Autismo y televisión
La revista en internet Slate, tiene un interesantisimo artículo sobre un estudio dela Universidad de Cornell que vincula el autismo infantil con los hábitos televisivos de los niños menores a tres años. La hipótesis del artículo es que los cerebros de estos niños, en su proceso por entender un mundo en tres dimensiones, son pervertidos por las luminosas imágenes en dos dimensiones que ofrece la televisión en sus años de mayor desarrollo.
The Cornell study looks at county-by-county growth in cable television access and autism rates in California and Pennsylvania from 1972 to 1989. The researchers find an overall rise in both cable-TV access and autism, but autism diagnoses rose more rapidly in counties where a high percentage of households received cable than in counties with a low percentage of cable-TV homes. Waldman and Nicholson employ statistical controls to factor out the possibility that the two patterns were simply unrelated events happening simultaneously. (For instance, petroleum use also rose during the period but is unrelated to autism.) Waldman and Nicholson conclude that “roughly 17 percent of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s was due to the growth in cable television.”