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Technically brain volume, not weight - though I doubt that saves the joke. Also worth noting: hours watched didn't drop just because TVs got lighter, so the "lucky" framing doesn't really hold up, funny as it is.
Interestingly there is no mention of semantics or what does actually "TV watching" mean.
I have friends who self admittedly don't "watch TV" but they watch every single hyped up Netflix series available.
Are they watching TV? By this study they probably not. Are they watching TV? I'd say most likely yes, they also use the device called TV to watch Netflix
Aye, though supposedly without the ads. But with filler episodes. You wanted to waste less time, instead you get tricked. Then there's the cancelled after S1 thing which is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
>Participants were asked how frequently, on a scale ranging from “never/seldom” to “very often,” they watched television during their leisure time and how much of their workday they spent sitting.
One big concern for me in this article is, the MRI scans were not taken during the start of the study. But, I couldnt eliminate this because the pattern (of reduced white matter in brain) seem to hold true across the pool of 1700 people.
Most curious part of in this article is the active vs passive sitting distinction. Occupational sitting (or performing intellectual activity while sitting) correlated with better brain scans and white matter.
This makes sense, if I view it as consumption vs processing thing.
TV is pure consumption, Intellectual work requires output and creation.
If this thesis holds, the rise of AI tools is a bit concerning for knowledge workers. We are shifting from active creation (writing code, writing articles, designing, etc) to passive consumption and curation (reviewing AI generated content).
Will be interested to learn more on how this study unfolds further.
Observational study with an MRI at the end and user-reported activity histories. The results indicate a correlation, not necessarily causation. The study authors don't pretend to imply causation and are straight with these facts.
You can't randomize humans to either do a lot of TV watching for years or stay away from TV for years. So you can you safely assume any study making these correlations is not randomized. It does not mean it should be discarded.
There are a lot of other studies looking at how cortical volume can be preserved through aging with other interventions, however. There are a lot of before/after studies showing aerobic exercise can reduce the brain volume loss associated with aging - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41491407/
So despite this being a correlation study, the result is not surprising. Sedentary activity is correlated with slightly faster degradation of multiple brain measures.
What is interesting in this study is that sedentary work that was intellectually challenging appeared to be somewhat protective. This is also consistent with past studies with before/after measurements around interventions like really intensive skill learning or even meditation.
>The results indicate a correlation, not necessarily causation
Just to drive that home, "Study participants also did not undergo a baseline MRI", which of course could mean that they already had some of these brain changes, which may have driven more TV watching.
>Sedentary activity is correlated with slightly faster degradation of multiple brain measures.
It seems to matter what you do while you're being sedentary, at least according to this study. From the article: "Strikingly, the sedentary element of TV watching didn’t appear to be the main driver for these changes."
When I find articles like these, I remember I haven't watched TV for almost 12 years, except when at someone else's home.
By this, I mean I never turned on the TV to see what's on the television.
I used the TV as a monitor to play games or watch movies from streaming services at times.
Given that I moved to the UK after I stopped watching TV, I barely know which channels even exist on the TV.
I do watch a lot of stuff on YouTube. But it's things I chose to watch because I find them interesting, and I don't find most of the stuff on TV interesting enough.
And the interesting parts, usually, you can find them on streaming services and only watch those whenever you want to watch them. Even scrolling brain rot on Instagram seems less of a waste of time. At least the algorithm knows the type of brain rot I like.
The study seems to be strictly for TV watching. I mostly watch science/math/history/economics related videos on YT. I prefer the more in-depth ones; I also watch gaming/movies related videos sometimes. I don't think it's nearly the same as watching TV. But I don't watch hours a day of those either.
Fair, missed the sarcasm. Though for what it's worth, the imaging studies do separate passive TV from active screen use, smaller gray matter volume correlated specifically with hours of scheduled/background TV, not gaming or curated YouTube. Mechanism's still fuzzy though.
Geez, growing up in the 60's and 70's I watched a lot of TV: Little Rascals, Three Stooges, Bugs Bunny--the good stuff. I guess without that time spent watching my brain now would be the size of a large watermelon.
I watch (or listen to) a lot of youtube on my iPad (and sometimes on my TV, but not too often). I wonder if youtube watching is also correlated with the mentioned brain changes.
YouTube algorithms have a tendency to try and lead you down rabbit holes and watch AI generated content. I notice YouTube constantly trying to bias me in one direction or another. A lot of the political content on there is nowhere near as intelligent as it pretends to be.
If it notices you are interested in something, it will show you a glut of content on that particularly subject. Some of the videos are just churning out similar content. If you click on a Monty Python video, Python takes over your suggestions. Nothing against Python, I just want to watch a variety of things.
There's more variety of content on youtube, whereas I think TV sometimes caters to lowest common denominator (although that's less the case in the era of streaming: TV is much higher quality than it was when this study started in 1987).
On youtube, you could watch lots of silly dancing videos, car crashes, etc., possibly rotting your brain. Or you could watch history lectures, book reviews, documentaries, etc.
The type of content, the length of content, the method of ingesting the content, the different motivations/precursors to TV watching vs online watching (since the study doesn't determine causation only correlation) lots of things.
Science doesn't work by looking at things and saying what's "obvious" or "common sense", because what's supposedly obvious or common sense is often actually false.
Ran a quick n=1 test on myself years back — swapped TV for YouTube thinking it'd feel different. Same zombie state, same lost hours. Different box, same passive-consumption mechanism. Content format matters way more than the screen it's on.
Same fight as radio-vs-reading in the 50s, then TV-vs-video-games in the 80s. Passive screen time is passive screen time. YouTube's autoplay and infinite scroll are just Nielsen ratings with better UX.
I could have told you that years ago. LOL. The problem is that as a medium it is so passive. Radio forces you to visualise to some extent or maybe do other things. Computer games and some of the internet (even social media!) require some interaction.
Reading and stage plays require heavier use of the brain too. In the case of reading, you both interpret the words and in many cases visualise things based on them.
The first question that comes to mind is reverse causation (probably because I'm a debater). Is increased TV viewing contributing to the brain differences, or are people with say preexisting reduced brain volume simply more likely to engage in activities like this? Essentially, there may be more to this than surface level.
I'd like to see the study go farther with a specific consumed content breakdown. For example somone who watches Jimmy Kimmel vs someone who watches Dateline nightly. How much impact does the content affect the brain rot?
Poor study design for such sweeping claims. Correlation is not causation. Plethora of reasons people who were later measured with small brain sizes may have been heavy TV watchers earlier in life.
Perhaps people who already have small brains watch more TV. Or perhaps exercise is important to brain size, and people who can’t exercise watch more TV. Or maybe not watching TV, and doing other things with your time, grows your brain size.
Given the difficulties of random blinding, and the long-term (decades-long) duration of the research, studying that aspect (with the same post hoc brain morphology analysis) might help assess causality.
There was some exclusion of other factors in the study per TFA.
>Strikingly, the sedentary element of TV watching didn’t appear to be the main driver for these changes.
>Those who reported high amounts of sitting at work actually had larger frontal and occipital lobes, as well as reduced white matter hyperintensity volumes, indicating better brain health than among those who sit to watch TV. This could be due to the intellectually stimulating nature of many sit-down jobs, say the study authors.
Disagree partly - exercise's dose-response beat sitting-at-work correlation in this same study. But screens vs books both sedentary, different brain hit likely. Content probably matters less than passive vs active attention.
“[Television] is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." —Karl Marx not talking about television.
