Modern decor may be straining people’s brains

现代装饰可能正在让人们的大脑不堪重负

A bright, colorful modern office design. (© Dariusz Jarzabek - stock.adobe.com) Striped Floors and Flickering LEDs Can Overload the Human Mind, Leaving Some With Headaches or Nausea 明亮、多彩的现代办公室设计。（© Dariusz Jarzabek - stock.adobe.com）条纹地板和闪烁的 LED 灯可能会让人的大脑超负荷，导致一些人出现头痛或恶心。

In a nutshell: Study authors propose that the brain may use more energy than normal to process certain artificial visual patterns, and hypothesize that this overload is what causes physical discomfort in many people, though this mechanism has not yet been fully tested. 简而言之：研究作者提出，大脑在处理某些人工视觉模式时可能会消耗比平时更多的能量，并推测这种超负荷是导致许多人身体不适的原因，尽管这一机制尚未经过全面测试。

People with autism, ADHD, migraines, dyslexia, and other conditions are disproportionately affected, possibly because their brains may have less ability to suppress overactive visual signals, though the exact mechanism remains unsettled. 自闭症、多动症 (ADHD)、偏头痛、阅读障碍和其他疾病患者受到的影响尤为严重，这可能是因为他们的大脑抑制过度活跃视觉信号的能力较弱，尽管确切机制尚无定论。

Striped patterns, flickering lights, bright glare, and crowded visual environments such as supermarkets are among the specific stimuli documented as most discomfort-inducing, with a consistent pattern found across at least 11 clinical diagnoses and areas of neurodiversity. 条纹图案、闪烁的灯光、强烈的眩光以及超市等拥挤的视觉环境，被记录为最容易引起不适的特定刺激因素。在至少 11 种临床诊断和神经多样性领域中，都发现了这种一致的模式。

Striped office floors. Flickering lights. Walls covered in repetitive geometric patterns. For many people (including those who are neurodivergent or who live with migraines, epilepsy, or other neurological conditions), these everyday features of modern life are more than an eyesore. They may be causing real physical distress, and a new scientific review sets out a detailed hypothesis to explain why. 条纹办公地板。闪烁的灯光。覆盖着重复几何图案的墙壁。对于许多人（包括神经多样性群体，或患有偏头痛、癫痫或其他神经系统疾病的人）来说，这些现代生活的日常特征不仅仅是碍眼。它们可能正在造成真正的身体痛苦，而一项新的科学综述提出了一项详细的假设来解释原因。

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. 来自美国、英国、欧洲、亚洲和加拿大各机构的一个大型研究团队发表了一份详细的综述，指出视觉不适——即一些人在面对特定视觉刺激时所经历的头痛、眼疲劳、恶心和感知扭曲——在大脑中有着可测量的生理基础。

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. 这篇发表在《视觉》(Vision) 期刊上的论文，汇集了神经科学、建筑学、照明设计和心理学领域数十年的研究成果，旨在建立一个统一的理论，解释为什么有些东西让人难以直视，以及我们能为此做些什么。

At its core, the argument is this: 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. 其核心论点是：人类大脑在进化过程中是为了高效处理自然世界而设计的。研究人员认为，当大脑被迫处理现代城市环境中占主导地位的、高度重复、人工锐化且经常闪烁的模式时——比如荧光灯照明的办公室、汽车前灯、条纹吸音板或印刷页面上密集的文字——可能会驱动超出正常水平的神经活动，从而可能给视觉皮层带来过度的负担。

That metabolic overload, they hypothesize, may be what triggers discomfort, and in people with pattern-sensitive epilepsy, it can provoke seizures. 他们推测，这种代谢超负荷可能是引发不适的原因，而在患有模式敏感性癫痫的人群中，它甚至可能诱发癫痫发作。

Too much bright visual stimuli at the office could be leaving some workers with headaches. (© NAMPIX – stock.adobe.com) 办公室里过多的明亮视觉刺激可能会让一些员工感到头痛。（© NAMPIX – stock.adobe.com）

Why the Brain Prefers Nature Over Modern Design

为什么大脑更喜欢自然而非现代设计

To understand why modern environments can be so hard on the brain, it helps to know how the visual system is built. Eyes and brain alike evolved over millennia to process natural scenes, forests, rivers, coastlines, open skies. These environments share a specific mathematical pattern: their visual complexity decreases predictably as you zoom in on finer and finer details. Natural scenes follow this rule almost universally. 要理解为什么现代环境对大脑如此“不友好”，了解视觉系统的构造很有帮助。眼睛和大脑在数千年的进化中，都是为了处理自然场景而设计的，如森林、河流、海岸线和广阔的天空。这些环境共享一种特定的数学模式：当你观察越来越细微的细节时，它们的视觉复杂度会以可预测的方式降低。自然场景几乎普遍遵循这一规则。

Modern human-made environments frequently do not. Striped wallpaper, gridded building facades, acoustic ceiling tiles, even the lines of printed text create patterns that deviate sharply from what the brain expects. And when the brain encounters something it can’t process efficiently, it doesn’t simply adapt. Brain imaging studies cited in the review show it generates stronger neural responses in visual areas, consumes more oxygen, and in some people produces pain, distortion, or worse. 现代人造环境往往并非如此。条纹壁纸、网格状的建筑立面、吸音天花板瓷砖，甚至印刷文本的线条，所创造的模式都与大脑的预期大相径庭。当大脑遇到无法高效处理的事物时，它并不会简单地适应。综述中引用的脑成像研究显示，大脑会在视觉区域产生更强的神经反应，消耗更多的氧气，而在某些人身上，这会导致疼痛、感知扭曲甚至更严重的问题。

“We hypothesize that the discomfort is a homeostatic response to the excessive oxygen demands of the visual cortex due to inefficient encoding of the visual stimuli,” the authors write in the paper. Essentially, the brain is sounding an alarm because it’s being overworked. “我们推测，这种不适感是一种稳态反应，源于视觉皮层因视觉刺激编码效率低下而产生的过度氧需求，”作者在论文中写道。本质上，大脑是因为过度劳累而发出了警报。

Brain imaging research cited in the review shows that uncomfortable images, particularly striped, high-contrast patterns, produce much larger responses in visual areas of the brain than natural images do. Tinted glasses chosen specifically for a patient with migraines were shown in one study to normalize that overactive brain response. Patients who viewed comfortable building images in another study showed smaller brain responses and also rated those images as easier to look at. 综述中引用的脑成像研究表明，令人不适的图像（尤其是条纹状、高对比度的图案）在大脑视觉区域产生的反应远大于自然图像。一项研究显示，为偏头痛患者专门挑选的有色眼镜可以使这种过度活跃的大脑反应恢复正常。在另一项研究中，观看舒适建筑图像的患者表现出较小的大脑反应，并将这些图像评价为更容易观看。

Who Gets Hit Hardest by Visual Discomfort

谁受视觉不适的影响最大

Most people experience some degree of visual discomfort at some point. But the burden is not shared equally. People who are neurodivergent, a broad term covering autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and related conditions, are disproportionately affected. So are people with migraines, epilepsy, anxiety, depression, and a range of other neurological conditions. 大多数人在某个时刻都会经历一定程度的视觉不适。但这种负担并非人人平等。神经多样性群体（涵盖自闭症、多动症、阅读障碍及相关疾病的广义术语）受到的影响尤为严重。患有偏头痛、癫痫、焦虑症、抑郁症以及其他一系列神经系统疾病的人也是如此。

A possible biological explanation cuts across many of these conditions. In several of them, the brain may have a reduced ability to suppress its own overactivity, a kind of broken dimmer switch. One proposed contributor is GABA, a chemical messenger in the brain that normally acts as a brake on neural activity, though the authors note the evidence linking GABA levels to visual discomfort remains incomplete. Lower levels of that suppression, they suggest, could leave some people’s visual systems more vulnerable to overload when confronted with difficult stimuli. 一个可能的生物学解释适用于许多此类疾病。在其中几种疾病中，大脑抑制自身过度活动的能力可能降低，就像一个坏掉的调光开关。一个被提出的影响因素是 GABA（一种大脑中的化学信使，通常作为神经活动的“刹车”），尽管作者指出将 GABA 水平与视觉不适联系起来的证据尚不完整。他们认为，这种抑制作用的减弱，可能会使一些人的视觉系统在面对困难刺激时更容易超负荷。

A study using the Cardiff Hypersensitivity Scale, which categorized visual sensitivity into four subtypes (sensitivity to patterns, brightness, strobing or motion, and intense visual environments like supermarkets), found a consistent profile of discomfort across a wide range of diagnoses. Whether a person has autism, fibromyalgia, migraine, or a mental health condition, they tend to be bothered by the same kinds of visual input. The nature of the discomfort appears consistent across conditions, with differences mainly in how intense it gets. 一项使用“卡迪夫超敏反应量表”(Cardiff Hypersensitivity Scale) 的研究将视觉敏感度分为四种亚型（对图案、亮度、频闪或运动以及超市等强烈视觉环境的敏感度），发现各种诊断结果中存在一致的不适特征。无论一个人患有自闭症、纤维肌痛、偏头痛还是心理健康疾病，他们往往都会受到同类视觉输入的影响。不适的性质在不同疾病中似乎是一致的，区别主要在于其强度的不同。