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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

Staring at the circles had a very odd mental effect for me. After playing a few rounds other websites I look at seems very square, straight, and ridged.

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This is the second time I've ever felt this effect. The first time was with the 2048 variant Hexagon 16384 [0]. I'm starting to suspect that it's something having to do with spending a long time staring at a set of regular circles.

I wish I knew a neuroscientist so I could ask them about this effect.

[0] http://rudradevbasak.github.io/16384_hex/ with HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7437009 and my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443465

Wow, thanks for pointing this out to me. I thought my phone had updated or something because everything looked so blocky... I had my friend check out my phone and he didn't see anything different. I thought I was going insane :(

Echoing this sentiment. Closing out of the game and returning to my browser had me wondering if Chrome had updated to a new theme with harder edges

Not just chrome, my whole Yosemite environment seems so sharp.

I immediately though "Man, has hacker news always been so angular? Wonder if styling changed... my task bar seems harder too... wat"

Really interesting effect

I imagine it's along the same lines as when everything looks blue after you take off pink ski goggles. I read a study where people wearing glasses that flipped everything upside down would eventually start to see normally, and then after taking the goggles off had upside down vision for a while.

This seems to suggest that your brain has an intrinsic expectation of what the world should look like, either built in by evolution or from year of experiencing the world a certain way. I wonder what sorts of things are filtered from our perception because they don't correspond with the brain's expectation of reality.

I could be wrong, I can't remember fully. But if I recall correctly they don't start to see normally, i.e. the right rotation, they simply adjusted well to the upside down view.

The game trains you to see circles as squares. You're looking at circles but they really act like squares so when you go back to reality it's like you forgot squares existed because the whole concept of square is made obsolete in the game's world.

I'm really surprised this works so well, it really shows how plastic and manipulable our brains are. This could become a reference example on perception or an analogy for higher level perception-shaping.

Wow, that was exactly what happened to me... Everything is so sharp and square here.

Didn't even realize that this might be the issue. I thought something got updated.

I also had this effect, my macbook keyboard don't look like it used to..

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