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explosion-s • today at 2:43 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

As someone who’s had a concussion, this is really interesting. For me this is how any screen was to me, not just bright OLED ones. Even more interestingly it’s essentially only screens— backlist posters at the mall (paper with a backlight) still affect it but less so. To me perhaps it’s focusing on something on a screen that does this, but it’s really interesting to see this affect the general population.

It’s also odd to think about lack of ability to concentrate, and I wonder if screens cause this optically somehow but to a less noticeable degree even when less intense than this new one? (Independent distracting contents)

I noticed that adding a severe red filter to all my screens helped me significantly with the concussion and am also curious about that, would that impact the intensity of a refresh perhaps? Is blue light specifically the problem? I’m unsure but have a plethora of subjective experience.

I’m glad for this to enter public consciousness a bit and would love to see more research on the screen itself impacting our brain.


Replies

Fnoord • today at 3:20 PM

After I had a psychosis (it was still 'active' at the time, in hindsight, but not as severe) I couldn't use a monitor for long, especially not gaming. It gave me immediate motion sickness, or made the headache more severe. Hw was TFT 1080p LCD screen, GPU was probably AMD 7770 HD, since a few years afterwards I replaced that with a Nvidia GeForce GTX 960.

My matte MBP 2010 didn't yield me this issue, but I didn't game on it either; just watched movies/series. A lot of them.

I grew up with CRT monitors though, and these could cause severe headaches. Especially if resolution too high.

jareklupinski • today at 3:15 PM

curious; do you mean like a red plastic see-thru filter applied on top of the screen (filtering the backlight too, like those screen protectors), or a software screen effect that makes everything on screen appear red (which on an OLED screen would probably be the same thing)?

red/blue/green detectors (cones) in our eyes use different paths and have different "refresh rates" than luminous intensity sensors (rods), im wondering if filtering to a single color makes the rods take over for visual pattern processing