Autism Causes TV

“TV causes autism” was the big news story about autism this week. A Bizarre Study Suggests That Watching TV Causes Autism was the headline for an article in the October 20th Time.com. Wrote Claudia Wallis:

……[Michael Waldman] got to thinking that TV watching — already vaguely associated with ADHD — just might be factor X. That there was no medical research to support the idea didn’t faze him. “I decided the only way it will get done is if I do it,” he says.

Prof. Waldman did indeed “do it.” He and his fellow researchers made their paper available on their website, so one statistical analysis-based study of a hypothetical (”splashy,” notes the Time.com article) launched a thousand blog posts and online articles, with equally catchy titles (Does watching Barney make kids autistic?, Bad for the Brain, etc.).

And, while I do think that enough has been said and blogged on this topic (and that I await the next cause célèbre for autism: polarfleece, perhaps, or mothers whose husbands did not attend Lamaze classes with them), I will offer what I hope will be my final twist on the subject. (The following is meant to be not only purely hypothetical and speculative, but entirely fictional and fanciful.)

I would like to make a modest proposal, namely, that Autism causes TV.

What, you say? Is she kidding?

(I am, but bear with me, or get on with your Saturday; ours includes another round of Ant Hockey.)

Consider, indeed, the situation of the stereotypical average American in front of a TV set. (Readers in the UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and around the world are invited to use their imaginations about a sort of Homer Simpsonesque figure plunked before the mighty Boob Tube, beverage can opened and firmly grasped in one hand.) Said stereotypical American (usually male—perhaps even at a ration of 4 or 5 to one female) has his eyes plastered upon the 36 inches of HDTV images before him. His gaze is unidirected; the hand that is not holding the can grips a black plastic slab, the remote control. Voices call from nearby (the kitchen, the other side of the room) and are not responded to. Eye contact is not made and language is reduced to mere grunts and a repetitive set of phrases (”We gotta make this first down”; “What is wrong with you?”; “Go go go go go go go!”). Social interactions are minimal if not completely absent.

How did a human being get into this deplorable state of cubile potatonium?

It would be easy, and perhaps more obvious, to blame the TV for rendering an adult into a state so seemingly like autism (and imagine what might happen to a child under three years old…….). But a TV is just a TV, a mechanical device of metal, cathode ray tubes, plastic, wires, etc.. It does not ask to be watched and certainly to be blamed for causing any childhood developmental disorders.

At its inception, TV was hailed as nothing less than a sign of human genius: When Bell Telephone and the U.S. Department of Commerce conducted the first long-distance use of television between Washington, D.C. and New York City on April 9th, 1927, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover commented that “Today we have, in a sense, the transmission of sight for the first time in the world’s history. Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect, and in a manner hitherto unknown.” (See The Invention of Television on About.com.)

But wait. Genius. Inventors—Michael Faraday’s work on electromagnetisim, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison theorizing “about telephone devices that transmit image as well as sound,” Vladimir Zworkin who patented the color television system, and a host of other scientists pursuing their research with single-minded purpose in their labs. Could it be that the inventors of the TV had a dash or dose of autism in them—-what was the big deal about creating a machine that could transmit particular images, when if one wants to look at something, one has only to cast one’s eyes out the window and see all there is to see? Why do we need to all watch the same picture—-of Ralph berating Ed Norton while Alice wipes her hands on her apron in The Honeymooners, of the opening of a Piggly Wiggly store, of the day JFK was shot, of Neil Armstrong’s lunar landing? Why do we all have to look at the same thing, just as it so often seems to me that my autistic son Charlie has one and only one image of the world—that only three cars (black, white, and green) are allowed to be our driveway and the others need to back out (”bye bye!”) immediately, and that Charlie will go to great lengths, will invent every strategem he can devise, to get those strange cars out of his picture of what the world should be, and to make sure that I see it his way.

That I see the world according to his personal, TV-set-boxed, view of things, one flickering image to be broadcast to thousands.

We see the finely upholstered, nicely lit and painted, tastefully basketed and throw-rugged, interiors of Martha Stewart and don’t we think we just have to have our houses looking like that?

Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler introduced the word “autism” in his book The Group of Schizophrenias in 1911, just around the time that TV was being invented…..In 1943, the year that Leo Kanner’s article on “Autistic Disturbance of Affective Contact” was published, Vladimir Zworkin was developing the Orthicon, which “had enough light sensitivity to record outdoor events at night” (The Invention of Television on About.com)—-and isn’t sensitivity to various kinds of stimuli a feature of autism…..

If you find my logic a bit fuzzy, my correlations a bit strained, you are indeed right: It is fuzzy and I am straining, but there is a sort of logic.

Perhaps like that which suggests that TV is the cause of autism?