Is TV frying your brain

Today I read a thought provoking article by iafrica.com’s Kabous Le Roux. It has really inspired me to definitely switch the TV off…

TV rots the brain. According to Wikipedia, the results from a study in New Zealand involving 1000 people from children to adults indicate that ‘television viewing is strongly associated with poor educational achievement’.

TV makes one fat. Countless studies have shown a strong correlation between hours spent watching television and obesity and it has been proven that watching television decreases the metabolic rate to below what is normal for people at rest.
Don’t mind being a twit and a large one at that? Well, would you ditch your TV for a million dollars?

In a recent blog entry on The Times’ website, blogger Robert Laing refers to a US finance column, ‘How to earn $1-million by not watching TV’, where the author claims that lifetime savings of over $1-million is possible if you don’t own a TV.

The obvious costs include the television sets that one buys and replaces, the entertainment cabinets and couches that go with the TVs, television licence fees, pay TV fees, DVD players and game consoles, DVD rentals and electricity.

Add to this the less obvious opportunity cost of wasting 3.5 hours a day in front of the boob tube. How many university degrees could you have earned? How many businesses could you have started?

But these examples pale in comparison to what you could save if you weren’t exposed to the most expensive aspect of owning a TV — advertising.

Economist Juliet Schor estimates that for every hour of TV a person watches each week, he or she will increase his or her annual spending by about $200. In 2005 a Nielsen Media Research report indicated that the average American watched about 4.5 hours of TV per day or 31.5 hours per week. If Schor’s estimates are correct then those people spend an extra $6300 a year due to watching God only knows how many ads!

Television is advertising. It convinces us, more successfully than any other medium, to buy what we don’t need. We don’t actually need anything advertised on TV! We need things like food (not Pringles or Coke), shelter, clothing, safety, companionship, a sense of meaning and, of course, love.
The solution to our problems doesn’t lie with the purchase of a product!

Well, I am definitely going to watch less TV! That is for certain… I will have more time to craft, loose a little weight, have more money and become more intelligent!

“All you need is love.” – John Lennon