Jane Healy
Author Endangered Minds

With suspicions mounting that heavy TV viewing produces passivity and attention disorders among children, brain scientists and communications researchers gathered Oct. 2 in Washington, D.C. to review the issue and plan future research efforts.

Psychologist Jane Healy, author of "Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think and What We Can Do About It," opened the conference by citing "an epidemic of attention-deficit disorders" and "diminished higher-order thinking skills" as evidence that heavy TV viewing may be harming children.

Healy said it was refreshing to attend a conference at which the nation's schools and teachers are not being blamed for children's academic weaknesses. "Teachers are not doing that bad a job nor are the schools that much different. I believe this decline in skills is not the fault of teachers."

Healy helped plan the conference, entitled "Television and the Preparation of the Mind for Learning: Critical Questions on the Effects of TV on the Developing Brains of Young Children."

The conference was sponsored by the Division of Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Jane Holmes Bernstein, a researcher at Boston's Children's Hospital, added that 20 percent of the nation's students have "disorders of learning and thinking . . . but consume more than 20 percent of school budgets" in remedial training.

The neuropsychology specialist noted the difficulty of studying how TV affects a complex system such as the rapidly developing brain interacting with the environment. "TV is embedded in a socio-cultural matrix. It may simply be filling a gap. Other cultural factors may be limiting conversation, therefore leading to diminished linguistic skills," Bernstein said.

The most dramatic research presented was a set of experiments on the developing brains of young rats by noted UC-Berkeley brain scientist Marian Cleeves Diamond. She and her colleagues compared the growth of brain tissue in rat pups in "enriched" environments with those in "impoverished" environments.

Rat pups in enriched environments -- large, multi-family cages with a variety of toys -- experienced significantly more brain growth than rat pups in smaller, single-family cages with fewer stimuli.

The growth in brain tissue included blood vessels, nerve cells, dendritic branching, synaptic junctions and cerebral cortex thickness.

Diamond found that allowing the deprived rat pups to observe passively the activity in the more stimulating cages yielded no measurable benefit in their brain development.

"Mere observation is not enough to bring about changes" in brain growth. "The animals must have physical interaction with their environment," she said.

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