With reading, all the information is processed using more active cognitive skills. First, the eyes read the words, which are then decoded from their metaphoric shapes of letters and sentences, assigned tense, syntax, grammer, and then they can help us visualise or conceptualise the scenario created by the author. All this happens in a conscious mind state. We can hear the words we're reading as internal dialogue if we want. Nothing is sublimated into our memory or our subconscious that wasn't actively processed through our conscious minds.
With TV, there's much less going on upstairs. Because we are absorbing most of the information from the screen visually, a different set of processes are used. There's no intellectualisation of concepts, or assimilation of data, because the symbols and shapes we see, go straight to our subconscious. The subconscious uses images and symbols to process information. Whereas ur conscious mind uses a verbal dynamics to intellectualise words into their respective meanings or concept.
The flickering of the TV's screen as it blasts us with a stream of images, induces a very passive, and receptive state in our minds. Dopamine and seratonin are released into our brains as we emotionally identify with the characters we're presented with. We soak up everything like a sponge, without thinking. The director uses all that symbolism that we don't even notice, to gain an emotional response to his plots from his audience. We are tricked into suspending our belief, while the director presents us with fictional scenes, loaded up with non verbal emotional cues to emphasise certain ideas. It's using trickery as a plot device. But that's OK, we know it's only a Movie, and we totally trust the directors not to take this opportunity to slip psychological malware straight into our subconscious minds, don't we?
Of course, watching the News on TV is different, isn't it? That's fact, unbiased and presented in a balanced way. Allowing us the illusion we are forming ideas and opinions of our own. How can we be, when we're not being given all the relevant facts? Just a watered down version of an event, emotionally gelded, so we become incrementally de sensitised to the most brutal ideas of all, like War. TV grooms a population, like a skillful paedophile grooms a pretty child. And for pretty much the same purpose. To exploit and abuse us all, and leave us with just enough cognitive tickover, to manage the illusion of audience participation.
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