The damage of television neurological has nothing to do with content. For years and years, the debate over television was over content. Jerry Mander’s, years ago, recognized in his Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, that content was not the whole issue. The device, itself, was doing something.  Years ago, Joe started saying, content was not the chief damage it was doing, but it was the machine, the device itself.  Recently, there has been very serious medical, scientific studies coming from Australia, from Europe, England, from surgeons, people doing research here in the United States, not on content, but looking at the device, itself, and the damage it does.

Talking about this first seven years, devoted to the development of this capacity for creating the internal image through which we can change the whole external world, and that leads to all of the higher operations of mind, metaphoric symbolic thinking, all of that, we find World War II, the water shed of a number of radical changes in our society.

Hospital technological child birth, bringing about its own disruptions of the natural unfolding system and within about 10 years after that, or less than that, we invented a device which eliminated family talk, table talk, talk around the table that fascinates children.  We eliminated the sitting around the fireside where parents tell their childhood stories.  Carol Gilligan at Harvard talks about the critical importance of grandmother tales.  She thought of it as important to the grandmother to kind of round out her life.  Well, believe me, it's critically important to the children who hear those grandmother tales, and parent tales of their own childhood and so forth.  This device eliminated, for a long time, radio.  It eliminated radio permanently as a storyteller and turned it into a music box, as *Michael Toms called it.  And storytelling, we used to sit around, as a family, listening to stories on radio, and the imagery going on in my mind was totally captivating.

I'll never forget when some of the characters that we would hear on those radio shows would appear in their real life in a magazine or in a newspaper, and we were offended to the core.  But that's not what they look like at all, you see.  We all had our own idea of what they looked like because we had created our own internal world.  Now, this device did its grave damage by substituting, it is eliminating play and storytelling between parents and their children in about, I would estimate, about 70 percent of the American homes.  The device is, of course, television.  

Now, the damage of television, neurological, and it does bring about neurological damage, the damage of television neurological has nothing to do with content.  For years and years, the debate over television was over content.  Jerry Mander’s, years ago, recognized in his four arguments against television, that content was not the whole issue at all.  The device, itself, was doing something.  And years ago, I started saying, that content was not the chief damage it was doing, but it was the machine, the device itself.  Recently, there has been very serious medical, scientific studies coming from Australia, from Europe, England, from surgeons, people doing research here in the United States, not on content, but looking at the device, itself, and the damage it does.

The damage that television does, first of all must be contrasted with storytelling.  The story telling, here comes that vibration we call a word which creates this entire vibrational response of the brain to create a flow of imagery in keeping with it.  The little girl who said she loved radio so much more than television because the pictures on radio were so much more beautiful is an apt description.  The word of the story and the great internal challenge to the brain to create the flow of imagery.  Instead we came along with a device which gave both the stimulus and the response as a paired stimulus coming into the sensory motor system.  The pairing of the auditory stimulus with the visual stimulus as a single input into the sensory motor system and what that does to the early child.  And what it does is within about three minutes the brain habituates.  

That's not a very good term but I don't know any better term.  The brain habituates to this stimulus because none of the higher creative cortical structures are called on.  There is no challenge to the brain to create the flow of imagery.  The flow of imagery is coming in through the sensory system, through the environment and flooding the brain with a synthetic counterfeit of what it is supposed to produce in response to the imagery.  That is what's coming in through the lower brain down here at the bottom of the system, is flooding the high brain with the counterfeit of what the high brain is supposed to create in response to certain stimuli from the low brain.  Therein lays the major damage done.  

There is no possibility of content given in the first seven years of life that will not to some extent undermine the capacity of this internal image process.  Let me say very quickly that lots of people will come up and say, "outraged, my child saw a television and they're a leading A-1 student, and they're brilliant and they're creative and so forth."  Yes, and we'll find in every case, and find me an exception to this, in addition to television their parents read to them, played with them, told them stories, played the let's pretends and so on that every child needs and has had throughout history.  

And that brings about a very ironic situation that is again hypothetical on my part, in this case, that these children, apparently when they look at television and respond to it entirely differently than the children who don't get the play, the internal image, construction, and so on.  We'll talk about that in a minute.  So what we find the damage of television is both substituting for all of the signals the child must have in this early period to learn to create the internal world which is the foundation of metaphor and symbol, and metaphoric and symbolic thinking.  It substitutes for those stimuli and then floods the brain with a synthetic counterfeit of its own processes.