Television: abuse can damage the brains of young men

According to a recent survey, European children spend an average of 2 hours and 6 minutes per day watching television. The small French who record the same score would therefore be addicted to the small screen. An addiction that is not without risk according to a study published this Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Psychiatry.

To reach this conclusion, researchers in California followed for more than 25 years 3,247 adults, aged 18 to 30 years at the start of the experiment. These participants watched television more than three hours a day. At the end of this period, the volunteers had to pass three tests, measuring speed of thinking, execution functions and verbal memory.

Verbal memory does not seem to be affected

“Participants with the least active lifestyle habits, that is, with little physical activity and a lot of television, were the most likely to perform poorly on these cognitive tests,” explains the authors.
And while verbal memory doesn’t seem to be affected, scientists have estimated that those who watched television for more than three hours a day were twice as likely to have cognitive problems later in life than others.

This study is however disputed by other specialists in the subject. Among them, Andrew Przybylski, psychologist at the University of Oxford, interviewed by Agence France Presse (AFP), he confides: “First, their data is entirely based on a measurement made by the participants themselves of the time spent. in front of the television, which can be problematic ”.
This expert notes, moreover, that the participants had not carried out cognitive tests at the start of the study, which would have made it possible to have reference data. And “nearly one in three participants did not go to the end of the study”, further deplores Andrew Przybylski, which weakens the conclusions of this work, according to this expert.