I'd like to have an eye tracking study done on my viewing because the brain has a separate center that controls direction of gaze that is not part of the visual cortex that processes sight. With a normal human subject looking at a normal scene, an eye-tracking study will reveal in a few seconds the outlines of everything in the scene, trees, doors, windows, people, etc. because the eye tracks the interesting parts and edges.

Also relevant is the fact that only a tiny section at the center of the field of vision is actually in any kind of focus - you cannot read anything resembling normal sized type with your peripheral vision.

There's also the phenomenon of 'blind sight' where with people who are cortically blind, i.e., their eyes and optic nerves work, but their visual cortex doesn't (e.g., due to head injury to that part of the brain) When shows a panel of vertical or horizontal stripes in a forced choice test (i.e., they can answer "vertical" or "horizontal" but not "I don't know"), they answer correctly at rates much higher than chance (iirc from courses a decades ago, ~70%). It was thought that they might be unconsciously extracting the H/V information from the area that still controlled the gaze direction.

I'm wondering how many of us have 'ad-blindness' that isn't just filtering our visual input, but is actually guiding our gaze away from intrusive content so we literally never see it because the focal area never rests on it.

Anyone more up to date on neuroscience have any info?

Yes, filtering inputs is important and happens at every level of the sensory, nervous, and brain systems. I'm describing two substantially different levels of filtering and the dancing gorilla test isn't the one I'm focused on here, as it's the high-level attention filtering, as the gorilla is surely not filtered out by the subconscious eye motions (i.e., never seen), but filtered out by the higher-level attention mechanisms. I expect that much ad-blindness is indeed these high-level mechanisms.

What I'm wondering is if after decades of avoidance training, the separate gaze-orientation center (I forget it's proper name right now) which is subconscious and separate from the visual cortex, is trained enough to minimize the eye's gaze in the annoying areas such that the focus point never lands on them and they never get the opportunity to be read (and ignored by the higher level mechanisms). Eye tracking studies using actual eye tracks and not merely heatmaps would tell us the difference - if the tracks still follow the edges, bright spots, etc. into the adverts, then all the 'blindness' is cortical, but if the eye tracks avoid the ad zones, it's been trained down to a lower level.

Which is 100% an intentional dark pattern designed to maximize profits for the ad economy by tricking you into looking at something you don't want to look at. If users liked ads and found them useful, their brains wouldn't automatically learn to tune them out. On the contrary, if ads were so valuable to users, it would be a plus to make it easier to see them!

I mean, search engines throw an absolutely enormous amount of computational power at "organically" discovering, classifying, indexing, and searching the entire internet for the most relevant and useful results, and then the dollar machine instantly demotes them below paid placement. The cognitive dissonance is astounding.

I wouldn’t be so sure it’s at no cost, it seems possible that parsing/blocking a lot of that stuff causes some kind of mental/sensory strain or fatigue.

(and the fact that I remember it was chrome... ugh)

Am I wrong on this? Honestly not so sure.

I recently emailed a museum to ask about tours since they didn't have any information on their website. They replied with links to all the information on their website, that was in literal plain sight, but that I totally and completely missed because my brain just straight adblocked them. I almost had to force myself to "see" them. They just so closely matched that ad spam you see at the bottom of news sites and blogs that I'd just keep skimming past them.

Even non-advertising elements such as social-media icons, related articles lists, sidebars, and the like. The more the display is limited to simply the text I intend to read, the less stress and distraction I feel.

Virtually all studies of multitasking show that multitaskers both overestimate their abilities and their performance is negatively affected by the attempt.

Ignoring intrusions is a task.

I don't know how many things go unpurchased because of this.

Most of the middle ages probably wasn't that bad, but the civilization-destroying plague destroyed civilization, and Renaissance-era propagandists exploited the living memory of the plague to make themselves look better.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6065434

And traded notes with other sellers.

Usually accompanied by large in-corridor vendor displays which further obstructed already-crowded walkways.

I stopped going to malls.

High-street shopping districts still don't affect me to the same viscerally-negative degree. Even those which seem to be fairly consciously emulating and attempting to create a mall-like atmosphere. There's something about the open-air nature, and the fact that sounds attenuate rather than echoing off hard surfaces from all sides.

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As the struggle for survival had escalated over the past few millennia, the human brain had developed a miraculous defense mechanism: the psychic immune system. Simply said, the psychic immune system regulated the production of thoughts and emotions to a sustainable level. But with the new law came a new synthetic freedom to attack the underlying problem of an economy based on coercive consumption. Marketers and advertisers, wielding their mental weaponry, had been on the offensive, attacking minds of the world's citizens unabated. Psychic immune systems, no matter how strong, were helpless against the onslaught. Now that the psychic immune system had been weakened, everyone was a potential target for propaganda and mind control. In the following chaos, advertising mutated into a new form. The ban on psychic violence was not comprehensive, and included exemptions for images used in the furtherance of scientific, educational and artistic works. To survive, the advertisers had to learn to speak the language of art. They were the only ones left with the knowledge to speak it.

I'm impressed by the AI. It's actually what would happen if this law was introduced. There would be exceptions, and the advertisers would find ways to exploit them.

"So that's what things would be like if I'd invented the fing-longer"

I hope we don't have to wait that long :/

Ironically, worse than the deluge of advertising described in this comment is the attempted redefinition of language for political agendas as exemplified in this comment.

Both are a form of psychic warfare - except that while I have seen non-intrusive and useful forms of advertising (i.e. product discovery, not trying to brainwash me into believing that Coca-Cola isn't unhealthy), I have never seen a non-malicious instance of this kind of hostile language redefinition.

The poster was clearly writing a jocular, one-sentence sci-fi story to express how they felt violated by the constant vieing for their attention. That's why it's _set in the future_ and regarding a _fictional constitutional amendment_. Making up words is a genre trope of sci-fi.

The second is that languages just change and people make up words. This isn't unique to the political arena and isn't necessarily malicious. Every term you have ever used exists because someone needed it, didn't have it, and so they made it up. You'll need to actually argue that introducing a term is harmful or deceptive in the particular instance that it happens.

This is pearl-clutching to portray people you disagree with as being shrill and ridiculous and not worth listening to. It's a bad faith tactic which you should desist from.

ETA: Because I seem to be earlier in the sort order, I want to point out that there is a much more important third reason is a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016181

It's like how the people who talked about safe spaces and triggering being dumb were triggered by every single commercial, tv show, movie, news report, and passing conversation and begging for the stuff that triggered them to be removed.

"Go woke, go broke" is something said by people who are threatening to boycott businesses because of their triggering content.

par for the course, and embedded in all political discourse.

Recently we started calling anyone proposing higher taxes a socialist, which indicates total illiteracy, as it has no bearing on centrally planned economy

Laws that stop business defrauding customers are called 'consumer protection' and 'red tape', but when we protect business from individuals it's called being tought on crime.

When you make an extra copy of a song, you commit intellectual property theft, and the state can prosecute you for free and put you in jail, and you are a criminal.

When a company does not provide warranty you paid for, its called a business dispute and you have to hire your own lawyer.

Don't forget "piracy"--associating copying information with looting a ship and killing everyone on board. I'd love to see an end to this ridiculous modern usage of this word.

Feel free to wax florid and metaphorical.

This too is ironically it's own redefinition because originally (and still to many socialists today) socialism means workers' ownership of the means of the production, which undemocratic centrally planning states never were and never could be.

Anarcho-socialism rejects statism (totally agreeable) but doesn't offer a credible alternative. That's why common people don't even think about anarchy when you talk about socialism.

In a centrally planned socialist economy, the people in power can steal resources from the workers (like all the governments of the world do nowadays) and exercise power.

In anarcho socialism the power would be decentralised and distributed among democratic groups of workers. Why would the workers even bother to take all these decisions? They're not gaining power (or very little, due to the rightful decentralised nature of power in anarchy) nor currency.

The assumption is that workers are perfect human beings and don't need incentives do to the right thing, which is a pipe dream.

Taxes have nothing to do with socialism and have existed in Feudalism, in ancient Egypt and in every 'capitalist' state. Just because you collected money, does not mean you need to centrally plan how to spend it - carbon dividend would tax things that produce CO2, and distribute it equally to all citizen. Someone who produces no CO2 would get paid, and someone who produces the average amount would see no change.

I have no problem with central planning being associated, it was a key feature of socialist states. But Central planning means government sets prices on Salami, like USSR did, and I never came across anyone in the West proposing that.

At most someone advocates for some infrastructure, and they get called a socialist. But then, why does no capitalism society privatise the police, the army, the navy, the judges that sit in court, the federal reserve, the public library and the patent office?

If the accuser does advocates for privatising them, the rest of society will call him a nutcase and move on with their lives.

So he must instead make up excuses, of various levels of absurdity, for why free market can't be trusted with managing elementary building blocks of society here, but it's socialist to suggest government should step in over there.

The only solution is to Stop accusing everyone of being a socialist in disguise and learn from history and other countries: we have tried societies without government-managed police and courtsm, the results were terrible. We have tried private prisons, and government-managed consumer goods, also terrible.

But ya, "psychic violence" hits the nail on the head nicely.