Welp, it seems all those adults who warned you that if you kept watching TV your brain would turn to mush weren’t exactly right, but, according to a new study out of USC Dornsife, they may have been on to something. Researchers found that people who spent a lot of their middle age parked in front of the TV later showed smaller brain structures in areas vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease.
The study followed over 1,700 adults for nearly 24 years. People who said they watched TV “very often” wound up with smaller frontal and occipital lobes, more damage to the brain’s white matter, and reduced volume in regions tied to memory. Interestingly, the same can’t be said of people who sat all day at their desk working, whose brains, in some cases, actually looked healthier.
That’s because the problem isn’t sitting, even though sitting has been hyped in recent years as one of the grand evils of modern society, though there are still likely a lot of reasons to get your body moving. According to this study, what you’re doing while you’re sitting plays a big role.
Watching Too Much TV in Middle Age May Be Linked to Smaller Brain Structures
TV is often a passive activity. You’re not engaging your brain all that often, as compared to sitting while, say, reading or writing or solving problems involved with work or even just a sudoku puzzle. It essentially boils down to using your brain versus not using it as much.
Even weirder is that the effect showed up more strongly in men, but why is something the researchers have not yet figured out. The study has limitations, like how it relied on people remembering how much TV they watched, and it can’t prove television caused the brain changes.
But the takeaway is that if you’re going to spend several hours vegetating, you’re better off doing something that requires a little mental heavy lifting so the prophecy of your brain turning into mush that your elders pushed on you doesn’t come true.
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