Healy said it was refreshing to attend a conference at which the nation's schools and teachers are not being blamed for children's academic weaknesses. Teachers are not doing that bad a job nor are the schools that much different. I believe this decline in skills is not the fault of teachers. The conference was sponsored by the Division of Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The neuropsychology specialist noted the difficulty of studying how TV affects a complex system such as the rapidly developing brain interacting with the environment.
TV is embedded in a socio-cultural matrix.
It may simply be filling a gap. The most dramatic research presented was a set of experiments on the developing brains of young rats by noted UC-Berkeley brain scientist Marian Cleeves Diamond. The growth in brain tissue included blood vessels, nerve cells, dendritic branching, synaptic junctions and cerebral cortex thickness. Diamond found that allowing the deprived rat pups to observe passively the activity in the more stimulating cages yielded no measurable benefit in their brain development. Psychologist Daniel Anderson cautioned against concluding from research on rat pups that heavy TV viewing retards brain development in children.