Joseph Chilton Pearce is the author of many books including Crack In The Cosmic Egg, The Magical Child, and Evolution's End. For over thirty years he has lectured internationally on human development. Currently he is writing a book on the "biology of transcendence", and co-authoring Nurturing the Early Child, Family & Caregiver, a book and video series with Michael Mendizza. 

Let's look at the growth of language and the relationship between word and thing. When the little child is in their own nest, they think anything is safe to interact with. Just watch it: a child in a house will jump right in on anything. They want to taste it, touch it, smell it, feel it, and immediately say, "What is that, mamma, what is that, daddy?" They are asking for a name label for the object.

When you give them a name, the word and the thing build into the brain as a single neural pattern, a neural field network. The brain does not build a neural network of the thing, its taste, touch, smell, feel, and all of that, and then in addition, add its name as a separate item. The name is built in as an integral part of the whole structure of knowledge, as Piaget calls it.

The mother's emotional state-her horror, alarm, and so on-is built into the structure of knowledge as an integral part. Her name for the object-dirty, nasty, old dog-is built into the structure of knowledge. All that is without any evaluation on the part of the child. If it's a beautiful flower and the mother smiles and the child rushes over to pull it off its stem, stuff it in his mouth, taste it, touch it, smell it, feel it, and so on, then it builds the mother's emotional state of approval into the structure of knowledge along with the word flower.

As adults use these words, what starts happening in the child's mind? It starts responding with internal imagery. And that leads us to storytelling. The child responds to storytelling very early, even before they can talk. The word comes in as a vibration: sensory input. And that challenges the whole brain, not just to create an image in keeping with each word, but to create moving imagery, fluid imagery that follows the flow of the words. It sets up an inner-world scenario, a whole inner-world scene in which the scene is constantly shifting according to the shifting of the words themselves.

This has been found to be a major challenge of the brain. The job is so enormous that the child goes into total entrainment. That is, all of the energy moves into this visual process of the inner world. The child goes catatonic: body movement ceases, the jaw drops, eyes get great big and wide. They are literally not in this world. Their eyes are wide open, but they are not looking at anything outwardly. They are looking at the marvelous world forming within them.

The Swedish Pediatrics Institute came out with a study showing that a child with imagination was far less prone to violence than a child without imagination. Why? Because the child without imagination is subject to bombardment by their immediate sensory environment without any alternatives. So, if that sensory environment is unpleasant, demeaning, insulting, or threatening, their survival drive dictates that they immediately lash out against it and try to change it.

The neurological damage caused by of television has nothing to do with content. For years and years, the debate over television was over content. Jerry Mander, years ago, recognized in his four arguments against television that content was not the issue. The device itself was doing something. There have been serious recent medical and scientific studies in Australia, Europe, England, and the United States that look not at content, but at the device itself and the damage it does.

The brain habituates to the television stimulus because none of the higher creative cortical structures are called upon. There is no challenge to the brain to create the flow of imagery. The flow of imagery is coming in through the sensory system, through the environment, and flooding the brain with a synthetic counterfeit of what it is supposed to produce. That is, what's coming in through the lower brain at the bottom of the system is flooding the high brain with a counterfeit of what the high brain is supposed to create. Therein lies the major damage of television.