Quote:
Originally Posted by coolcat
Reading is reading. Uses your eyes, words go into your brain, that's reading. Does not matter what surface or texture you read it on. Ridiculous topic! So watching a movie on a TV screen is not watching a movie?
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What I had heard was directly related to the experience of watch TV on a traditional tube screen. The idea was that the mechanics of how the image is produced on such a screen requires that your brain works in a particular way in order to interpret it. Furthermore, this tends to overpower the mental demands of whatever content you are watching. [In case you don't know, a CRT uses an electron gun to spray a tight beam onto a phosphorus surface which lights up. The beam travels across the screen in hundreds of rows a number of times a second, but it's only lighting up one tiny little patch of the screen at a time. Your mind fills in the illusion of a moving picture. Take a high speed photograph of a TV to see what it looks like without the illusion.]
Specifically, the claim was that watching TV induced beta-wave modes in the brain, which are related to sleep patterns. This happens even if you are watching the most educational of PBS programming. My guess is that any claim that says that "screening" is different "reading" is based on this kind of research.
Of course, this was years ago, I don't have any citations and it may have been completely debunked by now.
In any event, I can't see how this would translate to the world of LED, Plasma and eInk. There's no strobing effect. All of the pixels are lit up at the same time, and they only flicker off and on when the picture changes. eInk is particularly static until you change pages.