Don't kill your television

That reading books is good for children is the most treasured notion in society's cabinet of received child-rearing wisdom, Johnson notes. Yet it's a pretty well established fact that kids today don't read as much as kids of yesterday -- at least, they're not reading books. (Few studies, Johnson points out, have taken note of the explosion of reading prompted by electronic media like the Web.) What are these children doing? They're playing video games. And other than praising games for building a kid's "hand-eye coordination," video games are, say child experts like Dr. Spock, a "colossal waste of time," leading us down the path to hell.

What's best about Johnson's section arguing that video games are just as good for you as books are is his tone: He's breezy and funny, and for a while you forget that he's proposing the kind of idea that in earlier times may have ended with a sip of hemlock. As I say, I think most people will be with him from the start: Video games are better than we think? Sure, I'll buy that. But one still feels itchy under the collar when he starts comparing something as sacred as the bound book to the sacrilege that is "Grand Theft Auto." And when, in a short, satirical passage, he points out all the shortcomings of books in the same unfair way most people describe the shortcomings of video games, I'm sure he drives more than a few readers to go out in search of some hemlock. A sample: "Perhaps the most dangerous property of ... books is that they follow a fixed linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion -- you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you ... This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as if they're powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it's a submissive one."

Of course, Johnson makes clear, he loves books (they provide, for starters, his livelihood). Still, his criticism of books' lack of interactivity -- even if it's offered as a purposefully specious point -- is valid. Books may promote a wide range of mental exercises, and a certain book may send your mind skittering in a dozen euphoric directions, but there are things that a book simply will not, cannot, do. Books don't let you explore beyond the narrative. Their scenery is set, and what's there is all that's there. You may have liked to have visited some of Gatsby's neighbors, but you can't. Books also don't ask you to make decisions, and in a larger sense don't require you to participate. You sit back and watch a book unfold before you. The book's possibilities are limited; what will happen is what's written on the next page. Read it a thousand times, still Rabbit always runs.

So this should be plain: Because they're interactive, video games promote certain mental functions that books do not. Specifically, video games exercise your brain's capacity to understand complex situations. That's because in most video games, the rules, and sometimes the objectives, aren't explicit. You fall into the sleazy urban landscape of "Grand Theft Auto" with no real idea of what you're supposed to do. Indeed, Johnson points out, much of the action in playing any video game is finding out how to play the game -- determining how your character moves, seeing which weapons do what, testing the physics of the place. If you fall from a building, does your character get hurt? What happens if you open this door? What kind of strategy can you plan to beat the monster on Level 3? The kind of probing gamers employ to determine what's going on in such simulated worlds, Johnson says, is very similar to the kind of probing scientists use to understand the natural world. Kids playing video games, in other words, are "learning the basic procedure of the scientific method."

Because TV is more fun, Johnson's section on television is more engaging than his examination of video games, but its revelations also feel a bit more obvious. His main point -- you can see an extended version of it in this New York Times Magazine excerpt -- is that most modern TV shows exercise your brain in ways that old TV shows never dared. Today's shows, whether dramas or comedies, are multithreaded -- several subplots occur at the same time, and in the best shows (like "The Sopranos" or "The West Wing") the subplots often run into each other (there is one popular exception: "Law & Order."). Modern shows -- including, of course, reality shows -- also feature many more characters; only a handful of regulars graced "Dallas" every week, but there are dozens of people in "24."

Next Page: Even "Desperate Housewives" is good for your brain

• View blog reactions