TV Addiction 1

A The amount of time people spend watching television is astonishing. On average, individuals in the industrialized world devote three hours a day to the pursuit —fully half of their leisure time, and more than on any single activity save work and sleep. At this rate, someone who lives to 75 would spend nine years in front of the tube. To some commentators, this devotion means simply that people enjoy TV and make a conscious decision to watch it. But if that is the whole story, why do so many people experience misgivings about how much they view? In Gallup polls in 1992 and 1999, two out of five adult respondents and seven out of 10 teenagers said they spent too much time watching TV. Other surveys have consistently shown that roughly 10 percent of adults call themselves TV addicts

B To study people’s reactions to TV, researchers have experiments in which they have monitored the brain waves (using an electroencephalograph, or EEG) to track behaviour and emotion in the normal course of life, as opposed to the artificial conditions of the lab. Participants carried a beeper, and we signalled them six to eight times a day, at random, over the period of a week; whenever they heard the beep, they wrote down what they were doing and how they were feeling using a standardized scorecard.

C As one might expect, people who were watching TV when we beeped them reported feeling relaxed and passive. The EEG studies similarly show less mental stimulation, as measured by alpha brain-wave production, during viewing than during reading. What is more surprising is that the sense of relaxation ends when the set is turned off, but the feelings of passivity and lowered alertness continue. Survey participants say they have more difficulty concentrating after viewing than before. In contrast, they rarely indicate such difficulty after reading. After playing sports or engaging in hobbies, people report improvements in mood. After watching TV, people’s moods are about the same or worse than before. That may be because viewers’ vague learned sense that they will feel less relaxed if they stop viewing. So they tend not to turn the set off. Viewing begets more viewing which is the same as the experience of habit-forming drugs. Thus, the irony of TV: people watch a great deal longer than they plan to, even though prolonged viewing is less rewarding. In our ESM studies the longer people sat in front of the set, the less satisfaction they said they derived from it. For some, a twinge of unease or guilt that they aren’t doing something more productive may also accompany and depreciate the enjoyment of prolonged viewing. Researchers in Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. have found that this guilt occurs much more among middle-class viewers than among less affluent ones.

D What is it about TV that has such a hold on us? In part, the attraction seems to spring from our biological ‘orienting response/ First described by Ivan Pavlov in 1927, the orienting response is our instinctive visual or auditory reaction to any sudden or novel stimulus. It is part of our evolutionary heritage, a built-in sensitivity to movement and potential predatory threats. In 1986 Byron Reeves of Stanford University, Esther Thorson of the University of Missouri and their colleagues began to study whether the simple formal features of television—cuts, edits, zooms, pans, sudden noises — activate the orienting response, thereby keeping attention on the screen. By watching how brain waves were affected by formal features, the researchers concluded that these stylistic tricks can indeed trigger involuntary responses and ‘derive their attentional value through the evolutionary significance of detecting movement…. It is the form, not the content, of television that is unique.

E The natural attraction to television’s sound and light starts very early in life. Daphna Blemish of Tel Aviv University has described babies at six to eight weeks attending to television. We have observed slightly older infants who, when lying on their backs on the floor, crane their necks around 180 degrees to catch what light through yonder window breaks. This inclination suggests how deeply rooted the orienting response is.

F The Experience Sampling Method permitted us to look closely at most every domain of everyday life: working, eating, reading, talking to friends, playing a sport, and so on. We found that heavy viewers report feeling significantly more anxious and less happy than light viewers do in unstructured situations, such as doing nothing, daydreaming or waiting in line The difference widens when the viewer is alone. Subsequently, Robert D. McIlwraith of the University of Manitoba extensively studied those who called themselves TV addicts on surveys. On a measure called the Short Imaginal Processes Inventory (SIPI), he found that the self-described addicts are more easily bored and distracted and have poorer attentional control than the non-addicts. The addicts said they used TV to distract themselves from unpleasant thoughts and to fill time. Other studies over the years have shown thatheavy viewers are less likely to participate in community activities and sports and are more likely to be obese than moderate viewers or non-viewers.

G More than 25 years ago psychologist Tanis M. Macbeth Williams of the University of British Columbia studied a mountain community that had no television until cable finally arrived. Over time, both adults and children in the town became less creative in problem solving, less able to persevere at tasks, and less tolerant of unstructured time.

H Nearly 40 years ago Gary A. Steiner of the University of Chicago collected fascinating individual accounts of families whose set had broken. In experiments, families have volunteered or been paid to stop viewing, typically for a week or a month. Some fought, verbally and physically. In a review of these cold-turkey studies, Charles Winick of the City University of New York concluded: ‘The first three or four days for most persons were the worst, even in many homes where viewing was minimal and where there were other ongoing activities. In over half of all the households, during these first few days of loss, the regular routines were disrupted, family members had difficulties in dealing with the newly available time, anxiety and aggressions were expressed By the second week, a move toward adaptation to the situation was common.’ Unfortunately, researchers have yet to flesh out these anecdotes; no one has systematically gathered statistics on the prevalence of these withdrawal symptoms.

I even though TV does seem to meet the criteria for substance dependence, not all researchers would go so far as to call TV addictive. McIlwraith said in 1998 that ‘displacement of other activities by television may be socially significant but still fall short of the clinical requirement of significant impairment.’ He argued that a new category of ‘TV addiction’ may not be necessary if heavy viewing stems from conditions such as depression and social phobia. Nevertheless, whether or not we formally diagnose someone as TV-dependent, millions of people sense that they cannot readily control the amount of television they watch.

Music: Language We All Speak

Section A: Music is one of the human specie’s relatively few universal abilities. Without formal training, any individual, from Stone Age tribesman to suburban teenager has the ability to recognize music and, in some fashion, to make it. Why this should be so is a mystery. After all, music isn’t necessary for getting through the day, and if it aids in reproduction, it does so only in highly indirect ways. Language, by contrast, is also everywhere- but for reasons that are more obvious. With language, you and the members of your tribe can organize a migration across Africa, build reed boats and cross the seas, and communicate at night even when you can’t see each other. Modem culture, in all its technological extravagance, springs directly from the human talent for manipulating symbols and syntax. Scientists have always been intrigued by the connection between music and language. Yet over the years, words and melody have acquired a vastly different status in the lab and the seminar room. While language has long been considered essential to unlocking the mechanisms of human intelligence, music is generally treated as an evolutionary frippery-mere “auditory cheesecake,” as the Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it.

Section B: But thanks to a decade-long wave of neuroscience research, that tune is changing. A flurry of recent publications suggests that language and music may equally be able to tell us who we are and where we’re from – not just emotionally, but biologically. In July, the journal Nature Neuroscience devoted a special issue to the topic. And in an article in the August 6 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, David Schwartz, Catherine Howe, and Dale Purves of Duke University argued that the sounds of music and the sounds of language are intricately connected. To grasp the originality of this idea, it’s necessary to realize two things about how music has traditionally been understood. First, musicologists have long emphasized that while each culture stamps a special identity onto its music; music itself has some universal qualities. For example, in virtually all cultures sound is divided into some or all of the 12 intervals that make up the chromatic scale – that is, the scale represented by the keys on a piano. For centuries, observers have attributed this preference for certain combinations of tones to the mathematical properties of sound itself. Some 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras was the first to note a direct relationship between the harmoniousness of a tone combination and the physical dimensions of the object that produced it. For example, a plucked string will always play an octave lower than a similar string half its size, and a fifth lower than a similar string two-thirds its length. This link between simple ratios and harmony has influenced music theory ever since.

Section C: This music-is-moth idea is often accompanied by the notion that music formally speaking at least, exists apart from the world in which it was created. Writing recently in The New York Review of Books, pianist and critic Charles Rosen discussed the long-standing notion that while painting and sculpture reproduce at least some aspects of the natural world, and writing describes thoughts and feelings we are all familiar with, music is entirely abstracted from the world in which we live. Neither idea is right, according to David Schwartz and his colleagues. Human musical preferences are fundamentally shaped not by elegant algorithms or ratios but by the messy sounds of real life, and of speech in particular -which in turn is shaped by our evolutionary heritage.” The explanation of music, like the explanation of any product of the mind, must be rooted in biology, not in numbers per se,” says Schwartz.Schwartz, Howe, and Purvis analysed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety of languages to reveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus only on the raw sound, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning and sliced sentences into random bites. Using a database of over 100,000 brief segments of speech, they noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set of frequencies, they discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In short, the building blocks of music are to be found in speechFar from being abstract, music presents a strange analogy to the patterns created by the sounds of speech. “Music, like the visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural world,” says Schwartz. “It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts emulate the visual environment.” In music we hear the echo of our basic sound-making instrument- the vocal tract. The explanation for human music is simple; still than Pythagoras’s mathematical equations. We like the sounds that are familiar to us- specifically, we like sounds that remind us of us.This brings up some chicken-or-egg evolutionary questions. It may be that music imitates speech directly, the researchers say, in which case it would seem that language evolved first. It’s also conceivable that music came first and language is in effect an Imitation of song – that in everyday speech we hit the musical notes we especially like. Alternately, it may be that music imitates the general products of the human sound-making system, which just happens to be mostly speech. “We can’t know this,” says Schwartz. “What we do know is that they both come from the same system, and it is this that shapes our preferences.”

Section D: Schwartz’s study also casts light on the long-running question of whether animals understand or appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of “music” in the natural world- birdsong, whale song, wolf howls, synchronized chimpanzee hooting previous studies have found that many laboratory animals don’t show a great affinity for the human variety of music making. Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard argued in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don’t create or perceive music the way we do. The act that laboratory monkeys can show recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say, of shared general features of the auditory system, not any specific chimpanzee musical ability. As for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally recognize their own tunes – a narrow repertoire – but don’t generate novel melodies like we do. There are no avian Mozart’s.But what’s been played to the animals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve preferences for sound as we do – based upon the soundscape in which they live – then their “music” would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same way our scales derive from human utterances, a cat’s idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and meows. To demonstrate that animals don’t appreciate sounds the way we do, we’d need evidence that they don’t respond to “music” constructed from their own sound environment.

Section E: No matter how the connection between language and music is parsed, what is apparent is that our sense of music, even our love for it, is as deeply rooted in our biology and in our brains as language is. This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra Tre hub at the University of Toronto, who also published a paper in the Nature Neuroscience special issue.For babies, music and speech are on a continuum. Mothers use musical speech to “regulate infants’ emotional states.” Tre hub says. Regardless of what language they speak, the voice all mothers use with babies is the same: “something between speech and song.” This kind of communication “puts the baby in a trance-like state, which may proceed to sleep or extended periods of rapture.” So if the babies of the world could understand the latest research on language and music, they probably wouldn’t be very surprised. The upshot, says Tre hub, is that music may be even more of a necessity than we realize.