Reading and Cognition

I think everyone will agree that the recent generations of human beings are endowed with certain perceptual peculiarities that are distinct to this age. Again probably most people will agree that the presence of television and visual media, the proliferation of computers and the web are changing children’s ways of spending leisure time. We hear more and more about the harmful effects of over-exposure to TV or the computer monitor, running parallel with the declining rate of reading in children. In addition to this, it is somewhat perplexing to notice that Turkey is right after the States in the world's highest rate in TV viewing. Considering the fact that my generation didn’t get to see a color TV or multiple channels until the mid-80’s, I remember my childhood as a more extraverted time of activity, where we spent most of our time outside with neighbors kids, inventing all sorts of different games ranging from tag to charades, from makeshift magic shows to making puppets and backdrops to produce a shadow-play for the parents and other kids. Other than that, being outside-bound for fun had other advantages as well. We were able to make friends with the community much easier, doing errands for the house like picking up groceries, running to the “bakkal” and so on. My mother felt relatively safe when I would wander out for a chore, as she knew that everyone around knew me and whose child I was. Mostly due to TV and household entertainment, as well as limited playgrounds in our urban environment, I think it is safe to say that today parents are less reluctant to let their children interact with the grocer, the butcher or the baker. These days, especially in big cities, living your childhood in healthy activity is becoming more and more difficult, as buildings get bigger and bigger, and playgrounds and parks get smaller and smaller. I can’t deny that safety has become another big concern, but outside of Istanbul, Turkey I believe, is still a safe place.  

            Coming from a reading-oriented family, one of my ambitions in child rearing is to pass along the same love of reading that my parents engendered in me.  Reading was a huge part of my childhood. After having spent hours devouring the beautiful children’s books my mother had brought from the States, I still get a familiar tingle every-time I hear a Dr. Seuss rhyme today and the images that accompany my favorite books come back to me in 3D pictures that waltz along my mind. My mother tells me that I enjoyed her reading to me so much, she would, out of fatigue, have to record her voice onto tapes and play them back to me just so I could hear my favorite book over and over again. Of course, when there is not a lot of TV around, one might say, it is easier to kill time with books. However, I believe the issue is a bit more complex.

            Years ago when I was a teacher, I remember a British educational scientist giving a seminar on how TV is harmful to children, especially in those between 0-3 years of age. Moreover, the worst harm, he claimed, was caused by commercials (which actually resonates with many parents’ complaints about their children’s TV habits). How this harm takes place is still not totally clear among the scientific community but there are some indications that point to a neural development that lacks a semantic complexity, due to an over-saturation of images emitted in high frequency intervals. The child tries to make sense of the images that are projected, but when the images are too many and too frequent, a causal relationship becomes more difficult to achieve. Hence the zombified look that children have when watching the image bombardments TV commercials produce. Consider how one minute there's an explosion on the screen, stars burst into the air, then a disembodied stick of ice-cream drifts towards the viewer with, say a dancing lion on it. Things happen so fast that the baby is not able to attach meaning or a relationship between the sequences of images. Now this may seem far-fetched at first but it seems to me no coincidence that baby channels like Baby TV or Babyfirst emit programs that change scenes slowly, almost as if they try to let the baby take in the scene with all its detail and cognitively absorbe it. A recent study states that babies perceive color in the pre-linguistic part of the brain (the right hemisphere) and that adults perceive the same colors in the linguistic part (the left hemisphere). If this is true, then a healthy transition from pre-linguistic to linguistic perception is an essential component in the child’s cognitive development in later years. In fact, what the seminar speaker suggested was that over-exposure to TV inevitably creates potential attention-deficit disorder, and a lack of concentration needed to finish a book as the children reared on TV are so used to passively watching the colorful lights whereby the imagination is stifled and meaning can not be generated due to a lack of time for neural synapses to form.

            Does this mean reading is dead? I definitely do not think so, as I witness with my child that although we do show her TV, she is much more interested in reading, as long as one of us is with her. Now, when I ask her if she wants to read a book she rushes into her bedroom in her clumsy toddler trot, grabs her favorite book (“Good Night Gorilla”) and returns holding the book out to me and uttering her favorite syllable, “boua”. Then she sits next to me with her arm draped along my leg, watching my fingers as I trace the action depicted in the words, and she joins me in emitting the animal noises that are on the pages, turning to me for approval, and cheering when I nod and smile. In other words, interaction still seems an important element in a child’s cognitive development and I believe no Sesame Street character will ever take the place of mom or dad, as long as we don’t let it.