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"You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe."
"You take the red pill and you
stay in Wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."
"Experiments conducted by researcher Herbert Krugman reveal that, when a person watches television, brain activity switches from the left to the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the seat of logical thought. Here, information is broken down into its component parts and critically analyzed. The right brain, however, treats incoming data uncritically, processing information in wholes, leading to emotional, rather than logical, responses. The shift from left to right brain activity also causes the release of endorphins, the body's own natural opiates--thus, it is possible to become physically addicted to watching television, a hypothesis borne out by numerous studies which have shown that very few people are able to kick the television habit.
Peter Russell, "Dehypnosis - Breaking the Trance"
All mass media in the end alienate people from personal experience and though appearing to offset it, intensify their moral isolation from each other, from reality and from themselves. One may turn to the mass media when lonely or bored. But mass media, once they become a habit, impair the capacity for meaningful experience. . . . The habit feeds on itself, establishing a vicious circle as addictions do. . . . Even the most profound of experiences, articulated too often on the same level (by the media), is reduced to a cliche. . . . They lessen people's capacity to experience life itself. Van den Haag, in Rosenberg and White, Mass Culture, p. 529.
ELECTRONIC HEROIN
In the Plug in Drug, Marie Winn says that television is an addictive drug: "When we think about addiction to drugs or alcohol we frequently focus on negative aspects, ignoring the pleasures that accompany drinking or drug-taking. And yet the essence of any serious addiction is a pursuit of pleasure, a search for a 'high' that normal life does not supply. It is only the inability to function without the addictive substance that is dismaying, the dependence of the organism upon a certain experience and an increasing inability to function normally without it. Thus people will take two or three drinks at the end of the day not merely for the pleasure drinking provides, but also because they 'don't feel normal' without them.
"Real addicts do not merely pursue a pleasurable experience one time in order to function normally. They need to repeat it again and again. Something about that particular experience makes life without it less than complete. Other potentially pleasurable experiences are no longer possible, for under the spell of the addictive experience, their lives are peculiarly distorted. The addict craves an experience and yet is never really satisfied. The organism may be temporarily sated, but soon it begins to crave again.
"Finally, a serious addiction is distinguished from a harmless pursuit of pleasure by its distinctly destructive elements. Heroin addicts, for instance, lead a damaged life: their increasing need for heroin in increasing doses prevents them from working, from maintaining relationships, from developing in human ways. Similarly alcoholics' lives are narrowed and dehumanized by their dependence on alcohol.
"Let us consider television viewing in the light of the conditions that define serious addictions.
"Not unlike drugs or alcohol, the television experience allows the participant to blot out the real world and enter into a pleasurable and passive mental state. The worries and anxieties of reality are as effectively deferred by becoming absorbed in a television program as by going on a 'trip' induced by drugs or alcohol. And just as alcoholics are only vaguely aware of their addiction, feeling that they control their drinking more than they really do ('I can cut it out any time I want—I just like to have three of four drinks before dinner'), people similarly overestimate their control over television watching. Even as they put off other activities to spend hour after hour watching television, they feel they could easily resume living in a different, less passive style. But somehow or other, while the television set is present in their homes, the click doesn't sound. With television pleasures available, those other experiences seem less attractive, more difficult somehow.
"Finally it is the adverse effect of television viewing on the lives of so many people that defines it as a serious addiction. The television habit distorts the sense of time. It renders other experiences vague and curiously unreal while taking on a greater reality for itself. It weakens relationships by reducing and sometimes eliminating normal opportunities for talking, for communicating." [p.p. 23-25, Marie Winn, Plug in Drug
“It’s been demonstrated that well within two minutes of watching television, most people enter a hypnotic alpha state bordering on theta. Viewers in this state are no longer able to critically evaluate, discern, or pass judgment from their own moral database on the material being viewed. The information just flows, unimpeded, into their subconscious year in and year out.”
— Jeff Rense talk-radio host
Rense.com__________________________________
"Academic achievement drops sharply for children who watch more than 10 hours a week of TV, according to the report "Strong Families, Strong Schools," from the U.S. Department of Education, December 1994.
American children spend more time watching TV than they do in school, according to Drs. Sege and Dietz in Pediatrics, October 1994.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends no TV viewing for children two and under in order to accommodate more appropriate and beneficial stimulation during that crucial period of brain development. Research on brain development reveals that the "wiring" of the brain (establishing neural pathways) during the formative years appears strongly influenced by the child's environment. If a toddler is deprived of the appropriate stimuli, certain areas of the brain may not develop as fully as they could. Hours of TV each day from three months on may limit the intellectual development of a child.
Television flickers at an average rate of about once every 3.5 seconds. The average American child in the crucial formative years of birth through age five watches over 5,000 hours of TV. That may be too much for a young child's neurological system.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Dept. of Labor, U.S. Government
American Time Use Survey (ATUS) 2003
Released September 2004
Marie Winn’s The Plug-In Drug refers to the writings of both Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, a renown pediatrician and writer about children, and Dr. Matthew Dumont, of the Harvard Medical School, that support this view. Dumont suggests that
1. hyperactive behavior in children is related to the rapidly changing TV images.
2. the changing of images every few seconds "programs" a short attention span.
3. the behavior of the hyperactive child represents an attempt to recapture the flickering quality of television.
If heavy exposure to TV may induce ADD or ADHD in some children, the possibility also exists that removing TV from the child's environment will permit the symptom to disappear."American children and adolescents spend 22 to 28 hours per week viewing television, more than any other activity except sleeping. By the age of 70 they will have spent 7 to 10 years of their lives watching TV."
-- The Kaiser Family Foundation____________________________
"In November 1969, a researcher named Herbert Krugman, who later became manager of public-opinion research at General Electric headquarters in Connecticut, decided to try to discover what goes on physiologically in the brain of a person watching TV. He elicited the co-operation of a twenty-two-year-old secretary and taped a single electrode to the back of her head. The wire from this electrode connected to a Grass Model 7 Polygraph, which in turn interfaced with a Honeywell 7600 computer and a CAT 400B computer.
"Flicking on the TV, Krugman began monitoring the brain-waves of the subject What he found through repeated trials was that within about thirty seconds, the brain-waves switched from predominantly beta waves, indicating alert and conscious attention, to predominantly alpha waves, indicating an unfocused, receptive lack of attention: the state of aimless fantasy and daydreaming below the threshold of consciousness. When Krugman's subject turned to reading through a magazine, beta waves reappeared, indicating that conscious and alert attentiveness had replaced the daydreaming state. More
Later, psychologist Hadley Cantril conducted a study of the effects of the broadcast and published his findings in a book, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. This study explored the power of broadcast media, particularly as it relates to the suggestibility of human beings under the influence of fear. Cantril was affiliated with Princeton University's Radio Research Project, which was funded in 1937 by the Rockefeller Foundation. Also affiliated with the Project was Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) executive Frank Stanton, whose network had broadcast the program. Stanton would later go on to head the news division of CBS, and in time would become president of the network, as well as chairman of the board of the RAND Corporation, the influential think tank which has done groundbreaking research on, among other things, mass brainwashing. More
Mass Mind Control Through Network Television Are Your Thoughts Your Own?
Experiments conducted by researcher Herbert Krugman reveal that when a person watches television, brain activity switches from the left to the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the seat of logical thought. Here, information is broken down into its component parts and critically analyzed. The right brain, however, treats incoming data uncritically, processing information in wholes, leading to emotional, rather than logical responses. The shift from left to right brain activity also causes the release of endorphins, the body's own natural opiates--thus, it is possible to become physically addicted to watching television, a hypothesis borne out by numerous studies which have shown that very few people are able to kick the television habit. It's no longer an overstatement to note that the youth today that are raised and taught through network television are intellectually dead by their early teens. More
Keepers at the Gate He Who Controls Television Controls the Masses
In this age of modernity and technology, where the television monitor has become the center of the average American household, from cradle to grave acting as surrogate parent, teacher, role model and as influencer of human thought, it should come as no surprise that entire populations can be controlled with such facility and efficiency, turning once thinking humans into grazing sheeple. For in today’s day and age, he who controls television controls the masses, and he who controls the masses controls the nation. More
The Stupefaction of a Nation Corporate Media Propaganda and its Weapons of Mass Distraction
He who controls the media controls the masses. Today, America's media is controlled exclusively by fewer than a dozen multinational conglomerates and their many interests. NewsCorp, AOL, Viacom, General Electric, Disney and others have formed a media oligarch that reaches into every American home and most every citizen. These few omnipresent entities hold as paramount the belief in assuring for themselves perpetual loyalty from as many of the masses as possible. Revenue and profit, corporate growth and power, executive pay and ego, these are all determined by us, the masses, and helps explain why the oligarchy has decided to invest and take an interest in all forms of media that reaches and influences us. More
What's Wrong With This Picture?
For all their economic clout and cultural sway, the ten great multinationals profiled in our latest chart--AOL Time Warner, Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, Sony, Bertelsmann, AT&T and Liberty Media--rule the cosmos only at the moment. More
A Review of The Film Orwell Rolls In His Grave
Orwell Rolls In His Grave is an excellent film that, unfortunately, nobody will ever get to see. This independent documentary, directed by Robert Kane Pappas, takes a deeply disturbing look at how mass media in the United States is controlled by only a handful of large corporations. The movie's premise is that these large corporations have one goal: to get larger and control the system that reports the news. To this end, big media has aligned itself with the conservative Republican political minority and has pushed their selfish agenda in order to gain political favor and build fortunes. More
Violent video games desensitize players to real-world violence
"It's already well known that playing violent video games increases aggressive behavior and decreases helping behavior," said University of Michigan researcher Brad Bushman. "But this study is the first to link exposure to violent video games with a diminished reaction to violent images." More
Violent video games can make people aggressive
"There is a causal link between playing the first-person shooting game in our experiment and brain-activity pattern that are considered as characteristic for aggressive cognitions and affects," said René Weber, assistant professor of communication and telecommunication at MSU and a researcher on the project.
"There is a neurological link and there is a short-term causal relationship. Violent video games frequently have been criticized for enhancing aggressive reactions such as aggressive cognitions, aggressive affects or aggressive behavior. On a neurobiological level we have shown the link exists." More
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