It can relax wonderfully after a stressful day at work and is occasionally great fun: watching trash TV. Reality or dating shows, just nothing strenuous. But our brain doesn’t seem to like that.
Watching a lot of television never had a good reputation. In the past, children were warned by their parents that watching too much television made them square eyes. Ever since the invention of private television and its colorful game shows, there has been a rumor that this might not be good for the intelligence of viewers. However, such cultural snobbery was never based on scientific facts. Until now.
The American researcher Dr. Ryan Dougherty, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, studied the impact that watching long TV programs had on the brains of 599 middle-aged people. And he noticed: The so-called Gray matter was present in the test subjects to a lesser extent than in comparison persons, and you also had Frontallappen and your Area entorhinalis smaller than those who refused to watch TV – so their brains literally shrank. In addition, they did worse on cognitive tests.
A lot of television has been shown to damage the brain
The frightening thing: Even relatively low consumption of Trash TV in adulthood seems to have consequences for the brain that, in the worst case, could end in dementia in senior citizenship. The subjects concerned watched television for an average of two to three hours a day. And not even sport and an otherwise healthy lifestyle seem to be able to offset the negative effects caused by the blistering box.
That’s why Dr. Instead, Ryan Dougherty gives people other well-earned after-hours pursuits that can even be good for the brain. This includes, for example, board games. However, whether an evening round of Monopoly or “Mensch ärgere Dich nicht” have a relaxing effect on us that is as relaxing as an episode of “Bachelorette”, that remains open.
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