Posted by gnabgib 5 days ago
I was watching some tours of some very nice metro stations in China and Moscow. I didn't quite understand what was so nice about them until one comment pointed it out: no advertising blasting bright colors into your retinas. Advertising in public spaces needs to be banned. It's visual pollution and it's using publicly funded assets to make tangible profits while the losses are externalised easily because they're not well understood. If profit is all you care about then it's easy to justify turning your house into a brothel.
This is not quite true. Reading via peripheral vision is a skill, but most people never have the right kind of motivation (and perhaps not the right kind of visual stimulus) to learn it. I know this because I have personally known someone who read exclusively via her peripheral vision.
There's an inherited retinal disease that runs in my family. It's a form of 'cone-rod dystrophy'. Cone-rod dystrophies are diseases where the cones and the rods in the eye eventually stop responding to light. The order of the terms in the naming reflects the typical order of the dystrophy: first the cones (responsible for central vision) go, then the rods (responsible for peripheral vision) go, too. As the cones and rods go bad, this results in loss of visual acuity in central and peripheral vision respectively. (It often causes lots of other, less generic problems, too, such as: blind spots, warping/twisting distortions in the visual field, sometimes flickering artifacts, progressive colorblindness, extreme light sensitivity, and an effective reduction of contrast.)
Between individual cases, there's a lot of variation in how the disease presents. There's no fixed timeline or ordering for the progression (even though the disease's genetic cause has been identified as just a single gene!).
Anyhow, in my late aunt's case, her central vision was useless long before her peripheral vision could give out. So she learned, somehow, to do things like read her smartphone using only her peripheral vision.
We chatted about it once or twice. Onlookers often could not comprehend that she was looking at her phone, since her eyes weren't pointed towards it. She once laughed to me about how someone had asked her 'Why are you sniffing your phone?', while she held it up to her face to read a text message.
My impression is that learning to rely on your peripheral vision in this way is extremely counter-intuitive and difficult to do. (This may have something to do with the mechanisms discussed in TFA.) I wonder if it can even be done at all without first obscuring one's central vision (which I guess you could do artificially with contacts). But evidently it can be done.
That's because the fovea, the "high resolution" part of the eye we use when focusing on some point is entirely made of cone cells, which give you color vision, but are less sensitive, as opposed to rod cells, that make up most of the peripheral vision. In other words, peripheral vision is better in low light situations.
I guess it looks sort of like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M83sF7_fYdM
By the way, while it is true that cones are far more densely packed in the fovea, their function is color vision, not central vision. Rods are responsible for motion perception and vision in low-light environments.
Yeah, it's hard to say what the determinative factors were because her general visual acuity was so low that she generally needed very large fonts very up close anyway. My mom and my sister and I also have this condition and rely on magnification to varying degrees (and for various reasons— sometimes it's truly about acuity but sometimes larger sizes/bolder fonts are a clumsy way to try to make up for contrast issues). But even those of us with usable central vision generally need large fonts anyway. We're also all, for reasons I think are mostly incidental, naturally myopic (although my mom is no longer nearsighted but farsighted (with low acuity— she's legally blind)).
> Was your aunt able to read normal print besides titles?
No. Even titles, like titles of chapters in a paperback, she could likely only read with magnification. And that's if she could get enough contrast at all. At some point, screens become much easier to read than paper, even at equal sizes.
I should learn more about the precise anatomy because it's interesting, but currently I know more about the subjectivity of it than the mechanics.
> By the way, while it is true that cones are far more densely packed in the fovea, their function is color vision, not central vision. Rods are responsible for motion perception and vision in low-light environments.
There may be other factors in these inherited retinal dystrophies that affect the way their progressions affect field of view, idk. But what I said about which areas are first distorted for cone-rod dystrophies is true, and its reverse is true for rod-cone dystrophies (i.e., retinitis pigmentosa), where people with that condition lose their peripheral vision first and their field of view shrinks from the outside-in. My assumption so far has been that this corresponds to those density differences you mentioned.
> Rods are responsible for motion perception and vision in low-light environments.
I do know that much. :)
One of the features of this illness that's very prevalent for me and my sister right now is extreme light sensitivity, presumably because our eyes rely increasingly on their rods even during the daytime and even in high-light environments. One related I've written about on HN before is how the need for lower total light emission pushes both of us to high-contrast dark themes with the lowest brightness possible. OLED screens are really nice when your rods are in better shape than your cones!
One that I don't think I have is that my colorblindness has been getting worse over time. The last time I took a colorblindness test (administered by a medical professional, at my retinal specialist's office), I could hardly read any of the Ishihara plates at all. (When the doctor came in, he asked me if I only saw in black-and-white, which I found mildly irksome but very amusing. I laughed about it with my family afterwards. I do still see many colors! I just have trouble distinguishing a lot of them, too.) My sister, who was not colorblind at all when she was growing up, is now also colorblind, about as much as me based on her tests.
“Therefore, the detailed visual information you’re getting is from the car in front of you, but the information of interest is outside of your focus.”
This must be one of the reasons you get fatigue and exhaustion during traffic rush hour due to so much visual information.
This reality might be like a quantum observation field - cities are full of conscious minds actively observing/measuring/collapsing probability states. Like millions of wave function collapses happening constantly. Nature lets those quantum states breathe, maintaining possibility spaces longer.
Some people thrive in that urban collapse-field - they want that constant measurement and definition. Others need more quantum coherence time, seeking out spaces where consciousness can maintain superposition longer. It's not about visual complexity or stimulation, but about how much conscious observation is forcing reality into defined states.
Cities vs nature isn't just about peace or chaos - it's about the density of consciousness collapse. Like the difference between metal (constant forced collapse) and ambient music (sustained possibility states).
Checking mirrors often, looking outside your side window, etc.
Whenever I do those things it helps refresh me quite a bit.
if this clutter has negatie affects why has japanese design settled on it?
For whatever reason it’s just easier to talk when staring out the window at a tree than staring at a face on a screen. I call it a bad habit because it results in accidentally ignoring body language of the person on the other end
100% with phone calls. I typically just slowly pace around around my house when on a phone call without video.
It goes for locations and activities too but mostly if I look at something it locks and unlocks memories but the thing I'm looking at also becomes part of the active memory.
You have a bunch of stuff hashed against the tree or against a dead gaze or you don't want the person to be part of the thought process.
I forgot the code for the warehouse at a previous job. Typing the wrong one locks the place down. I somewhat panicked but went there anyway, got distracted by something and typed the code without even thinking about it. I also remembered it after walking inside. Took some coffee and it was gone again. I thought, I've been typing that code for years but had never realized I only remember it when looking at the door.
Looking at a face while talking vs. a tree just increases the mental energy necessary for the call. When you’re chronically exhausted, you start cutting out the little things that seemingly don’t matter (like someone’s body language or facial expression during a call)
Definitely a tangent here. Love the warehouse example though. Similarly, I can’t for the life of me recite my iphone, Apple Watch, or home security alarm PIN codes. It’s just pure muscle memory at this point. When I try to recall the PIN codes in my head, my mind immediately tries to recall the numbers by visualizing my phone (or alarm keypad) and attempting to remember the movement of my fingers in order to deduce what the numbers are.
Someone might reference signal-to-noise issues with modern news sources, body language, or a data set of any particular origin.
It is kind of obvious that stimuli like notifications are disruptive, but less so in the other cases.