Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (25 page)

The Emerys explain that slow, synchronous brainwave activity is ordinarily associated with “lack of eye movement, fixation, lack of definition, idleness, inactivity, overall body inertness.” They quote from A. R. Luria, who writes in
The Psychophysiology of the Frontal Lobes:
“No organized thought is possible in these phasic states and selective associations are replaced by non-selective association, deprived of their purposeful character.”

Alpha is the mental state most commonly associated with meditation, but before anyone equates meditation with television, it’s important to make a critical distinction. In the former, you produce your own material and in the latter it comes from outside; it is not internally generated. Dr. Freda Morris, the psychologist-hypnotist quoted earlier, told me that people who are good at meditation are among the most difficult to hypnotize. “They start going into hypnotic trance, but at a certain point they begin producing their own material and cannot be influenced by outside instruction unless they choose to be. They’ve got their own thing going.” She told me that she doubted that good meditators watch much television and added that meditation might be an excellent ability to develop in people who are bothered by television addiction. In fact, she said, television addiction might itself be symptomatic of an inability to produce one’s own mental imagery.

Herbert Krugman, a Florida researcher whose brainwave work the Emerys drew upon, compared brainwave activity while watching television with brainwave activity while reading magazines.

“It appears that the mode of response to television is . . . very different from the responses to print . . . the basic electrical response of the brain is clearly to the medium and not to the content differences,” said Krugman. “The response to print may be fairly described as active . . . while the response to television may be fairly described as passive . . . television is not communication as we have known it. Our subject was trying to learn something from a print ad, but was passive about television. . . .
Television is a communication medium that effortlessly transmits huge quantities of information not thought about at the time of exposure.”
(My italics.)

I took the Krugman report and the Australian study to Dr. Erik Peper, a widely published researcher on electroencephalographic (brainwave) testing, formerly associated with MIT, currently a professor of Interdisciplinary Sciences at San Francisco State University.

It turned out that Peper had worked with Dr. Thomas Mulholland on a study similar to Krugman’s.

“Krugman’s statement is correct,” Peper told me. “You get a decrease in beta [fast waves] and an increase in slow activity with a large percentage of alpha.” I asked Peper to explain the meaning of this.

“Alpha wave patterns, recorded over the occipital areas of the scalp, disappear at the moment when a person gives visual commands (focuses, accommodates, and verges), when he takes charge of the process of seeking information. Any orienting outward to the world increases your brainwave frequencies and blocks [halts] alpha wave activity. Alpha occurs when you don’t orient
to.
You can sit back and have pictures in your head, but you are in a totally passive condition and unaware of the world outside of your pictures. The right phrase for alpha is really ‘spaced-out.’ Not orienting. When a person focuses visually, or orients to anything, notices something out-side himself, then she or he gets an immediate increase in faster wave activity and alpha will block [disappear]. Many meditators are in alpha but in meditation you are learning self-control and how to call upon your own internal processes. There is no such discipline with television. You are not training your mind to control itself, which biofeedback, and also meditation, accomplish; television trains people only for being zombies. Instead of training active attention, television seems to suppress it.” I asked Peper to describe the Mulholland experiment.

“As far as I know, this study is the only one that has been made, aside from Krugman’s. Ten kids were asked to watch their favorite television programs. Our assumption was that since these programs were their favorite shows, the kids would be involved in them and we’d find there’d be an oscillation between alpha slow-wave activity and beta. The prediction was that they would go back and forth. But they didn’t do that. They just sat back. They stayed almost all the time in alpha. This meant that while they were watching they were not reacting, not orienting, not focusing, just spaced-out.”

I told Peper about a study which showed that children who were watching television were far slower to react to an emergency than children who were doing something else.

“That’s predictable,” Peper said. “When they are watching television they’re being trained not to react.”

He then volunteered his own thoughts about television as an educational medium: “To really learn anything, you have to interact with the source of the data. With television you don’t really think. I know that speaking for myself, I can only really learn if I get engaged, as in the Socratic method of teaching. The best teaching is an interactive form. Some people learn best, for example, by writing notes because the notes are a feedback system.” (Like a journal or a diary.)

“Television watching is only receiving,” he went on, “no longer reacting. It can’t do anything but hold your attention; you are receiving, not looking. The key for why they’re in alpha is that when they’re watching they’re not looking
at,
not orienting. This is all by way of totally agreeing with Krugman. If you have a light which is not really being at-tended to, you can get an infinite amount of alpha. Perhaps it’s that the TV target is so far away, the screen so small that your eyes needn’t move; you’re looking at infinity, in a way, like looking at the hypnotist’s flashlight. If you look at moving targets, you have at least a little active interaction; that would tend to put you into beta. But with television though there seems to be movement, you stay all the time in alpha.”

I asked Peper if he agreed with Krugman that reading was a more active learning process. “Definitely,” he said. “Reading produces a much higher amount of beta activity. You would expect abnormality in anyone who produces alpha while reading. The horror of television,” he added, “is that the information goes in, but we don’t react to it. It goes right into our memory pool and perhaps we react to it later but we don’t know what we’re reacting to. When you watch television you are training yourself not to react and so later on, you’re doing things without knowing why you’re doing them or where they came from.”

Television Is Not Relaxing

If television puts our minds in a passive-receptive mode, if it inhibits thinking processes as the preceding remarks certainly suggest, can this be seen as positive? As mentioned in Chapter Eight, many of my correspondents seem to like what happens to them. People say “it relaxes my mind,” others use the term “spaced-out,” some call it “meditative.” The evidence that television produces alpha brain waves, commonly associated with meditation states, encourages the idea that something beneficial can result, especially for our mentally obsessed culture.

In many ways, we are a people isolated in our heads. Nature is absent. Our senses are deprived.

The business person lives in the mental world of offices: paper work and forward-focused, driven-thinking processes. The suburban person lives in predefined mental and physical movement patterns: freeways, mechanical kitchens, repetitive routines. The child sits in schools, fixed in chairs, focused on mental work, attempting to channel thoughts in a way that will help later in this world.

As the environment has been reconstructed into linear monolithic patterns, and as our days have been reconstructed to function within those patterns, our minds have had to adjust.

We drive them forward into obsessive work. We push our thoughts into line, marching with military precision, objectified, analytical, isolated from our senses, our feelings and any alternate patterns of mind. We need to do this. The creative free-roaming mind would help neither the child get through school nor the adult pay rent.

We have celebrated “the life of the mind,” but is this the mind we wanted?

When we speak of relaxing our minds nowadays, it is not as though we have been working them at anything like their capacity. If our minds are strained, it is from confinement within one pattern of thinking. Most of our mental capacities have gone fat and soft, or dead from atrophy. It may be that our minds are not tired from overwork, but underwork.

If you have ever done physical exercise on a regular basis, you know the result is not exhaustion, but stimulation. The more of it you do, the more you wish to do, and the more you can do. It is only after extraordinarily long effort that one becomes depleted and needs to rest. And then the relaxation is sweet.

In our culture, the chronically exhausted person is the one who sits all day, or the one whose physical work is chained to fixed patterns: assembly line, store counter, waiting on tables.

I believe it is the same with our minds. Confined to one mental process, they are exhausted by underuse and repetition. After a day of paper work, turned off in so many realms of experience, compulsive and obsessive in those that remain, we dearly seek to escape mentally.

Psychiatrists report that an increasing number of people these days complain they cannot quiet their minds. One cannot
will
the mind to cease its fixations and rumination. Even when it comes to sleep or sex or play, experiences that require shifting out of focused thought, the mind continues to churn.

It is little wonder, therefore, that we have seen the sudden growth of Eastern religious disciplines, yogic practices, martial arts, diverse exercise regimens and many forms of meditation. They help relieve the agonies of uncalm minds pacing their narrow cages. They stop obsessive thinking and open alternative mental awareness. They allow for the reception of new experiences. They encourage yielding as opposed to always driving forward. They teach people to take in rather than put out.

While many people use these ancient disciplines to achieve freedom from the driving of their minds, most people do not, choosing drugs instead. Alcohol is good. Valium is better. Some sleeping potions work. And there’s television.

They all succeed. Drugs provide escape while passing for experience and relaxation. Television does as well.

All help break obsessive thinking, but this is where their similarity with meditation and other disciplines comes to an end.

I have quoted from Dr. Morris and Dr. Peper to the effect that in meditation one produces one’s own internally generated imagery. Both contrast meditation with television viewing in which the images are imposed.

This difference between internally generated and imposed imagery is at the heart of whether it is accurate to say that television relaxes the mind.

Relaxation implies renewal. One runs hard, then rests. While resting, the muscles first experience calm and then, as new oxygen enters them, renewal.

Similarly, one thinks and thinks, driving one’s mind forward. To relax the mind, one needs to cease thinking, to calm the mind. In Zen meditation, for example, something called “empty mind” is desirable because once achieved, renewal begins. When the mind is quiet, one produces one’s own new imagery, or experiences a new sense of one’s place in the world.

There are other forms of meditation, however, that are less interested in self-renewal and discovery. These are the forms imposed by the “right wing” of the religious disciplines, those with autocratic leadership: Erhard, Moon, Maharaj Ji, L. Ron Hubbard. These leaders are not interested in “empty mind,” but in minds which are empty only long enough to be refilled by them.

Whether you are doing Zen meditation or the specific mantras of Reverend Moon, your mind may go into alpha. But one condition is not similar to the other. With the latter, your mind is not renewed, it is occupied.

And so it is with television. When you are watching, absorbing techno-guru, your mind may be in alpha, but it is certainly not “empty mind.” Images are pouring into it. Your mind is not quiet or calm or empty. It may be nearer to dead, or zombieized. It is occupied. No renewal can come from this condition. For renewal, the mind would have to be at rest, or once rested, it would have to be seeking new kinds of stimulation, new exercise. Television offers neither rest nor stimulation.

Television inhibits your ability to think, but it does not lead to freedom of mind, relaxation or renewal. It leads to a more exhausted mind. You may have time out from prior obsessive thought patterns, but that’s as far as television goes. The mind is never empty, the mind is filled. What’s worse, it is filled with someone else’s obsessive thoughts and images.

In this way, television serves to continue the same channeled mental processes from which one is seeking relief. The mind is as weary after watching as before. No invention or creation can result, only sleep, if you are lucky, as with the aftermath of alcohol and Valium.