New research suggests that elderly women who watch daytime soap operas and talk shows are more likely to suffer from cognitive impairment than women who abstain from such fare.
Researchers stress that it’s not clear if watching these TV shows leads to weaker brainpower, or vice-versa. And they say it’s possible that another explanation might be at work.
But there’s definitely “something going on with those two types of television programming,” said study co-author Joshua Fogel, an assistant professor of behavioral sciences at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
To say that watching a soap opera causes memory problems is as to say that the firemen cause fire, because you find them always together with fire.
I think that both “parameters”, weak brain power, watching the chewing gum for the eyes, are a display of a single “component” (as in PCA, the Principal Component Analysis or in ICA, the Independent Component Analysis). This component would be the thing that is going on here.