lower cortical volume and greater WMH volume,” he writes, “sitting during work was linked to higher cortical volumes in several regions, including those often considered important for higher-level executive functions.”
And, if we’re to believe recent findings by Raymond Mar, PhD, and his colleagues at York University in Canada, lounging on the couch with a book confers similarly beneficial neurological benefits. Citing various studies, Mar argues that regular recreational readers exhibit slower cognitive decline than nonreaders, and they tend to live longer.
“Reading is cognitively stimulating, and this stimulation seems to reduce brain atrophy and strengthen neuronal connectivity,” he writes in Current Opinion in Psychology. “Sustained mental engagement during reading likely bolsters cognition across the lifespan.”
This is good news, of course, for bookish types like me, but I hesitate to draw significant conclusions from Raichlen’s findings on the neurological costs of TV viewing. As he notes in the study, self-reported data on sedentary behaviors may be unreliable, and the observational nature of the research may limit the degree to which we can attribute a cause-and-effect relationship between our TV habits and cognitive function. Also, whatever damage the viewing habits may have caused, only the male study participants seemed to have been affected.
And far be it for me to counsel anyone on the potential neurological dangers of too much TV — or the cognitive benefits of spending hours navigating obscure 19th century British literature. All that reading hasn’t elevated my cognitive capabilities enough to figure out how to stream an NBA game.
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