Here's a decent article to start with: https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-books-and-television-af...

If you do some searching, you'll find lots of ink spilled on the subject of "does TV rot your brain" and the cognitive benefits of reading.

The article you link to speaks about television, not cinema. Furthermore, its claim that the visual medium encourages passivity:

"you can just sit back and watch everything unfold without effort on your part. You’re less likely to pause to reflect on what’s happening."

does not apply to the considerable number of filmmakers (and occasional television content producers) who employ Brechtian alienation techniques.

Don't be dense. That sentence is from the reporter trying to make a study easier to understand to the common folk. Actually read the study referenced. There are also other studies that compare content and find it doesn't make a difference on the impact of the brain.

Just an idea,, Maybe all TV input looks the same to us, as regards its effect on the brain, but in reality its not.. Our tools for measuring anything to do with the brain/cognition are extremely crude currently.

eg. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobe...

To use computers as an analogy. If you were to examine it only physically, a hard drive filled with random garbage would look the same as one filled with our greatest works.

What's your motivation behind this comment? Do you really want to live in a world where some of humanity's greatest achievements are seen the same as random garbage? In any case, current brain scans are crude, but they measure function, not data. It's like putting an ammeter over an ethernet cable. You're not going to be able to see the data flowing over the wire, but you'll definitely be able to tell that data isn't flowing when it should be. You can also physically inspect a computer and see when a capacitor has blown.