Reading books is better to improve imagination than watching TV, according to a study published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts.
It has been long thought that watching TV can lower the brain’s imaginative powers, as stories are delivered through images rather than created in the mind. However, there has been minimal research in this field to support this theory.
To test this idea, Dr Sebastian Suggate from the University of York designed an experiment involving more than 200 young adults. Participants were presented with film clips and text to read and asked to imagine the characteristics of objects familiar to them that were not featured in the film or text they had just experienced. Researchers measured the speed and accuracy of the responses.
Participants had to imagine the objects and then answer questions about what they looked or felt like. For example, a participant might have been asked which musical instrument is shinier, a trumpet or a flute. Results showed that participants watching the movies were slower to answer these questions than those who read texts.
“We found that those who had been watching film clips had slightly impaired imagery for 25 seconds compared to those who had just been reading and that this did not change depending on whether they had seen fast-moving or slow-moving images on screen,” said Dr. Suggate, from the University of York’s Department of Education. “In reality this is a very small time delay, but if you look at what this means over a longer period of time – days or years of consistently consuming images on screen – then we can see that this is actually a significant impact on the brain’s ability to mentally visualise and feel.”
This follows on from their previous work, where they showed that the imagination of young children watching TV (instead of reading or doing other activities) was “dulled” after a few months. “In order to produce images in the brain or mind, we rely on a number of sensory systems, and not just our ability to see. It takes the experiences of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch to produce a response to the world around us, and our study in children suggests that passively consuming images for hours and over a long period of time without routinely stopping to do something else that tests our other sensory functions, or to simply pause their viewing to discuss what they had just seen on the television, dulls the imaginative capabilities,” said Dr Suggate. “In our study with adults, we see a similar effect in a short period of time, and by comparing it to reading, we can see that the brain needs to actively create mental imagery, and we appear to be able to do this better when the images have not already been given to us via film clips.”
The researchers emphasise the role of imagination on human development and its impact on many abilities, such as creativity and empathy. “More work is needed to understand how our new digital world impacts imagination, but like most things, balance seems to be the key. Some screen-time is fine, but balancing this out with things like reading, interacting with other people, exercising outdoors seems to be the best way to protect our imaginative capabilities,” concluded Dr Suggate. “It is important that we do protect it because it has a big impact, particularly on young children as their brains develop, and the concern is that we want to avoid having generations of people who struggle to see themselves in other people’s shoes and imagine alternative ways of addressing both big and small challenges. Many social and environmental problems provide good examples of this; in many ways, we need to be able to imagine what our world was and what it will be like if we don’t do things differently.”
Suggate, S. P. (2023). Does it kill the imagination dead? The effect of film versus reading on mental imagery.Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000651