The article addresses this directly:

"Indeed, it is of note that other screen-based activities such as video gaming and using the internet which involve more interaction can in fact have cognitive benefits, leading to higher levels of frontal and central EEG activity(21) and enhanced visual-spatial skills, problem-solving skills and cognition in older age(16), suggesting that it is this alert-passive interaction that is a key feature of the effects of television viewing."

Also note in Table 1 there are activities such as "using the internet" and "reading a daily newspaper" that were examined.

Note that the article uses "verbal memory and semantic fluency" as a proxy for general cognition, so readers will almost automatically score better than viewers. They also seem to have modeled all factors as linear, and "cannot rule out (...) the possibility of reverse causality".

So to answer your question: it depends on whether you consider all assumptions of the article relevant. One thing the article certainly doesn't contradict is the old adage "use it or lose it".

Reverse causality would be an interesting conclusion. Essentially asserting that articulate people with good memories are less likely to find TV appealing and would prefer to read or do something more interactive instead.

There are probably a lot of reasons why people may watch a lot of TV, including depression or other forms of mental and emotional pain.

Or: it’s a physiology / social sciences paper, so probably nonsense / narrow in scope / “more research is needed”.

You could probably say the same thing about 90% of scientific papers.

Almost all research is narrow in scope, and more research is always needed.

And calling other research fields "nonsense" is also something that researchers from all fields do.

Older people have had more practice operating the TV. Just getting the phone to work is often a mental challenge.

A ton of them are constantly inadvertently opening control center and then accidentally turning it on airplane mode or whatever. Another issue is that software changes constantly and any slight interface change they have no clue what to do.

At the farmers market earlier this fall, the seller was having a hell of a time getting his phone to work so that he could swipe our card on his Square.

After looking a little, he was wrapping his hand behind the phone far enough that he had his fingers from that hand touching the screen while he tried to poke buttons with his other hand.

Since there were multiple fingers on the screen, it kept interpreting them as gestures and not doing anything.

Further, his case made it so the Square dongle thing wouldn't stay plugged in all the way. So when he finally did get it to the swipe screen, it wouldn't read the card.

Finally ended up offering to look at it myself and manually entering my card info. The guy was so visibly relieved to be out of that situation.

Smart phones aren't nearly so user friendly as a lot of tech people like to think.

> he was wrapping his hand behind the phone far enough that he had his fingers from that hand touching the screen

Yeah, the perfect amount of bezel is significantly more than zero, I really don't get the hype for maximising screen/body ratios. It's just impractical, at least without serious measures against wrapped touch like having a fully touch enabled side only tho know which touches near the edges of the screen to ignore.

Although I'm sure this gets said fairly often around HN, smart phone "advancements" have stopped being "advancements" a while ago. They're they're closer to fads, and the cheaper brands have to chase the luxury brands, because the luxury brands get to define what is trendy. Much the same way that the rich get to set fashion trends, and the rest have to follow.

I'm not denigrating the upper class, fashion, or trends in general -- just pointing out that fashionable trends are different from technological advancement.

On the zero bezel phones the software makes a huge difference. I have very small hands where I can barely grip friends' XL phones. If they have some cheap off-brand, discount prepaid or even fancy Chinese Android I am constantly activating it despite barely touching the edges, whereas I never have the problem on the Google Pixel or an iPhone.

Any tool requires learning and understanding- a time and effort investment. Using a cash register also requires training.

The more power you put into a tool, (frequently) the more complex the interface becomes. This is a trade-off that must be weighed. Either you make your devices do less, or you require your users to learn how to use their tools.

I do not think we should sacrifice the power of our devices in exchange for improved ease of use.

Final note: Of course better interface design can help mitigate the increase in complexity of the tool with the increase in power of the tool, but I believe this has a limited effect.

Sure, you think that now, because you're in the group that interfaces are designed for. But once you're the guy at the farmer's market, you'll think differently. Power only matters if one can get something done with it. A kilogram of plutonium is enormously powerful, but that's no reason to carry it around in your pocket.

I'll also note that we have been sacrificing the power of our devices in exchange for improved ease of use since the 1980s and it's great. Manually configuring X-Windows in those days was enormously powerful, and enormously user-hostile. We sacrifice vast amount of computing power on the altar of usability, and that's exactly what we should be doing. Contrary to my early computing experience, I have never once had to rebuild the kernel on my phone, and I am very happy with that.

And third, you mostly create a false dichotomy here. If we're talking about a typewriter or a steam loom or something, yes, power and user complexity go together. But the true power of software is the ability to hide most of the complexity most of the time. Most of the work of software development is pushing complexity down, wrapping it in abstractions that provide the next level up with a clean interface.

A perfect example here is Google Search. It's a magic box into which I can type (and now, just say) anything, and it will apparently intuit what I want. The "powerful" version of that interface was 1980s search, where you carefully specified the various fields you wanted to search (because all data had to be carefully fed into the system's structure) and a painfully constructed, manually stemmed, boolean query. For maybe 1 search in 500, I still want that kind of power. But for the rest of the time, I'm very grateful that thousands of nice people at Google have made it so that their search's power has increased continuously, with users needing to learn less and less to get good results.

People should know that that power exists though. It should be available even if it's not always needed.

> Any tool requires learning and understanding

No, it's just bad design. Holding a phone only from the sides is simply not comfortable nor very safe for the phone.

> Another issue is that software changes constantly and any slight interface change they have no clue what to do.

I have my own story from today: I have iOS devices since forever and sill I had to google how to access some option. The damn things move between versions and some become invisible until you read somewhere where they are etc. It’s really that bad.

Previously on HN: “perfectly cropped”:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21353920

How does one passively consume textual content?

Reading engages the brain in an entirely different way than viewing images does. When you read you interpret meaning from text and construct a mental model of what's being described.

I've long struggled with retaining what I read. It feels like I've trained my brain to enjoy the quick dopamine hits from, for example, reading short stories or, say, seeing a problem someone has that my brain can pretend to solve. Sites like Reddit or StackExchange.

Yes, maybe I interpret text in my head and build mental models, but my brain just throws them away as soon as the story is over. Ask me what I read about 5 minutes later and I swear, I won't be able to tell.

Ingesting data and evaluating it according to some model, sounds like what a good cluster node would do. No need to permanently store neither the data nor the output on the node itself, but you might want it to update its process via learning.

Scrolling through reddit or HN threads takes almost no mental effort. I’d dare say it’s the sort of thing people do to relax after reading “hard” content like novels or research. Speaking personally, I can feel burnt out from reading a novel for a while. On the other hand, I can mindlessly scroll through internet comments, read them in full, and not notice that hours have passed and feel zero exhaustion from it.

I don’t feel exhausted, rather: bored by fiction and non-fiction alike.

Having said that, it often feels like the internet speaks with one voice, even when it’s disagreeing with itself.

Rarely does anyone say or write anything original.

I guess HN feels more familiar though, more like family. And we’re probably driven by millions of years of evolution to seek that out.

Yes the Internet's voice is very homogenous. I crave the tiny YouTube videos that are posted by people that have truly different views and are articulated well.

There's too much everyday garbage on the web, it's disappointing quantity is trumping form and quality. If YouTube loosened up it's monetization rules and went back to letting the producer set the form we could have more focused videos. The ten minute spam videos are the plague.

HN is more rational and quantitative than other sites in general so I prefer this as a counter to other more abstract information sources.

I believe you can read a novel more or less mindlessly, as you can read HN. But HN is more surprising, and it's like a slot-machine (in the analogy that Tristan Harris makes with social media).

For me it is like System 1 or System 2 taking charge (as in the book "Thinking Fast and Slow", by Kahneman).

You can’t passively consume anything. You say you have to interpret meaning from words. Sure, but.. What about faces? Tone of voice? Body language?

You’re correct. It seems though that there’s something about the level of - I can’t think of a less ridiculous phrase than - adaptive engagement you marshall while performing tasks that’s important.

a director watching a cut of a movie, weighs every detail with a focus that is quite unlike the mental state of the public audience. I think that changes the way they watch all films, always dissecting.

So I’m assuming the importance of television isn’t that it’s television, but that it’s minimally stimulating activity, so easily within your cognitive capacity as to require neither physical nor mental discipline nor adaptation, requiring just enough from you to displace sleep.

I don’t watch a lot of tv, but I choose to take this as a warning I need to do less scrolling

Edit: one thing in particular that stands out is the discussion of television being fast paced, fleeting information, I wonder if I’m viewing adaptation incorrectly here, what if it’s that we are exhausting our adaptive capacity, training ourselves on static?

> a director watching a cut of a movie, weighs every detail with a focus that is quite unlike the mental state of the public audience. I think that changes the way they watch all films, always dissecting.

Viewers do this as well. Analysis of literature and of television/film overlap to some degree, and both require an active consumer of the material.

I think the question is: Given an equal amount of effort on the part of the consumer, does one medium convey more benefits than the other?

My completely unfounded theory is that reading and watching both exercise different portions of the brain, like running and swimming. But like running and swimming, there is a wide spectrum of available exercise intensity - and even in their most intense forms they don’t exercise the whole of the brain.

1965: He is so smart, he is watching so much TV

1990: He is so dumb, he is watching TV all day

2000: He is so bright, he spends a lot of time on the Internet

2020: He is so dumb, spending all day on the Internet.

> 1965: He is so smart, he is watching so much TV

I'm not sure this was ever the case.

> Newton N. Minow spoke of the "vast wasteland" that was the television programming of the day in his 1961 speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_aspects_of_television#N...

One reason for this pattern is classism: the novelties of the upper classes are held up as glamorous and even virtuous, and that goes away when something is mass-marketed and becomes popular among the lower classes. Eventually, one might even hear words like "disgusting" and "poison" used to describe something that was once considered perfectly wholesome.

The difference is in quality and quality.

Both media began with precious little content, most of it relatively high in value for the times and circumstances. (Even if it could be argued some content was low quality or utility, the simple access to a much wider array of thought was valuable.)

But once they matured, of course they filled up with trash. Just like every medium.

Given the quality of most books these days, someone “reading a lot” doesn’t mean much anymore, for instance.

Do you mean quality and quantity?

> 1965: He is so smart, he is watching so much TV

This never happened.

Well, you have to remember the memes so you can exhale more air from your nose when you see it next time.

If you're talking about Listicles (ie 'Top 10 X') then yeah they're probably just as bad, but the other reply you got makes the good point that reading is fundamentally an active cognitive activity in the way TV is not.

I’m not really convinced. That just sounds like an issue with quality of content. Viewers and readers can both be active or passive.

they can be. However, reading is probably "by itself" more active than watching TV, irrelevant of the content. Probably in the same vein that handwriting is better for your brain than typing.

>handwriting is better for your brain than typing. {{citation needed}}

This citation does not support the claim. The paper is about literacy in children during the development of literacy.

Abstract:

> Digital writing devices associated with the use of computers, tablet PCs, or mobile phones are increasingly replacing writing by hand. It is, however, controversially discussed how writing modes influence reading and writing performance in children at the start of literacy. On the one hand, the easiness of typing on digital devices may accelerate reading and writing in young children, who have less developed sensory-motor skills. On the other hand, the meaningful coupling between action and perception during handwriting, which establishes sensory-motor memory traces, could facilitate written language acquisition. In order to decide between these theoretical alternatives, for the present study, we developed an intense training program for preschool children attending the German kindergarten with 16 training sessions. Using closely matched letter learning games, eight letters of the German alphabet were trained either by handwriting with a pen on a sheet of paper or by typing on a computer keyboard. Letter recognition, naming, and writing performance as well as word reading and writing performance were assessed. Results did not indicate a superiority of typing training over handwriting training in any of these tasks. In contrast, handwriting training was superior to typing training in word writing, and, as a tendency, in word reading. The results of our study, therefore, support theories of action-perception coupling assuming a facilitatory influence of sensory-motor representations established during handwriting on reading and writing.

thank you.

I'm not sure how you can remove the reader/viewer and the content from the act of reading/viewing to make a claim that reading is 'by itself' the more active activity.

At best I think you could make the claim that, for the average person, as typically consumed, reading results in more activity in the brain.