Spontaneously, the colors in the room around me became brighter. I knew where all the steps and doors were but still couldn’t orient myself.Īfter that, it got weird. It felt like wandering around my own house in total darkness. I spent the next ten minutes fooling around on my phone, feeling somewhat distressed. The source of the unease wasn’t easy to identify. The relief was the kind you feel when you put on sunglasses on a bright summer day. Two minutes after changing my phone screen black and white, two emotions hit me: relief and unease. The second time I tried was eight months later I switched it to black and white and felt relief. The first time didn’t stick, and it was back to color within a week. I’ve tried to turn my phone black and white twice in my life. My Experience With a Black and White iPhone Display Setting the phone to grayscale removes neurological rewards while preserving almost all of its utility-based value. It goes from un-put-down-able to, well, boring. Your phone no longer draws in your animal brain like bait. Making a phone display black and white short-circuits this tendency. Phone designers intentionally do this to draw us in. They fixate our brains, which are still triggered by bright colors. The many bright colors on a phone screen mean many items of interest, all the time. In nature, bright colors mean items of interest. Why? Because LCD color screens stimulate parts of our brain we inherited from ancestors long ago. Tell me: What could you do with an extra twenty hours a week?įortunately, there’s a surprisingly simple way to get some of that time back: Turn your phone display black and white. It’s been almost three years since those studies came out, so the numbers are likely even higher today. That’s equivalent to a part-time job where you spend your entire shift hunched over a phone. In 2016, Americans spent between two and a half and four hours on their phone every day, or over eighteen hours a week. That makes sense: manufacturers want you staring at their phones, and one of the ways they do that is by making the screen as beautiful as possible. Of all the hardware capabilities of a smartphone, the screen always gets a lot of attention. It helps many people check their phone less. Set your phone to grayscale to remove those positive reinforcements. We use all our tech and all our power to create better boxes.Ĭolorful icons give our brains shiny rewards every time we unlock. We could feed, clothe and connect the whole world in ways that are respectful of other humans, animals, and plants on this earth.īut we don’t. With all the amazing technology we have available, we could create tech that integrates us with the environment. Technology isn’t evil - quite the opposite. We have the technology to reach across the globe, and we use it to send little strings of text from our little boxes to other people’s little boxes. What she didn’t foresee were the little boxes we hold in our hands. Reynolds sings about the boxes we live in, the endless repetitive houses in the suburbs. Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes made of ticky-tacky Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes all the same There’s a pink one and a green one And a blue one and a yellow one And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky And they all look just the same Malvina Reynolds - Little Boxes
Black and white phone app icon series#
We can video chat with people in rural villages on the other side of the world.Īnd we use that technology to build ourselves a series of boxes. We have the power to put people on the moon and we insert tiny robots in our bodies to do surgery.
As a society, we are surrounded with groundbreaking technology.
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