Television shows and movies are a hugea part of our culture. They have had an impact on every part of our lives, from how we speak and dress to how we act and portray ourselves. However, motion pictures can have a profoundly negative effect on our brains. Television's effect on viewers is a subject that has been extensively studied in the last twenty years and whose impact extends farther than most people realize. Television shows and movies, whether based on real events or entirely fictional, often distorts people's perception of reality. One study conducted in 2004 studied the visual processing patterns of ferrets that were forced to watch the movie The Matrix. The researchers found that while the adult ferrets had neural patterns in their visual cortex that correlated very well with the images that they viewed, according to the research summary, but the young ferrets did not. The younger ferrets were taking in and processing visual stimuli just like the adult ferrets, but they were not processing the stimuli in a way that reflects reality.

However, this distortion of reality is not limited to young minds. Another study conducted at the Department of Psychology at Missouri Western State University examined the effects of reality television on the viewer's perception of reality. reality television is overtaking the networks and polluting the viewers' minds with distorted pictures of reality, leaving behind an even bigger effect than that of regular television, the study states. The study consisted of two groups: one group was asked to watch various television clips and then asked to rank the likely hood of typical events on television shows (but unlikely in real life) occurring to normal people in real life situations on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being extremely likely), and another group that was just given the scale without watching television clips first. The study found that the group that viewed television clips first and then ranked the events, ranked them significantly higher than those who did not view the clips first. The study also found that those who watched TV more in their day to day life, ranked the events more likely to occur than those who watched less television.

Reality TV is particularly distorting because it is no longer documenting reality but still describing itself as reality. Reality television frequently includes media manipulation and portrays a modified and highly influenced form of reality. Participants are often placed in exotic locations or abnormal situations, and are sometimes coached, to act in certain scripted ways by off-screen story editors or segment producers, with the portrayal of events and speech manipulated and contrived to create an illusion of reality through editing and other post-production techniques. However the viewer does not see this, so they are unaware that it is going on so they see what is happening on screen as real and unaltered.

The more people watch television, and hence are exposed to these distortions of reality, the more they will come to view the real world as similar to the world portrayed on television and thus perceive a greater real-world incidence of the over-represented entities. More often than not, the representations of social reality on television are not true to objective reality. The cultivation theory suggests the relationship between regular television viewing and the viewers' perception of reality, but it would seem that the viewers' perception of reality would be even more grossly altered by television viewing if the programming repeatedly inferred that the situations and people being viewed were, in fact, real. Past studies indicate that students who viewed programming that was considered to be highly unrealistic (for example, the soap opera As the World Turns) still molded students' perceptions of reality. Those who viewed the soap opera were more likely to accommodate their perceptions of reality to include more deception and lack of trust in others when faced with hypothetical situations as opposed to weighing the situations and using critical thinking skills to discern the truth.

Although it is difficult to say exactly how much any particular member of society's sense of reality has changed, it is fair to say that it has and will continue to.