Modern decor may be straining people's brains
studyfinds.com
Modern decor may be straining people's brains
1–10 of 292 posts
Re: Modern decor may be straining people's brains
#2Off topic but I really hate modern web design. I found the content of this article interesting but I could hardly read it scrolling through in-article ads, banners, etc. One of the reasons I like HN is the prevalence of personal blogs that just have text for me to sit and read.
Re: Modern decor may be straining people's brains
#3Off topic but I really hate modern web design. I found the content of this article interesting but I could hardly read it scrolling through in-article ads, banners, etc. One of the reasons I like HN is the prevalence of personal blogs that just have text for me to sit and read.
> ... could hardly read it scrolling through in-article ads, banners, etc.
Which is why you can take my adblocker from me when you pry it from my cold dead hands. Much of the modern web is largely straight-up hostile without a proper adblocker these days.
Re: Modern decor may be straining people's brains
#4Off topic but I really hate modern web design. I found the content of this article interesting but I could hardly read it scrolling through in-article ads, banners, etc. One of the reasons I like HN is the prevalence of personal blogs that just have text for me to sit and read.
A clean reading experience appears to be a unique selling point these days
Re: Modern decor may be straining people's brains
#5If you've ever been in an home owned for generations, filled with books and knickknacks and heirlooms and family photos, despite the clutter it all feels comforting in a way that modern decor doesn't.
The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did. It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. Companies are either expanding or like to think they'll be expanding soon. People move jobs so often that they have a hard time feeling settled where they are, so they design for that possibility. The modern aesthetic is one of planned impermanence.
Re: Modern decor may be straining people's brains
#6The Limitations section at the bottom certainly has a lot of limitations:
> This paper is a review, meaning it synthesizes and interprets existing research rather than presenting new experimental data. The authors themselves note that current visual tests for susceptibility to discomfort are subjective and poorly standardized. They also acknowledge that the proposed mechanism (that discomfort is the brain’s response to overwork) has not been fully tested, particularly the hypothesis that colored tints reduce discomfort by steering visual stimulation away from overactive brain areas. The relationship between the brain’s excitatory and inhibitory chemical signals and visual discomfort also remains, in their words, “unsettled.” Several key research questions are flagged as unresolved, including how to best quantify the real-world impact of visual stress on people’s lives and how to objectively measure susceptibility.
Flickering lights are about the only thing I saw in here that seem like they'd be a problem in the long term. Everything else your brain just adjusts to over time and stops noticing. Maybe the first few days in an office with bright colors would be slightly distracting, but after that you just stop seeing them. I would guess that a lot of the studies they reviewed probably tested people's reactions to these things when they saw them one time, not the hundredth time.
Re: Modern decor may be straining people's brains
#7I'm thinking about Backrooms
Re: Modern decor may be straining people's brains
#8Who needs science for that?
Re: Modern decor may be straining people's brains
#9If you've ever been in an home owned for generations, filled with books and knickknacks and heirlooms and family photos, despite the clutter it all feels comforting in a way that modern decor doesn't. The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did. It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. Companies are either expanding or like t…
This resonates with me. I enjoy being at my grandparents’ home. And it’s exactly as you mentioned, if I would describe all the stuff in the living room it’d be called “cluttered”. Yet it feels “homey” and I feel pretty relaxed whenever I sit there to read a book.
And then on my side, for the past 15 years I moved to a new place about every 2-3 years. Never really invested in making it feel “homey” because I’m not sure how much space I’d have in the next place I move to.
Re: Modern decor may be straining people's brains
#10>Eyes and brain alike evolved over millennia to process natural scenes, forests, rivers, coastlines, open skies. These environments share a specific mathematical pattern: their visual complexity decreases predictably as you zoom in on finer and finer details.
Wut? It's precisely the opposite. Natural patterns have infinite complexity as you zoom in, and human-made patterns (most often) not.