Four Arguments for Elimination of Television

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"What I'm really here for today," I said, "is to try to get at one narrow issue. If red, blue and green phosphorescent light is being projected at 25,000 volts directly into human eyes and from there to the endocrine system, and if humans are receiving light in that way for four hours a day on the average, while depriving themselves of natural light, what can be said about the possible effects of this?"

"There's been no data on that," he repeated.

I told him that I was alarmed at the fact that nobody was looking into such questions.

"I'm alarmed too," he answered. "I'm amazed at the lack of intellectual grasp of the situation. There has been a tremendous amount of research on the effects of temperature and pressure on man. Yet it has not been fashionable to study the effects of light on man, and light is probably the most important single element in our environment.

"What does it mean, for example, that people who are predisposed to motion sickness immediately become sick when they walk into a room illuminated with blue light? Why does this happen? What is the effect of blue light? These are the kind of data that are needed before we can even approach your question.

"We know that blue light will reduce the concentration of bilirubin in the blood of infants and now jaundiced infants are put under banks of light to treat them, but we don't know yet what the other wavelengths of light in the lamps might be doing to the infants.

"In another area, we know that our bodies are relatively transparent to red wavelengths of light. You can tell that by putting a flashlight inside your mouth. What you can see from the outside is not blood; it's the red rays passing through you. People are now beginning to be interested in the effects of red light on man. "

Smith told me one last story which resonated with the Hopi Indian practice, mentioned earlier, of "keeping the top of the head open," and which was the highlight of my visit. It threw me back to my instinctive feeling that for knowledge about the effects of light, pretechnological medicines and practices may be as reliable as our own.

"There is research now underway," Smith said, "to gain further knowledge about the effects of light entering the body through the skull. It is known, for example, that light affects the testicular growth of sparrows and it's the light that comes in through the top of the head, not the eyes. We need to know if light entering the bodies of higher mammals by other routes than through the eyes has biological effects on them, and if so, what wavelengths are the active ones. We need to do this kind of research on the higher mammals, and we need to do it now. "

I could quote from a few more interviewees of varying credentials and authoritativeness, but they all say the same thing. There is not the slightest doubt that light taken through the eyes affects the cells; there is no doubt that variations in light spectra cause variations in cellular activity; there is no doubt that sitting and looking at television light affects our cells in some way. But no one can say how, and not many are asking.

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