As a related aside, in communication school (I went to college at Boston University's College of Communication) we spent a lot of time talking about different entertainment mediums. The subject I was most fascinated by was the power of television. There are many reasons television has the influence it does. One of the most interesting reasons is as follows. The human brain separates information from where the information was gathered. The two pieces of information are kept in different parts of the brain. The reason this is important is that with time you forget where you learned something. Combine this with the human impulse to believe that what we know is true and you get a very insidious effect of entertainment mediums (and television in particular as people spend more hours watching television than any other medium—at least that was true when I was in college; the internet has thrown a monkey wrench into all this). Most of what you see on fictionalized television is simply not true. One only needs to watch a show about a subject they know to realize this.

Here comes the insidious part. Everything we learn from television gets stored in our brain. Sure, when we're watching it, we kind of know to take everything with a grain of salt. But that information sits there outlasting our brain's ability to remember where we learned it. This means eventually it's just information we "know." And if we don't have other information contradicting it, we assume it's true. I bring this up because relying on what we think we know about things that we don't actually know can get us into trouble.

(с) Mark Rosewater

В краце по телевидению нам впихивают всякую чушь. Мы ее запоминаем как полную чушь, но со временем человек забывает откуда у него в голове информация взялась и остаются голые факты. И потом когда мы об этом вспоминаем, мы относимя к этому уже как к голым фактам, а не как к чуши и начинаем в это верить.