Over the last 20 years, an increasing number of children and teens suffered from ADHD, recent numbers showing up to 10% of UK’s children facing this issue.
A recent study has revealed that children who spend more than two hours every day watching TV shows or playing video games double their chances of suffering from attention problems related to Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or simply said, ADHD.
The study also says that due to a lot of time spent in front of fast-moving images children have problems when it comes to focus on class hours, while their brains becomes to “dependent” to those images provided by TV and computers. This translates in bad results at school and behavior deterioration.
A well-known researcher, Professor Douglas Gentile said that when watching TV and playing video games the brain is getting not only used to flickering lights, noise and sudden camera changes but it does not react anymore as before to slower factors like a teacher writing on a blackboard, a silent class and so on. Children loose their attention even without them being conscious about it, while their brain still waits for more “intrigued” action, thus the action provided on TV and PC.
This study was made on 1,500 children with ages between 7 to 10 and on US college students. It seems that it does not take too much time to suffer from this condition, one year with 2 hours daily playing video games can be enough to become a major factor of ADHD.