TV - Television the real "gateway drug"?

[Venusia]

Swiv was recently reading the thread about "gateway drugs" and asked hubs what his "gateway drug" was. She got an unexpected answer: he believes that television is the biggest "gateway drug". I thought he was being cynical or joking around, but no, he was being completely serious.

It turns out that watching television and movies releases endorphins and some of the same neurotransmitters that cocaine and other pleasurable drugs release in our brains whilst watching. Of course, being the curious little kitty she is, Swivy had to do some investigation into this theory. She found some very interesting information and thought it would be cool to share it with her fellow D-Fers:

Watching television has been found to be a euphoric experience for the viewer, as stated in this paper she dug up on the internet:

"Compared to the pace with which the real life unfolds and is experienced by young children, television portrays life with the fast-forward button fully pressed. Rapidly changing images, scenery and events and high-fidelity sounds are highly stimulating and extremely interesting. Television is the flavour enhancer of the audiovisual world, providing unnatural levels of sensory stimulation.
The actual currency used to pay off and corrupt the reward system may come in the form of the neurotransmitter, dopamine. The release of dopamine in the brain is associated with reward. In particular, dopamine is seen as rewarding us for paying attention, especially to things that are novel and stimulating. This underfunctioning of dopamine may fail to reward the brain's attention systems, so they do not function effectively.
Interestingly, adults with attention deficit disorder, who are given dopamine-boosting methylphenidate (Ritalin) before doing a maths test, find it easier to concentrate. This is partly because the task seems more interesting. More research is needed into the extent to which this reward system involving dopamine (and other neurotransmitters) is set in childhood by exposure to electronic media such as television."
Source

Swivy, finding this whole business fascinating stuff, looked a little deeper into the "TV = Drug" comparison and found this excerpt from a Scientific American article, which proved to be pretty interesting too:

"To study people's reactions to TV, researchers have undertaken laboratory experiments in which they have monitored the brain waves (using an electroencephalograph, or EEG), skin resistance or heart rate of people watching television. To track behavior and emotion in the normal course of life, as opposed to the artificial conditions of the lab, we have used the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). Participants carried a beeper, and we signaled them six to eight times a day, at random, over the period of a week; whenever they heard the beep, they wrote down what they were doing and how they were feeling using a standardized scorecard.
As one might expect, people who were watching TV when we beeped them reported feeling relaxed and passive. The EEG studies similarly show less mental stimulation, as measured by alpha brain-wave production, during viewing than during reading.

In 1986 Byron Reeves of Stanford University, Esther Thorson of the University of Missouri and their colleagues began to study whether the simple formal features of television--cuts, edits, zooms, pans, sudden noises--activate the orienting response, thereby keeping attention on the screen. By watching how brain waves were affected by formal features, the researchers concluded that these stylistic tricks can indeed trigger involuntary responses and "derive their attentional value through the evolutionary significance of detecting movement.... It is the form, not the content, of television that is unique."
Source

So not only does it involve the reward system--releasing neurotransmitters that cause us to feel pleasure and enjoyment, it also stimulates our "flight-or-fight" response, releasing adrenaline and endorphins at a continuous rate, keeping us fixated on it via rapid cuts and changing pictures. We also feel more relaxed and more passive, as the second quote states, and rewards us with pleasure chemicals which keep us watching and coming back for more at an addictive level.

How it becomes a "gateway drug" is it's ubiquitous presence in our lives in general. We are exposed to it very early in life and we learn to enjoy the rush and happy feelings it gives to us, much how heroin or cocaine (or any other dopamine-releasing drug) works to keep one using.

We learn early in life that this feeling is pleasant, and eventually we are exposed to other dopamine-releasing substances, like opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, etc. We, at some level, be it conscious or subconscious, recognize this feeling and find we crave more at a faster and more heavy-hitting pace, allowing the level of pleasurable neurotransmitters to release at an explosive rate and flood our brains.

So, if you think about it, we're addicted at very early ages to these rewarding neurotransmitters, possibly setting ourselves up for more intense addictions later on in life, especially if we have a genetic predisposition for addiction. Watching TV is a euphoric and addictive activity, just like using drugs that makes one feel good.

Swiv was a bit dumbfounded to find this correlation and thought it was an exciting bit of info! No wonder it can be so easy to be "glued" to the TV set, even during times when more pressing things are needed to be done. Swiv found this totally fascinating!

So in concluson, it's definitely arguable that television is a drug of sorts to which we become highly addicted...but that's not to say that Swiv doesn't enjoy her TV time.

p.s. If anyone made it through this novel of a post, Swiv applauds you! She hopes her fellow D-Fers will find it as interesting as she did. (And if not, well, at least she had fun writing it. )