[meindnoch]

>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.

Wut? It's precisely the opposite. Natural patterns have infinite complexity as you zoom in, and human-made patterns (most often) not.

[Diogenesian]

Yeah, "shockingly" the LLM summary has it wrong. The paper is really focusing on luminance contrast: the variation in contrast within a natural object tends to be narrower than the variation between objects, and the neural metabolism of our visual system tends to be optimized towards a natural range of contrasts. Modern high-contrast decor and lighting is way out of natural balance, and for some people it can be exhausting.

"Visual complexity" is just wrong: simple black / hot pink stripes are visually exhausting upon immediate perception, whereas the monochromatically brown detail of a tree trunk is only visually exhausting on close inspection.

God, what a useless website. I hate LLMs. The actual paper is here: https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5150/10/2/34

[VeninVidiaVicii]

I’m pretty sure they mean perceptible complexity at the level of the human eye. Of course, everything has quarks and leptons in infinitely complex patterning.

[meindnoch]

>I’m pretty sure they mean perceptible complexity at the level of the human eye

That's precisely what they're wrong about.

Take a look at tree branches. A field of grass. A stone cliff.

Now take a look at human-made decor: drywall, plastic, laminated boards.

Which one has more visual detail?

[kulahan]

Our brains evolved in the former environment, and is very good at filtering it out. I've got pretty extreme ADHD, and if I'm in a room and something on the wall is flittering about, I absolutely must look at it. If I'm in a field and a tree is full of leaves billowing in the wind, it's a nice background thing. I guess my monkey brain is too busy looking for tiger faces to be distracted by flickering leaves, flowing grass, and flying bugs for more than a half second.

I dunno if I agree with their arguments in the paper (there seem to be some pretty big questions unanswered yet, which the authors acknowledge), but there's definitely something to the idea that natural environments aren't as stressful for us, even if they're objectively "busier".

[hliyan]

Will repeat what I wrote elsewhere:

The default visual circuits in our brains may have evolved to optimally handle fractal patterns and textures. Straight lines, geometrical figures and featureless surfaces may require activation of less optimal circuits. Anecdotally, I find being in environments made of featureless geometrical figures uncomfortable to be in.

[SoftTalker]

Natural patterns are often fractal.