Dumb TV makes you dumber
Bottom Line: Most of us have watched dumb TV and have probably joked about what we watched actually making us dumber. Guess what. It wasn’t a joke! Norwegian researchers studied the IQ of people over a decade based on their TV viewing habits. Those who most commonly watched cable TV over the course of a decade lost an average of 1.8 IQ points. Not only that, but those who primarily watched cable TV shows, showed less civic and charitable engagement, including becoming less likely vote.
Now, in the age of streaming TV, binge watching etc., one has to wonder what the collective effect might be on society. If you’ve wondered if we’re becoming dumber as a country, the old joke about the dumbing down of Americans – it's probably real. I know it’s not the PC this to say but frankly the term binge watching just sounds like the absence of constructive thought. I truly can’t imagine doing it. Ironically, I’ve never watched less TV in my life, cable or not. In fact, I don’t even keep it on in the background as I used to when I’d be working on show content and research of my own. Maybe it was an internal mechanism seeking to protect myself from the apparent intellectual decay that occurs when one stares at a screen watching foolish people pretend to be other people so they can lecture us about how to live our lives in real life. Actually, that’s probably why I don’t watch it much anymore.