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Comment by pibefision | Hacker News Reader

I have trypophobia. Cannot believe this is a new design style.

Word from the people who saw it first-hand at Apple's WWDC is that it is not a problem when you're looking at the machine AFK, because your vision has a depth sense, but video and images look very weird.

When I first saw the ads I thought it was two flat pieces of metal with circles cut in each. It took a lot of photographs for me to understand the actual shape. So I can see a shift in perspective making a big difference in perception.

Same! I didn't realize it wasn't just circles cut on two sheets of metal until I saw this video on their design page: https://www.apple.com/105/media/us/mac-pro/2019/36178e80-30f...

I never had that problem until I read an article about that being a problem people had. And then I spent several years being very weirded out by evenly spaced holes in things. And then I got mostly over it. And now your comment has my skin tingling again at the thought....

Same here. The front of the Mac Pro and the back of the XDR display physically nauseates me.

I wonder if you can find an appropriately sized speaker cover to snap onto the front of it...

Circular patterns? Been a design style for the past 10+ years.

Tryophobia sounds like one of those "I have OCD" things because people are "so peculiar." I'm not discounting that folks may have a legitimate mental illness resulting from it, but that has to be an overwhelming minority of users.

I recommend googling things you don't understand instead of trying to shut down opinions.

I too think it's a reddit-ism. Same with thalassohobia. Cool sub though with awesome pics.

I wouldn't exactly call it a "mental illness", but upon seeing such images I can feel my brain heating up in the same way as when I'm thinking of a difficult problem. My theory is that it's essentially overloading the edge detection (neural) circuitry, because the one thing that all such images have in common is they have plenty of circular edges, which are effectively edges in many directions simultaneously.

Interesting theory. A similar mental problem is a plot element in the sci-fi novela "Blindsight" by Peter Watts: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

I have fairly pronounced trypophobia too. I was under the impression that the leading theory is an evolutionary one; that certain burrowing insects will lay eggs in the skin causing a pattern of holes and that our brains have been trained to read this and other parasites. Yours is certainly interesting, though anecdotally I can look at a very regular pattern of holes and not feel the effect. It only really "bugs" me with more irregular, organic patterns.

I get a mild disgust/nausea/skin-crawl reaction. I lean towards evolutionary theory: your lizard brain is telling you "don't touch/eat this parasite-infested item". The worst trigger for me was an image was a (photoshopped) picture of skin with holes, and some had maggots in them.

Think of it like the (much more common) disgust reaction to the smell of rotten organic matter. Most people have not actually had the experience of eating something putrid and getting sick from it, but something deep within your sensory system just knows, and tells you it's not ok. It's not debilitating. You can still pick up your dog's poop, or even hold a job in the sanitation industry. It's just really unpleasant.

FWIW I had my first really strong trypophobia reaction to the shattered glass on my family minivan's windshield after hitting a deer, age 7 or so, long before Reddit. (No injuries, other than the deer, just inconvenience). I felt weird. I kept thinking about it afterward. I wanted to bash it in. Discovered more than 10 years later that there's a name for it and and it's a thing other people experience.

Have you made efforts to overcome the phobia?

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