[chriswait]

The article talks about this: "Now, I think the vast majority of drivers will understand what’s going on and treat them as normal blinking turn indicators, but these indicators hurt your brain, at least a little bit"

I think you are interpreting "confused" as "I can't tell which way the car is turning", while everyone else is talking about "This UX forces me to use my brain when I shouldn't have to".

[chrisseaton]

I guess I don't know what the author thinks they mean about 'hurt your brain'.

[chriswait]

Yeah, I don't think they're literally meaning "hurt" here.

Maybe a better analogy is where you're having a conversation with someone, and they throw in a double-negative. It's not like you're literally unable to work it out, but you need to engage with it consciously for a second. In a high-stakes conversation, that's just something that's good to avoid.

A memorable example of this for me (if a bit of a tangent) was when Felix Baumgartner was doing his mega parachute jump, and they kept screwing up the comms for which direction the wind was coming from / going in: https://youtu.be/rNhmYaWiPEk?t=4200 (by convention, people talk about wind in terms of the direction they come from).

I think the whole thing here is that driving involves a lot of modelling other drivers and their intentions, so our tolerance for bad UX that requires conscious thought should be really low.

[icedchai]

The phrase is very common in the US. You've never heard someone say "this code hurts my brain" ?

[fortyseven]

Sure, go ahead and play stupid.

[edoceo]

Cognitive Dissonance.