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What I had heard was that the imaging technology in CRT screens pushes the viewer towards alpha-wave patterns, which are associated with sleep and hypnotic states.
As I understand it, the image on a CRT isn't actually an image at all. Your eyes are perfectly capable of perceiving the electron gun "painting" the image, dot by dot, line by line, on the screen. Your brain, however, assembles the dots and fools itself into "seeing" an image.
This image assembly process, however, is extremely right brain oriented. I'm not sure if that's enough on its own, or whether the switching to left brain to comprehend the content is the key element. Anyways, the idea is that it pushes you into the alpha-wave state.
It isn't clear to me that any of this stuff holds for LCD's, plasma or projection TV's since they don't use the same pseudo-image painting technique.
Anyways, for CRT's at least, the drop into alpha-wave state is supposed to happen within a minute or two and is totally independent of the content of the programming.
Does it make you stupid? Probably not. But it probably is true that reading a book actively exercises your mind in a variety of ways that the TV content doesn't, which makes it a better mental exercise. For instance, you have to recognize the letters, words and phrases, translate those to ideas and engage you imagination to visualize the content. It could be argued that the alpha wave state induced by TV actually makes it harder to actively engage with the content of the programming and therefore exercise your mind dealing with it (at least while you're watching the content).
All of that makes sense to me, but doesn't mean that it's correct.
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