Low dopamine computing

ULTIMATEDEAD@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.world – 0 points –

Why isn't this a thing? Just turning your monitor into grayscale mode, changes the entire experience. Have you ever played a video game in grayscale? After such a long time of being used to overstimulation, it feels like being on antipsychotics. The constant exposure to multimedia, videogames and the mere display of colors change the structure of our brain. This is why I believe, we need to invent low dopamine computing. Or in other words: Making Digital Detox permanent. Unfortunately it isn't that easy with the prevalent technology/OS. There isn't even a way to turn Linux Mint into greyscale mode. It tells alot about the ideology of the developers, that they refused to implement a simple option to turn on grayscale mode.

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As someone who didn’t have enough money to get a color monitor, I can tell you colors have almost nothing to do with dopamine generation. I played a lot of games in B&W and even used mspaint! Printed my beloved drawings in a dot matrix printer…

I think you mean to reduce distractions, not colors…

You are exactly proving my point! You are already practicing low dopamine computing!

I'm not sure I follow.

Are you claiming that the colors have bigger impact on dopamine production than the actual content?

No, I say that colors itself have a dopaminergic effect. There are thousand of articles about it, they write about it in the context of digital detox, to use gray scale mode on smartphones.

Could you provide a few links from some considerably respectable sources?

I tried, but I noticed that everything had become paywalled https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-case-for-grayscale-smartphones-screen-time-wasted-attention-scrolling-twitter-imessage-facebook-11642020254

Can't comment on the article's content if it's unavailable to read...

And judging from what little they decided to show, it's not exactly an article relevant to what you're saying here?

Here's the article in it's entirety. I didn't pay for an account, I just have this browser extension. Just seems like an advertisement for an iOS feature. Maybe it's useful, I don't know. Article doesn't have any substance though.

After nearly two years of lockdowns, remote working and learning, and general phone-scrolling boredom, many made a New Year’s resolution to spend less time on their smartphones in 2022. Studies show that Americans spend an average of about four hours on their phones each day. That’s 60 days a year—one-fourth of a life awake. That should provoke at least a bit of existential terror.

The iPhone’s Screen Time app helps users at least feel guilty about the wasted time, but there’s an easy trick to make a smartphone impeccably dull.

It’s called grayscale. With a few clicks in the “accessibility” tab on MacBooks and iPhones or a few taps in the settings of an Android or PC, a phone or computer can become as interesting as a black-and-white television.

It isn’t only push notifications and vibrations that cause our addiction to smartphones: Colors draw our attention, and certain ones can cause a dopamine release. The blue themes of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, not to mention the blue Apple uses for iMessages, entrance us.

Humans really like looking at blue, which makes sense, because the sky is light blue on clear days. Until I set all my digital devices to grayscale, I never realized that compared with the sky, iMessage’s blue looks sickeningly artificial. In grayscale, meanwhile, photos and videos have the same intrigue as C-Span at midnight.

A boring phone will likely cause greater use of a laptop to watch videos and look at social media in full color. I recommend grayscaling laptops and monitors too. Many people are colorblind, so most applications are designed to function without color. In theory, most people who work on a computer could perform their tasks in grayscale, as I do.

If you’re at all worried about your excessive smartphone use, make your digital life look like Dorothy’s Kansas, and let the real world be stunning as Oz.

Hmmmmm, there's definitely a merit in the idea, but I was more about dopamine excretion itself - from what I gather, the actual content should be playing the most important role in it, to the point that a, hmmmm, highly evocative scene would influence the brain no matter if seen in vivd colors or greyscale.

I need to do some research on the topic, to make up my mind. 😉

Just google "grayscale dopamin detox" and you will find articles. It is well known

E-ink is great for this kind of experience, but it has one big problem: abysmal refresh rate. Enough for books, irrelevant for price tags so this is where it succeeds. Movies or fast typing? No.

I heard a rumor that an eink display can be oveclocked to reach reasonable rates, but it would probably wear it down rather fast.

Well the abysmal refresh rate makes for even less dopamine!

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I'm not sure if this would accomplish what you're looking for, but it did give me an idea: wouldn't it be cool if they had a monitor that used the fake ink effect (that thing that non-backlit digital books sometimes use) to make displays look "more natural" (read: different in an interesting way)

I think that'd be cool at the very least, and, due to it not being backlit, it would possibly get rid of the blue light issue (i'm not an expert in this field so idk how much of an issue blue light actually is when it comes to dopamine overdrive)

I might try and make a monitor like this if I can gather the skills to do it, I am only getting more excited about this idea lol

Ty for the inspiration!

Hijacking my own comment in case anyone else is interested in this, apparently it's called e ink, and they're just now starting to come out with full color monitors using it. Very cool stuff!

They exist and are getting better but refresh times are still horrible for many use cases.

This is a great idea! I'm very interested in your project. Please share it once it is finished!

This is not a thing because that's not a concern for developers. They make the software in whatever way they think it looks best, maybe add some accessibility options, and leave the fine-tuning to the user's display options. It's strange to me that you interpret this as an ideology issue for developers.

Windows 11 has a color filter setting with hotkey.

Win + Ctrl + C but you'll need to enable it and select grayscale first.