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Heavy TV watching associated with smaller brain structures, study finds

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Re: Heavy TV watching associated with smaller brain structures, study finds

#54
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.

Re: Heavy TV watching associated with smaller brain structures, study finds

#55
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.

I wonder how many people still watch TV today.

Re: Heavy TV watching associated with smaller brain structures, study finds

#57
post #55

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 stuf…

I assume passive watching, like you're doing, is the problem.

Re: Heavy TV watching associated with smaller brain structures, study finds

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The island of Saint Helena only started getting TV relatively recently, so some studies have been done on children there to compare effects.

Since 1995, per Wikipedia, citing Wireless South Atlantic press release and St. Helena Broadcasting Corporation Ltd. sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_in_Saint_Helena...>

Total population (2021): 4,439. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Helena>

Additional areas: South Africa and Tanzania saw television introduced relatively recently, 1975 and 1994 respectively. Those would be larger populations, though confounded by other factors (poverty, racism, higher early-adult mortality due to HIV/AIDS).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_usage_of_televisi...>

That could be interesting.

Re: Heavy TV watching associated with smaller brain structures, study finds

#60
post #55

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 stuf…

Woosh
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