A Natural Seducer

Let’s say you’re talking foreign policy with Colin Powell (or whispering sweet nothings to your sweetheart) when Bullwinkle Moose appears on a television in the room. If your attention wanders to the screen, you’re hardly alone.

As the authors of research published in this month’s Scientific American admit, they too often find themselves succumbing to the tube’s almost occult ability to seize people’s attention and not let go. They cite, as an example, a UC Berkeley professor who confesses to having many “embarrassing moments ... when I am engaged in conversation in a room while a TV set is on, and I cannot for the life of me stop from periodically glancing over to the screen. This occurs not only during dull conversations but during reasonably interesting ones just as well.”

In the article, Robert Kubey, a media studies professor at Rutgers, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor at Claremont Graduate School, offer a gripping explanation of how images and sounds from the small screen seduce us by evoking a biological reaction that has been wired into our brains over millions of years of evolution.

The researchers are hardly the first to describe the “orienting response,” which dilates blood vessels to the brain, slows the heart and constricts blood vessels to major muscle groups at the sight of sudden or novel stimuli. Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov studied it back in 1927, recognizing it as an adaptive response that evolved to help our ancestors vigilantly scan the environment for lions and other threats.

However, Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi are among the first academics to “out” the science of media manipulation in the popular press. Previously, you had to look in publications like Advertising Age to learn how the orienting response can be evoked by such simple TV tricks as quick cuts, zooms, pans and sudden noises. The authors deserve cheers for exposing some of advertisers’ secrets, thus nipping at the hand that gives lucrative grants to many media studies institutes today.

These mavericks’ research is hardly on a par with curing cancer. But it could, in a sense, add years to someone’s life. Take, for instance, this typically common-sense observation: “Viewers often know that a particular program or movie of the week is not very good within the first few minutes but instead of switching off the set, they stick with it for the full two hours.” Learn to break that pattern and you might wind up spending less time in front of the tube than the average person in the industrialized world--a full nine years of life.

Here’s our tip for making the change: Get a clue--Bullwinkle is not a real threat.