TV anaesthetic

Scientists have published a report that suggests TV - in particular, cartoons - can have a numbing effect on children.  They found that children watching cartoons suffered less pain from a hypodermic needle than kids not watching TV.  In fact, TV was found to be more soothing than moms.  If this is true, then understanding 'passive distraction' may be important when we think about how ads work, and in particular why most testing methodologies are frankly ridiculous.

Comments

[mark]

Does this mean that TV viewing is encourages active (high involvement) processing in the brain vs. advertising being low involvement (if you buy Heath's argument's)? Or is this just applicable to kids - that TV is so new and engrossing to them that it engages larger portions of their brain.

[Chip Dwyer]

We should pay little mind to these studies, and not use them to craft bigger correlations.

I'm sure if you put a clown or a chimp in the corner, the kids would also report less pain.

[Rob @ Cynic]

TV has a numbing effect on me to ... mainly my brain!

I agree with Chip, these sort of studies have wildly differing results every few years without ever really looking into whether it is TV - or simply having your brain distracted from 'normality' for a period of time.

Reminds me of a study a mate of mine did years ago.

What they did was hook people up to a brainwave reading device and measured attention span when watching ads.

Unsuprisingly, the brains interest seemed to take a rather drastic dip when the branding came on.

The best bit was that when Toddy told the client the findings, he was told it obviously meant people were bored after about 15 seconds of television viewing so they had to place the branding of their commercials within the first 5 seconds.

When Toddy told him that he thought it was more to do with the branding than the timing, the client demanded him off the biz.

Genius ... another example of brainfuckwitism at work.