Welcome to a real horror: Modern decor may be causing more harm than good!
A large team of researchers from institutions across the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Asia, and Canada has published a detailed review arguing that visual discomfort, the headaches, eye strain, nausea, and perceptual distortions that some people experience in response to certain visual stimuli, has a measurable, physical basis in the brain. The paper, published in the journal Vision, pulls together decades of research across neuroscience, architecture, lighting design, and psychology to build a unified theory of why some things are so hard to look at, and what can be done about it.
It argues that the human brain evolved to process the natural world efficiently. When it’s forced to handle the highly repetitive, artificially sharp, and often flickering patterns that dominate modern urban environments — think fluorescent-lit offices, car headlights, striped acoustic panels, or the dense text of a printed page — the researchers argue it may drive greater neural activity than it should, potentially placing excessive demands on the visual cortex.
That metabolic overload, they hypothesize, may be what triggers discomfort, and in people with pattern-sensitive epilepsy, it can provoke seizures.
Read more about the study here..
Maybe next we can discover how modern building design, all being gray and boring, can lead to the same reaction..
