Seattle researcher says SpongeBob is wearing out your kid’s brain

We’ve been told over and over TV will rot our brains and we shouldn’t let kids under 2-years-old even look at it, and now a new study shows fast paced cartoons negatively affect preschool-aged children.

The study, in Pediatrics: Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, assessed a 4-year-old’s executive function (self-regulation, working memory, etc) immediately after watching nine minutes of a fast paced cartoon, SpongeBob SquarePants, versus a slow paced cartoon, Caillou, or playing with crayons. Researchers found the kids who watched SpongeBob did perform worse immediately after watching it.

Dr. Dimitri A. Christakis with Seattle Children’s Research Institute, who is familiar with the study and has himself studied the effects of TV on children, told 97.3 KIRO FM’s Ross and Burbank Show the theory of the study is the pacing of kids programs are surreal and don’t mimic what they would encounter in real life.

“Our brains have evolved over millennia to process events that by definition happen in real time,” Christakis said.

Listen to Researcher Dimitri Christakis: Spongebob is Hurting Kids Brains

He said fast paced cartoons are essentially over stimulating and exhaust certain parts of the brain, so performance is at least “temporarily diminished afterwards.”

While the study didn’t test a child’s imagination or creativity following nine minutes of SpongeBob, Christakis said it tests their task persistance, which is critical to development.

“At a minimum, I think what parents should take home from this is they would be ill advised to have their 4-year-old watch an episode of SpongeBob before they went to their kindergarten assessment,” he said.

The study did not look at the effects of fast paced programming on adults, but Christakis said there’s no doubt we’re all living in world where media is much faster than the past and is also constant.

“There’s no question that the general pacing of all programs, including perhaps your radio program, has increased over time in large part because as a society, we have shortened our attention spans and we kind of demand more stimulation to be satisfied.”

Christakis referred to recent movies in which there are six plot lines and the action doesn’t stop.

“As far as I know, they’re not harming you,” Christakis said, but he did offer to test Tom Tangney, 97.3 KIRO FM’s movie critic, after he’s done viewing his weekly allotment of films.

As for television’s link to ADHD, and specifically fast paced cartoons and how children view them, Christakis said studies are much more difficult to conduct. This most recent study does not include ADHD.

“Very few studies have looked specifically at ADHD. ADHD is a clinical diagnosis, that requires input from parents and teachers and neither this study nor prior have had exactly that,” Christakis said. “We know ADHD has a genetic basis, but our genes haven’t changed at all in the last 20 years. It begs the question of whether or not there has been some environmental change that’s triggered this increase.”

Listen to Dave and Tom don’t necessarily agree the tests are fair to kids