(January 19, 2010 at 8:59 am)Pippy Wrote: Play games or watch TV for an hour. Is your breathing rate decreased?No.
Quote:Are your eyes heavy, and you blink a lot less often?No.
Quote:Are you kind of dreamy, having trouble holding thoughts?No.
Quote:Are these all sign that the electrical rhythm in your brain is being pushed closer to the sleep side of the scale? If you don't think you're being hypnotized, than I don't know where else to start.I don't think I'm being hypnotized, mainly because I'm not. I've been hypnotized before, I know what it feels like (it was medical hypnosis, not carnival hypnosis before you make some remark). Playing video games, watching tv, etc is nothing like it.
Quote:This is kindergarten stuff here. TV is bad for you. You don't think so, that's your own problem.We tell children TV rots their brains for the same reason we tell them that Santa Claus brings gifts to good children. Children shouldn't watch too much TV, but rather focus on developing other skills in different areas. It's a control mechanism, which is why parents allow you to watch more and more TV as you grow up, and eventually let you control the amount you watch yourself.
Quote:You do bring up a good, but misplaced point about time on the computer. I spend time here, I have other forums, I check the underground news every day. I write Emails to family. I try to limit my time on the box though, because I am able to comprehend what it is doing to my mind. But that it makes me some kind of hypocrite is fallacious to the core. I say 'TV is bad for you, it rots your brain', and you take it all personal and come back with "Yeah, but you use a computer... so... there!" That has absolutely nothing to do with the point I am making. I know the computer rots my brain too.It isn't fallacious to call you a hypocrite. In fact, if you admit that you know the computer rots your brain, it makes you even more of a hypocrite. You have gone on and on about how you don't watch TV because it flickers at such a rate as to "hypnotise" you, you've said the same about video games. You've told us we shouldn't be doing it because it is bad. However, if you can make this argument about watching TV, you can make the same argument about using a computer. In the last 9 months, over 4 days of them (that's 1.5% by the way) has been spent on these forums alone. 4 days is a rough estimate of your time spent on the site; it is probably less than this if you take idle time into account, but the fact still remains that an awful lot of time is spent sat at your computer.
So the hypocritical thing about you is that you don't practice what you preach. Instead of TV and computer games, you spent your time online in forums, still staring at a screen that flickers at 50 or 60 Hz. Your argument is that TV rots your brain, so it is unhealthy, so you shouldn't use it. It follows that anything else that rots your brain, is unhealthy, and therefore you shouldn't use it either. So either you admit you are hypocritical on your position of using computers but not TVs, or you can tell me why computer screens are held above TV in some special escape clause.
Speaking about this has reminded me of a question I got in a Critical Thinking exam a few years back. We were to evaluate a situation where a campaigner against TV was being interviewed, saying how TV rots your brains and how it should be banned. The same campaigner admitted in the interview that he does go to the movies more than the average person. The question was to find the flaw in his argument, and the answer was that he was being hypocritical. All he has done is replace TV with a bigger, brighter screen. I pointed out that in the terms the campaigner was talking about, a movie screen isn't any different to a TV screen. I got full marks too.
