M: I may have asked this in another silo, but if I did, it was on one of those days when I had like six different ideas going on and I never actually checked it. I know that I had this thought and intended to look into it. Anyway, the question is, let me see, how is that going to phrase it? Is there anything about a screen, whether it's a TV screen or a phone screen or some other, which causes human attention to be attracted besides the fact that it's glowing? And is there a difference in the degree or nature of the visual attraction between like CRTs and LEDs and other forms of display? Go online to find out or back up your argument. And or back up your argument. Sorry, the phrasing was bad. I ask because there are situations where I will be playing a game or something and it has to go through a sequence, and even without looking at it, I will be able to judge when it's complete. And even if I'm holding it out of my sight line sometimes, I will begin trying to look for the phone. Or, you know, in another example that doesn't involve a handheld attention-getter, I will be standing in a bar at a restaurant or something like that and not consistently, but occasionally have to consciously avoid looking at a screen, even if I know that I have no interest in what it's showing.
G: TL;DR (your
style):
Yes—screens attract attention for multiple reasons beyond
“glowing.” The big ones are motion, flicker (even when
“invisible”), contrast, and learned reward cues. CRTs and
modern displays do differ: CRTs had obvious flicker; modern
LEDs/LCDs hide it, but can still produce subtle, high-frequency
signals your brain detects—especially in peripheral vision.
What you’re describing (knowing when something finishes, or feeling
pulled to look) is consistent with real, studied effects.
The attraction isn’t just brightness. It’s a combination of:
Your visual system is aggressively tuned to detect change over time, not static light.
This is why:
…can pull attention without conscious intent.
This is the big one you’re circling.
So even when you can’t see flicker, your brain can still register:
This creates a kind of low-level “something changed” signal.
Screens tend to have:
Your visual system prioritizes edges heavily (they define
objects).
So a screen is basically an edge-rich anomaly in the
environment.
This part is psychological but very real:
Over time, this becomes pre-conscious attention capture
image_group{"aspect_ratio":"1:1","query":["CRT screen scanlines close up","CRT flicker effect slow shutter","old CRT television glow dark room","CRT phosphor refresh pattern"],"num_per_query":1}
Effect on attention:
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Effect on attention:
Some people are actually more sensitive to modern PWM flicker than old CRT flicker because it’s global and uniform citeturn0search13
You’re likely picking up:
Your brain is essentially doing:
“The temporal pattern stopped → event complete”
That’s the combination of:
Important detail:
Peripheral vision is tuned to detect change, not detail.
So even when you’re not looking:
That includes:
This is why:
Screens are:
So they act like:
artificially concentrated “change emitters”
That alone makes them attention magnets, even if:
What you’re describing is not unusual—it’s a fairly clean example of subconscious temporal signal detection doing its job too well.
M: Are there any screens which have either unintentionally as a side effect or as an actual reason for their existence attempted to minimize the capacity to draw attention without meaning to? And I mean for a constantly updated image. Without that qualification, something like the Kindle paper effect might qualify, but that's more susceptible. Sorry, that might not be the right word. What am I looking for? That's more static, I guess. You can definitely tell when a page is flipped because of the nature of the screen, and it doesn't change in a way that would really be comfortable for actual viewing of anything but a static page.
G: TL;DR:
Yes—there are displays that intentionally (or as a side effect)
reduce attention capture while still updating. They generally work by
removing flicker, minimizing motion cues, lowering contrast, and
matching ambient light instead of emitting their own. None
eliminate attention entirely, but some get noticeably closer.
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These include:
What they do differently:
Result:
So they reduce baseline attraction, but spike attention during updates, which is the tradeoff you already noticed.
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These aren’t trying to be “non-attention-grabbing,” but they accidentally move in that direction.
Key changes:
Effect:
This is probably the closest modern mainstream solution to what you’re asking.
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Not a different technology, but a different philosophy of presentation:
These are common in:
Effect:
There’s a small but real design space where people intentionally:
Goal:
Make the screen behave more like the real world (continuous but low-signal change)
Examples exist in:
These are not mainstream because:
You’re running into a constraint:
A display that updates smoothly must emit time-varying signals.
And your brain is built to detect time variation.
So every continuously updating screen must contain:
Even if you remove flicker:
Most likely cues:
That’s detectable even:
Classic case of:
Even if you don’t care about the content, the screen is:
the highest-density change signal in the room
Some screens feel louder because they have:
Others feel quieter because they have:
So two identical displays can differ wildly in “pull” depending on:
how chaotic the signal is over time
M: Well, I'm not saying that drawing attention during an update wouldn't be acceptable and actually advantageous in one or two positions, but your point is taken. It's still got the problem of the e-ink where legibility is prioritized when things aren't moving. I guess the application I'm thinking of is the type of background display that always seems so potentially enticing in media, but that is obviously impossible once you see it in reality because of the nature of the screens. This isn't what I was thinking of when I thought of the question, but yesterday I was playing a game where this supposedly modern research facility was aligned on the walls with shots of nature, you know, beach at sunset with a palm tree swaying. And in the game, you know, it looked good. But if you tried to apply that to reality, the various things we've been talking about in terms of the screen would draw attention instead of being the meditative background that it was intended to be. At best, if you got something like the advanced e-ink, you might be able to do it without drawing attention to the screen itself, but the unnatural motion of the tree in the background would end up making it obvious that it was wrong. Or another application would be in the idea of having a good but changing art setup, although I guess that would apply to e-ink in terms of being able to be visible without being as commanding of attention as standard screens are.
G: TL;DR:
What you’re trying to describe doesn’t fail because of screen tech
alone—it fails because natural motion + artificial timing +
emissive light = a signal your brain flags as “wrong.”
There are partial solutions, but the closest real-world version
is not “a better screen”—it’s slowing, constraining, and
“de-randomizing” the motion itself so it stops triggering your
detection systems.
The issue isn’t just flicker or brightness. It’s a mismatch of three layers:
A palm tree in real life:
A screen version:
Your brain picks up:
temporal repetition → artificial source
Real-world motion:
Screens:
So when motion happens, it’s:
“clean change on a static plane” → unnatural
Even if it looks fine when you stare at it:
So your brain flags:
“this is a signal emitter, not part of the environment”
You’re trying to create:
“continuous, low-salience change that blends into reality”
But most displays produce:
“discrete, high-coherence change that stands out from reality”
That mismatch is what ruins the illusion.
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Instead of “video,” you use:
Examples:
Effect:
This is the closest match to what you’re imagining.
Instead of constant animation:
Examples:
This mimics:
real-world intermittent motion
Flat screens fail because:
Solutions:
This adds:
micro parallax → breaks the “flat signal” problem
As you already identified:
But:
To feel real, the system needs:
Basically:
you have to de-optimize the video
Most media does the opposite (smooth loops, clean cycles), which makes it feel fake.
In your example (research facility with nature walls):
They cheat in three ways:
So the illusion holds because:
your brain isn’t running the same detection filters
This is where your intuition lines up with reality:
Because:
art doesn’t need continuous motion
This avoids:
And still gives:
What you want behaves more like:
Not like:
That’s why the closest real analogs are:
Not traditional screens.
Your instinct about the palm tree is exactly right:
it’s not that it’s moving—it’s that it’s moving like a video instead of like reality
M: Yeah, but what I'm really saying is that screens of that size and capable of being able to display the background would, in reality, attract attention for the various reasons we've been discussing. But you can't really see it when you're looking at a game or a movie or something like that because it's a screen within a screen. So any of that kind of effect of attracting the eye is masked because the entire display already is functioning within that paradigm of flicker.
G: TL;DR:
You’re right. A “screen inside a screen” hides the problem because your
visual system is already globally adapted to one coherent
signal source. In the real world, a wall-sized display becomes a
second, competing signal field, and your brain flags it
immediately. The issue isn’t just brightness or flicker—it’s
signal coherence vs. signal isolation.
Movie/game case:
Everything you see = one unified display signal
→ same refresh, same flicker profile, same motion grammar
Real-world case:
Environment = mostly static, continuous, analog
Screen = discrete, time-sliced, high-contrast
Your brain does this automatically:
“One of these does not belong”
That’s the attention draw.
Inside a game/movie:
So the “nature wall” isn’t competing with reality. It is reality (to your visual system).
Even if you solved brightness and obvious flicker, you still get:
Your brain detects:
phase discontinuities (even unconsciously)
The screen is:
That boundary itself becomes a cue:
“this is a separate system”
Peripheral vision sees:
So attention gets pulled without permission
Even with:
You still have:
So the brain still tags it as:
a synthetic signal generator
To truly blend in, a display would need to:
Not just high refresh—no discrete frames at
all
→ effectively analog or event-driven light changes
Not emit independently, but:
Real scenes are messy:
A convincing system would need:
non-uniform, non-looping, non-synchronized motion
The “rectangle problem” is huge:
You’d need:
Projection mapping onto textured walls
→ blends edges, shares lighting
Windows (actual or simulated lightboxes)
→ works because the brain already expects depth + change
Kinetic / physical displays (fans, fabric,
water)
→ real motion, not simulated
Notice the pattern:
The closer you get to physical processes, the better the illusion
Your brain isn’t just saying:
“look at that”
It’s saying:
“classify that”
And the moment it classifies something as:
…it stays mentally foregrounded, even if you try to ignore it.
In a movie, classification never happens because:
everything is already “screen”
What you’re describing would require:
a display that behaves less like a screen and more like a piece of reality
…and current displays fundamentally don’t do that.
M: While I'm thinking about vision and games, I have a second question, which may or may not have been researched, that I'd like you to look into online. Often when I play a game which involves some form of camouflaging, when the game has either made it too easy or too hard, I'll find myself wondering whether the capacity to see things in binocular form would have a significant effect. Like putting out of consideration the actual realisticness of the game. So I'm not so trying to disregard any kind of actual relation to reality, but just in terms of one eye versus two, would that significantly increase my ability to identify targets, or would there be some other effect, either negligible or even perhaps making it more difficult to identify things?
G: TL;DR:
Two eyes do help with detecting camouflaged targets—but not as
much as you might expect in most games. The advantage is real
but situational:
With two eyes, you get binocular disparity—tiny differences between each eye’s image that encode depth.
There’s direct research on your exact question:
Even historically:
So yes—two eyes can give a real edge.
In a typical game:
So your brain falls back on:
→ the same cues you’d have with one eye
Result:
In most games, binocular advantage ≈ minimal
If each eye gets a slightly different image:
This is closest to real-world advantage.
Two eyes can:
This is a known advantage:
There’s something called binocular summation:
So:
subtle targets become slightly easier to notice
If the camouflage is purely:
…and the object is on the same depth plane:
→ binocular vision adds almost nothing
Depth cues can get messy:
In some cases:
the extra information just becomes noise
Your brain often:
So in quick reactions:
binocular advantage may not even kick in in time
There are techniques where:
Result:
This shows:
the brain treats binocular mismatch as a priority signal
Example: Pulfrich effect
Meaning:
binocular vision can sometimes mislead, not help
Your question was essentially:
“Would two eyes make hidden things easier to see?”
In both real life and games:
And motion detection:
So in practice:
motion often outweighs any binocular advantage
Binocular vision gives you:
It can help break camouflage
But in most games (flat displays), that advantage is mostly absent
So your instinct is right to question it:
the “two eyes advantage” is real in biology, but mostly not implemented in typical game visuals.
M: Well, that's why I'm asking, as I'm reading through this. The reason I'm asking is because in some games, particularly, or at least what jumps to mind is the Metal Gear series, but I think there were others like Hitman and other ones. There are situations where either something I'm looking for or one of the problems that I need to identify in order to avoid game death or whatever seems to be hidden either intentionally or unintentionally, not because I wouldn't have been able to identify it, but just because of color palette choices or things like that. Which usually leads me to wondering as I wait for the game to reload if it was a honest failing on my part or if it was just that because I was having to use the flat screen instead of binocular vision, if I kind of got shafted by the decisions. Or another potential candidate would be the Time Crisis series, where you have to identify the target before you can aim at it, but occasionally it would be a situation where the target just blends in because of the flat screen effect in a way that makes me wonder whether it would have been easier if I had a binocular perception of the situation.
G: TL;DR:
Most of the time, you weren’t “shafted by losing binocular
vision.”
You were getting hit by 2D presentation limits +
palette/contrast decisions + timing pressure.
Binocular vision would only have helped in a narrow
subset of those situations—mainly where depth
separation exists but isn’t visually communicated well on the
screen.
Your failures are usually not “one eye vs two eyes” problems.
They’re “flat signal vs 3D expectation” problems.
Games often contain depth information, but don’t present it in a way your brain can use efficiently.
Example:
In real life:
On a flat screen:
→ This is the scenario where you were probably right.
Example:
Two eyes:
Flat screen:
→ Small but real advantage lost
Binocular summation gives:
But this effect is small, not game-changing.
This is the big one in Metal Gear / Hitman:
Stereo vision does nothing here if:
→ This is a design/visibility issue, not a vision limitation
These rely on:
Those are:
→ Two eyes wouldn’t meaningfully improve reaction time
Games often:
This removes:
Stereo can’t fix:
missing contrast information
In reality, you have:
On a screen, most of that becomes:
just color + brightness
So when a game says:
“this is hidden but visible”
…it’s often relying on cues that:
Your brain expects:
When that doesn’t happen:
“if I had two eyes on this, I’d see it”
Sometimes true—but often:
the required cue was never actually there
Those games often use:
But they’re still displayed in:
So they unintentionally create:
“too realistic for the medium” problems
Meaning:
In many of these situations:
Motion provides:
And motion detection is:
far stronger than stereo depth for finding targets
games simulate camouflage better than they simulate the tools used to defeat it
So your instinct wasn’t wrong—but it was slightly misattributed:
you weren’t lacking “two eyes”
you were lacking the full stack of real-world visual cues that games compress away
M: Two other offshoot questions, maybe an offshoot and an expansion. We'll see how it goes. But yeah, the two are, one, have there been VR experiments regarding how people are able to identify things in situations where lighting is non-natural? Like with the time crisis thing, one of the ways they were able to get that working, even like 25, 30 years ago, was by taking shading shortcuts, which is how some things blended into the background. And for my hypothetical before about being able to see in a binocular way, I realized that the help would rely at least partly on whether the depth perception would be combined with some form of lighting improvement or not, which led to this question. Like, does there's, is there any indication that a lack of natural lighting has any effect on humans, either in terms of object identification or just in general? Because I feel like at the very least, trying to function in a world where instead of having realistically simulated lighting, you just had the kind of fong shading that you get in 3D building programs or things like that would be odd at best. And then I was, you know, just processing what you had and thinking about how probably the least help would come in those Metal Gear situations where someone in camouflage was actually behind a bush or something. And that made me realize I really don't have too much information on how camouflage actually works in how it interacts with human vision. Like, you can, like I have the basic intellectual concept, but I don't know how it is that in some gaming situations, it's like the brain will almost filter out something which simultaneously makes perfect sense and absolutely no sense in terms of why it really stayed hidden. I'm not talking about the times when there are so many targets that the brain just can't track it. I mean, like the time when you're dealing with only two or three targets, but you don't actually have the ability to see one of the targets without concentrating in the way that others do, and it seems to have something to do with the coloration. And when you're doing that, I'd like a few examples of odd color combinations that nevertheless work, kind of like how a bright orange tiger is somehow able to be thought of as camouflaged in a jungle.
G: TL;DR:
You’re basically asking:
If we mess with lighting realism, does perception break?
Short answer: yes, in predictable ways.
→ object recognition drops measurably
This shows up in:
Key findings:
Classic simplified shading (like early 3D or some stylized games):
Your brain expects:
light from above, consistent direction, hard + soft shadow mix
When that’s violated:
shape cues collapse → objects flatten → blending increases
Binocular vision without good lighting = limited benefit
Because:
If lighting is wrong:
the object may still “exist in depth” but not “resolve as a thing”
You already have the intellectual idea. Here’s the missing piece:
Camouflage works by breaking perceptual grouping, not just hiding color.
Your brain doesn’t see “pixels.” It tries to answer:
Camouflage attacks those processes.
Weak alone, but useful in combination
Your brain:
This is why:
something can be visible but not recognized
Your brain depends heavily on:
continuous contours
Break the contour → object disappears conceptually
This is a known phenomenon:
pre-attentive vs attentive processing
Camouflage works by:
passing pre-attentive filters but failing to trigger recognition
So:
Because:
Your brain essentially says:
“this is noise, not an object”
Until you override it.
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Humans see:
But prey animals often see:
So to them:
More importantly:
This creates:
false segmentation → breaks the body outline
These feel counterintuitive but work because of perception rules:
Why it works:
Even if no object is that color:
it matches ambient light conditions
Camouflage is:
viewer-dependent
Bright colors:
Because:
pattern > color in object detection
→ triggers:
segmentation failure
→ triggers:
contrast + timing failure
Binocular vision helps when:
But camouflage + bad lighting:
So:
depth arrives too late to matter
Your eyes see the data fine.
The failure happens at:
“this cluster of signals = a thing”
Camouflage and bad lighting both attack:
So what you’re experiencing is:
not blindness, but classification failure
And the key insight tying everything together:
You’re not failing to see the target
You’re failing to have your brain recognize it as an object