In Montgomery Alabama
EST Werner Erhard
Copyright
2003
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Trainers and lecturers of est believed that the long confrontational sessions caused a re-evaluation of life situations.
But the fact that a few psychotic episodes happened demonstrates that something else was at work.
Click this line to skip the standard site introduction and page links,
or scroll down one screen.
This site is about a conflict of human physiology that shaped history but was undetected until the 1960's.
In the entire history of man on the planet Earth this phenomenon was discovered only once.
It caused mental breaks for office workers.
You will find this material hard to believe.
This phenomenon is explained in first semester psychology lectures where students don't believe it either.
For that reason I wrote a demonstration that will allow you to experience the phenomenon.
The Everquest Connection page has the explanation and assumes you have not taken basic psychology.
The solution for this problem was the office Cubicle.
This site argues that the this phenomenon causes College Suicides and Missing Students.
The phenomenon causes mental events around the world, Chaco Canyon.
If you use computers in unprotected workspace such as homes, dorms, student apartments, and small business offices read ...Prevention... at the bottom of most pages.
Long term exposure can cause severely altered mental states. Qi Gong Kundalini Yoga
If you are visiting the site as part of a school project send the person responsible for controlling violence at your school to this site.
The message of 'est' is not of concern here.
Only the presentation style is, large group training seminars.
The site is edited frequently so that Google Cache searches do not work well.
Use Control-F or "Find on this page."
Background and History
March 6 2007: I have located hidden camera video of a Landmark Education training seminar. It is in French with English subtitles. Links, Video.
There are several excellent articles and websites devoted to this training system. None of it is of interest to the subject of VisionAndPsychosis.Net but if this is your first contact with est I have provided links below. The copyright page explains that you may copy and print out any material on this site as long as you also print out the site URL as authorship and copyright owner on any such material.
Rick Ross has a large site on est. http://www.rickross.com/groups/est.html
Apologetics page on est. http://www.apologeticsindex.org/l30.html
Large Group Awareness Training definition. http://www.apologeticsindex.org/l29.html
Adobe file stating Landmark Education's position. http://www.landmarkeducation.com/uploaded_files/203/commun.pdf
The '60 Minuets' segment is reviewed. http://www.esatclear.ie/~dialogueireland/landmark/lifeafterest.htm
Perform a YouTube search for Landmark Education. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy8ysxIOyAA
The problem is best described in this quote from the 'Landmark Education' site.
"6. From time to time, during or shortly after participating in the Program, a very small number of people who have no personal or family history of mental illness or drug abuse have reported experiencing brief, temporary episodes of emotional upset ranging from heightened activity, irregular or diminished sleep, to mild psychotic-like behavior. An even smaller number of people have reported more serious symptoms ranging from mild psychotic behavior to psychosis occasionally requiring medical care and hospitalization. In less than 1/1000 of 1% of participants, there have been reports of unexplained suicide or other destructive behavior. While we know of no independent studies to suggest that people who are physically, emotionally and mentally healthy are at risk in the Program, certain persons have claimed that the Program has caused or triggered in them a psychosis or psychotic event".
Scroll down the Landmark page until your reach the quoted number "6" paragraph above. http://www.landmarkeducation.com/display_content.jsp?top=24&mid=343610
The trainers and lecturers are unaware of what they do to cause the mental events.
While it is unlikely that the long two or three day sessions alone caused the psychotic mental breaks exposure from Subliminal Distraction happens every day in unprotected workspace. Those who had the mental events connected to est had most likely already accumulated a level of exposure that was significant but too low to cause the expected mental break. Intense exposure to Subliminal Distraction, during the lectures, pushed those few people over the edge.
The same mental breaks happen other places.
ICU Psychosis, mental breaks in hospital intensive care units, happen within five days. Again pervious exposure may contribute to cause those mental breaks. (Perform a Google Search for "ICU Psychosis.")
ICU Psychosis is a VPN site page.
When users of Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga have too may group sessions in a compact time frame they have a similar mental break. Qi Gong psychotic reaction is included in the DSM as a Culture Bound Syndrome but not the "Awakening of Kundalini" even though they are the same phenomenon caused by the same exposure.
See Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga VPN site pages.
Mental breaks have happened on scientific expeditions for over a hundred years. Severe conditions in Artic and Antarctic areas force the use of too-small single-room living and working arrangements. Now the same mental problems happen in space missions that create those conditions.
See the Astronauts & Insanity VPN site page.
If you are a student with your study area or computer workstation in unprotected workspace you can be a victim of these mental breaks. Only the fully blind are immune.
College Suicides and Missing Students are VPN site pages.
Why are these mental events the same?
Because we can examine each activity and find a source of Subliminal Distraction exposure. (See the site pages on each case linked above.) Like Culture Bound Syndromes, in each activity the participants believe there are different special reasons for the mental events. They name them in relation to their beliefs and what others tell them to expect from the activity. The best example of this is Chee in Qi Gong and Prana in Kundalini Yoga.
The est mental events establish that classroom type situations can produce Subliminal Distraction.
Note it is the fact that these seminars produce psychotic episodes as well as other psychiatric symptoms that brings them to my attention. If this happens in intense ten hour per day sessions you would expect to see some negative outcomes from similar lower level exposure. We see that effect in both Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga. Sudden intense exposure produces a psychotic episode but low-level long-term stimulation produces the thought processing problems and bizarre beliefs of these two exercises. Those altered mental states resemble schizophrenia.
What are the psychiatric symptoms of classroom exposure? ADD, ADHD, and Schizophrenia are the main outcomes but sudden violence, paranoia, depression and thoughts of suicide also appear for western style classroom users.
Does following this thought path lead you to the same conclusion?
The est mental break and violence..
Jason Weed took a Landmark Education seminar training course, had a mental break as a result of that course, and killed a postal worker named Robert Jenkins on December 21, 2001. Seventeen months later a commitment hearing was held to determine if Weed should be released under 18 U.S.C. 4243 (2000), the federal statute governing commitment of persons found not guilty by reason of insanity. Experts for both sides agreed and testified that he was psychotic at the time of the murder but his psychotic symptoms had disappeared. The court decided that Weed failed to prove he was no longer a threat to the community in that he might still have latent mental illness. He was committed to the custody of the Attorney General of the United States. That court decision was affirmed on appeal. (There had been two previous hearings at nine months and one year after the commitment.)
The appeal decision (see links section below) mentioned that video tape of the original interrogation showed psychotic behavior. Weed switched from laughter to anger and had many incomprehensible statements.
Dr. Curtis Grundy testified that Weed's mental problem should be diagnosed as "brief psychotic disorder." He said the mental break happed because of a defect but the nature of that defect was unknown. Dr. Grundy said that Weed displayed symptoms of psychosis at the time of the shooting, including visual and auditory hallucinations, paranoia, delusions, and severe agitation. No additional psychotic episodes had happened since the murder.
Dr. Harrison Pope, Harvard Med., testified for the government. He interviewed Weed by phone and reviewed the records to reach a diagnosis. He discounted the participation in an est seminar and blamed a "complex partial seizure" deep in the brain. He could not cite any evidence of that having happened.
A report from the Bureau of Prisons, called a "Certificate of Mental Disease or Defect and Dangerousness," was introduced. It stated that mental health workers treating Weed believed that, "Weed is currently suffering from a mental disease or defect that would cause him to present a substantial risk of danger to others if released." A forensic evaluation submitted by staff psychiatrist Bryon Herbel, M.D., and staff psychologist Robert E. Cochrane, Psy. D., diagnosed Weed as having "Brief Psychotic Disorder, In Remission." They noted that the symptoms shown a the time of the shooting had "remitted a few days after his arrest, following treatment with a single dose of Haldol and Ativan."
Note that both psychiatrists create a mental problem or seizure in Mr. Weed without any medical evidence that such a seizure happened or that a brain defect existed. The story including sudden onset and recovery matches the description of Subliminal Distraction. The est participation probably was the cause of the incident even though the psychiatrists discounted it. Today the mental breaks associated with est are acknowledged. They claim an incident rate at less than 1/1000 of 1% for serious events such as suicide.
There is a long history of this problem and it has been investigated before. The psychologists could only find that the mental breaks happened in seminars where aggressive lecturers were used. (See the links section below for published articles.)
A French TV program took a hidden camera into a seminar and filmed the process. All the participants were doing was sitting in the audience while watching a lecturer interrogate volunteers about their psychosocial problems.
When someone sits in the seminar and intently involves themselves in the action at the front of the room they eventually reach a state of light dissociation for activity around them. In that mental state they can subliminally detect the small movements of others nearby. That is Subliminal Distraction.
I suspect that those who have psychotic events were being exposed at work or home before they took the intense three day seminar. The additional intense exposure pushed them over the edge.
This incident is evidence that subliminal Distraction exposure happens in classroom situations to cause the suicides, and strange disappearances of college students.
Weed was a participant and only sat in the audience during the seminar.
He was held in an institution from 2001 to 2005 he recovered after a week and did not have another episode while under observation.
Why est Works
For willing and interested participants est works for the same reason Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga work. The method of presentation involves long periods of lectures and eyes-open concentration, participation, in large groups.
Persons who engage concentration in these group activities can subliminally detect movement of others near them.
This phenomenon was discovered about fifty years ago by engineers designing the first close-spaced office workstations. There it caused bizarre episodes in Knowledge workers. The Cubicle prevents this problem today. (Modern Cubicle) Perform the Psychology exercise on the Demonstration page to understand the phenomenon.
How does this happen?
When someone engages a state of concentration, in this case paying attention to the lecturer, they engage the conflict of physiology explored on this site. To be able to maintain concentration you must consciously ignore everything happening around you. This is automatic. We all do this every day when we read, write, or use a computer. You do not have voluntary control over the brain system that subliminally detects threat movement to trigger a vision reflex.
Exposure from Subliminal Distraction happens when that brain system continues to function normally and tries to warn you of detected movement. This only begins to cause problems when there is heavy intense exposure. Most exposure is harmless. Chronic long term exposure can be shown to cause other psychiatric symptoms.
We all do this every day. It is a part of our modern crowded world.
Humans evolved as hunter gathers and to survive we have a warning system that breaks our concentration when movement approaching from behind is detected. We call that warning system Peripheral Vision Reflexes. If you have been startled when someone stepped up beside you or caught something out of the corner of your eye that is the brain system that causes this problem.
To be effective the system is automatic and cannot be stopped. If hunter gathers could have stopped the brain system's function they would not be warned at critical times. They would have become a meal for something bigger and with sharper teeth.
One of the features of this system is that we can ignore the reflexes when we identify the source as harmless. This is safe for short periods. Remember, this was evolved for hunter gathers.
The problem arises when modern humans learn to ignore the reflexes. The conflict of physiology is that while you can ignore the reflexes you cannot "stop subliminally seeing" the movement that triggers them.
The subliminal operation of the threat detection system prevents you being aware the system is still attempting to break your concentration after you ignore reflex warnings.
When you sit for hours concentrating on anything, while there is repeating detectable movement around you, exposure continues until you or the source of detectable movement moves away.
Now, today, that fact works to cause mental breaks in modern offices when Cubicle Level Protection is not provided.
(It also happens around the world to cause bizarre exotic psychiatric problems called Culture Bound Syndromes.)
How Does That Connect to est?
When conducted as a large group meeting, est seminars created both the physical situation to engage the conflict of physiology and supplied contemporaneous thought to be shaped by Accidental Operant Conditioning. The final element in the template for exposure is that the close spacing of audience members meant that sources of detectable movement were near all participants.
Peripheral Vision Reflexes are created in the mind below thought , reason, and consciousness. They are created within the operation of your subconscious mind.
When the repeating stimulation of detecting movement and attempting a reflex is perceived by your brain/mind as reinforcement for contemporaneous activities operant conditioning happens. There is no reason to believe that the detection of threat movement and the internal brain activity to effect a reflex have any complex meaning. You supply that meaning through contemporaneous activity and thought.
In Qi Gong the contemporaneous thought is to balance Qi, 'Chee,' within the body to improve health. For Kundalini Yoga the thought is to engage the "Awakening of Kundalini". As acolytes in either system perform exercises with eyes-open concentration they engage the conflict of physiology. As they concentrate and move they can subliminally detect the same movement of others near them. In early stages they are subliminally conditioned and the contemporaneous thought is reinforced.
But when a threshold is reached the mind rebels with a dissociative/psychotic mental break.
Shaping thoughts through Subliminal Stimulation
What you are doing when the stimulation happens determines the stress you experience and modulates the strength of emotional content of a reflex.
Each person's experience is different. Even under identical situations, when standing in the same group, individuals have unique experiences.
On the Everquest Connection page an illustration involving knowledge of a risk situation is used. The belief that risk is present modulates the reaction to a peripheral vision reflex. In that example the reaction to threat movement is increased because the victim believes that a snake has been seen nearby. Everquest Connection
Victims are never aware this is happening because the detection of threat movement is subliminal. That's how the peripheral vision reflex system works. It's a normal part of your physiology.
When that stimulation is intense and happens in a compact time frame the dissociative episode will be temporary and will resolve with no treatment.
What happens when the stimulation level is low?
Levels of persistent stimulation to the subconscious that are not high enough to create the mental break will cause other psychiatric symptoms.
This can be seen in Kundalini Yoga. Long term users of this exercise form demonstrate severe but narrowly focused psychotic mental states. Advanced Yogis believe they can levitate, communicate and control the actions of others through mental telepathy, dematerialize or become invisible through the will of their minds. It does not matter what your religious beliefs are that is psychotic. (To keep this presentation simple the support information and associated links are on the Kundalini Yoga page.)
Belief through faith that superhuman or supernatural events once happened is different from believing that you have those powers. The leader of the Falun Gong movement, exiled in New York recently stated that he is God. He has been performing Qi Gong since he was six years old.
On the Cause of Psychotic Mental Illness page these two exercises, the level of exposure each has, and the outcomes are used as a model for Schizophrenia.
Why does the mental break happen?
The bottom line is that so few people are aware of this phenomenon that there has been little research done.
When this came up in a psychology lecture the instructor said, "As the subject continues to ignore the attempted reflexes a conflict arises in the mind then builds to a mental break."
It can be argued that the subconscious finally rebels against the subliminal stimulation.
You might consider that your brain is an organic computer and grows connections to facilitate learning and memory. As your brain attempts to source and understand the subliminal stimulation there are finally enough attempted associations made that they interfere with normal thinking. These connections disappear when the stimulation stops. They fade away from disuse as part of your brain's normal clean up operation.
In the case of long term low level stimulation the new connections and associations are used over and over until they become fixed.
The problem was discovered by designers and researchers building the first close-spaced office workstations. The Cubicle solved the problem. The Modern Cubicle page has that history.
'est' Method of Presentation
If this is your first page visit on VisionAndPsychosis.Net you are unaware of the conflict of physiology and the effect it has on humans. These pages become unwieldy and long when the full explanation is repeated. It is not possible to put everything on each page. Start with the Demonstration Page and the Everquest Connection to understand the phenomenon being discussed here.
Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga serve as a model for this explanation. In each exercise a meditating state of concentration is used to effect changes in health and mental condition. They both do that because the conflict of physiology explained on this site is engaged.
It is acknowledged by gurus both in the United States and China that the psychotic episodes of Qi Gong happen when too many exercise sessions are done in a compact time frame.
When the confrontational lecture began and the audience started concentrating on the speaker, the subliminal detection of movement of others near by caused the creation of peripheral vision reflexes. But the victim sitting in the audience is aware that those people are there and no risk to them. They successfully ignore the reflexes.
In fact today's office worker is already trained by previous exposure to ignore reflexes that happen in groups. When we are previously trained by exposure we will not experience a first reflex.
Our vision reflexes do not stop because we ignore them. They continue to happen subliminally. This is silent and painless.
Each person has a different experience.
For some there was no effect. For others it was a life changing experience. And for a very few it caused a mental break.
The context and contemporaneous activity for those who were effected was the lecture and its associated belief system.
The trainers and the author of the system had no knowledge of the conflict of physiology. Neither did any of the observers. The message of the seminar was credited with the life changing experience.
Think about it. Do you really believe a few hours of confrontation had life changing effects.
Nonsense.
Could the exposure in the seminar alone have caused the psychotic episodes.
There are two ways to look at this.
In the original discovery of this problem designers and engineers thought that they had caused the episodes by putting workers too close together. But events had already happened to tell us that is not true.
Ron Tammen had disappeared from Miami of Ohio in 1953. Missing Students and Mysterious Disappearances
Mary Shotwell Little had disappeared from Lenox Square in Atlanta, 1965. The Little Disappearance Solution
Barney and Betty Hill had their alien encounter, 1961. The Hill Abduction
This tells us that there were people in the population being exposed at the same time EST seminars began. Cubicles were introduced in 1968 but there would have still been many offices with the old "bull pen" design. That design or no design, offices that are just thrown together, still exist today.
It is reasonable to believe that the few psychotic episodes happened to those people who were already lightly exposed. The EST experience pushed them past the threshold to cause the mental break.
Arguing against that is ICU Psychosis. One in three ICU patients spending more than five days in a hospital intensive care unit has psychotic episodes that complicate treatment. In that case stimulation would be every fifteen minutes around the clock. It would happen as long as the patient's eyes are open.
Given the time lapse it is not possible to absolutely resolve this.
Conclusion
While the lecturers and trainers of Werner Erhard's group training seminar's thought they were creating life changing results with confrontational lectures they had actually engaged a conflict of physiology that created the effect.
Today cults do the same thing. Intense group sessions engage this phenomenon. They change the beliefs of converts but the leaders are unaware of the real cause. They use the method because it works for them.
Published articles investigating psychosis caused by est do not include Subliminal Distraction in their evaluations.
What you should remember is that when these mental breaks appeared in business offices, designers, engineers, and psychologists solved the problem within about four years. Why can't psychiatrists do the same?
All the information needed is included in first semester college psychology psychophysics.
Here are two examples of studies of est.
Psychiatric disturbances associated with Erhard Seminars Training: II.
additional cases and theoretical considerations
MA Kirsch and LL Glass - Am J Psychiatry 1977; 134:1254-1258
Psychosocial theories for psychosis are given relative to individuals with defective ego boundaries.
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/134/11/1254
Observations on 67 patients who took Erhard Seminars Training
J Simon - Am J Psychiatry 1978; 135:686-691
This ..."author
believes that est often has a strong influence toward psychotherapeutic movement
in patients with good ego strength who are motivated to change. "
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/135/6/686
Psychotic Episodes links
These links are to websites that report on other sources. I cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information.
Rick Ross
The New York Times/April 24, 1977 By Jane Brody
"The discovery of seven persons who suffered serious psychiatric disturbances after participating in a self-help program called Erhard Seminars Training has prompted three psychiatrists to alert their profession to the possibility that the experience may have devastating effects on some people."
"The
psychiatrists, writing in the March Issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry,
emphasize that their case reports do not and cannot establish a cause-and-effect
relationship between the est
experience and a psychotic aftermath."
"Dr. Glass cited a study of encounter groups by Dr. Irving Yalom of Stanford University that showed that when the group leader was very commanding, confrontive and assaultive, group participants were more likely to suffer psychiatric disturbances than with more benign leaders."
"It made no difference what belief system the leader espoused, Dr. Glass said. The increased risk of psychiatric damage was related only to the style of leadership. Dr. Glass pointed out that this same authoritarian style is used by est leaders."
http://www.rickross.com/reference/est/estpt9.html
CultNews.Com
November 01, 2004 Landmark Education defendant in wrongful death lawsuit
LGATs also known as mass marathon
trainings that focus upon "human potential" have a troubled history and at times
have been the focus of personal injury lawsuits.
The links on this page go back to the Rick Ross site.
http://www.cultnews.com/archives/000781.html
Irish links site
http://www.esatclear.ie/~dialogueireland/landmark/lmlinks.htm
Wikipedia
There is a large Wikipedia article about est. Wikipedia articles are subject to the whim of any one who believes their opinion and information is superior to the established work. The only thing of interest in that Wikipedia article is the list of links. (See list of links below.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landmark_Education
Abstracts of Articles in Psychological Journals concerning est and The Forum
This is a page from a claimed neutral site about Landmark and other self help LGATS's. I could not find a contact address.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~anco/mental/randr/forsyk.htm
Video
This video is in French, with English subtitles. It is a TV station's hidden camera report of the inside of a Landmark Forum meeting and three day seminar.
http://www.culthelp.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1243&Itemid=12url
Additional page of links from Cult Help. http://www.culthelp.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=8&id=73&Itemid=12
These links are copied from the Wikipedia. They are not in the form used on this site. They cannot be maintained if the page is saved as a notepad file
As the current edit of this page proceeds I will remove dead links and convert the others to the standard form used here.
Some of the links are simply nonsense. They espouse psychobabble to explain the outcomes from est. Others have been previously used in the text above.
None of these sites will mention Subliminal Distraction. It is typical of government investigations to miss the main point of such inquiries. In this case it is because so few people are aware of the phenomenon.
Current edit stops here. I am still not happy with this page. But all the basic information is here. I will edit again in about a week. --
Links These links are for peripheral vision. Site links are on a separate page LINKS. That page is a "Favorites" list from Internet Explorer gathered during this project.
Nightwalking
"In The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi, the legendary swordsman of 16th century Japan, implies that he fought his greatest duels with his eyes crossed, and goes into considerable detail about developing and using this strange abitlity."
The method suggested to engage peripheral vision is to suspend an object from the bill of a baseball cap and practice staring at it rather than looking straight ahead as we all normally do.
The site has a page on the physiology of the eye and sight. It describes the normal field of vision.
http://www.navaching.com/hawkeen/nwalk.html#Anchor-The-59125
Institute for Innovative Blind Navigation
Don't let the site name put you off. This site has several pages which explain sight and how the brain deals with two vision systems.
http://www.wayfinding.net/index.htm
This page has the vision material. http://www.wayfinding.net/vsionsys.htm#four
The Red Myth
Color in Vision
http://stlplaces.com/night_vision.html
University of Utah
John Moran Eye Center -- Anatomy
http://webvision.med.utah.edu/
Kimball's Biology Pages
A simple explanation of the eye and sight.
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/V/Vision.html
Understanding Human Vision
This site deals with color.
http://www.pitir.com/pentile/Human_Vision.html
++ Use your [Home] key to return to the top of the page
and site navigation.
Prevention:
This section is now repeated at the bottom of most pages.
The rare occurrence of the
injury establishes that is difficult to create enough exposure to cause an
injury. But when it does happen the consequences are serious, possibly fatal.
Our personal experience
was intermittent human traffic during eight-hour workdays for thirty calendar
days.
If you have a tower CPU mount
it under your desk. That's the way they position it in a cubicle. The hard drive
busy light is about the height of your low peripheral vision if you put the
tower on the desk. Desktop reading of text or writing notes beside the keyboard
on the side of the monitor away from the tower makes the blinking hard drive
busy light appear to approach from behind when you turn to view the screen
again.
If you have a computer work
station/desk in which you turn ninety degrees to write or do other non computer
work, turn off the monitor when you turn aside. Remove screen savers in this
instance. The movement, animation for example, in your screensaver,
two-dimensional movement, might well be detected by your peripheral vision at
close range. Alternately cover the monitor screen.
All home, apartment, or
dorm computer workstations are in unprotected workspace.
To change that put the computer in a quiet room with no possible movement. If
that is not possible in a dorm or apartment position the computer so that your
peripheral vision can see only stationary walls as you use the computer in a
busy room. In Cubicles and 'Systems Furniture' these protective features are
achieved with peripheral vision blocking panels and corner seating positions. It
is called 'Cubicle Level Protection.'
If you use computer or CD-ROM
games for many hours day after day, the game playing position should follow the
same rules as the computer workstation. Battery operated games will not run long
enough on a single rechargeable battery to cause a risk for SPVP.
Although a laptop does not
have a visible blinking light in peripheral vision the same rules apply to your
work position. There should not be human traffic moving to you from
behind. There should be nothing behind you, which could enter your subliminal
peripheral vision field as you turn your head while working at the laptop and be
mistaken for threat movement.
Only movement coming from
behind you into your Subliminal Peripheral Vision can cause a peripheral vision
reflex. If the movement source approaches you from ahead then enters your
Subliminal Peripheral Vision from conscious sight there can be no peripheral
vision reflex.
Repeated for Emphasis:
A single session or rare
sessions will not cause this problem.
It is the same day after day
long hours of play or computer use with detectable movement in ‘Subliminal
Peripheral Vision,’ which would form the basis of a risk for SPVP injury.
The brain’s detection system only evaluates movement. There is little recognition of the nature of the object in peripheral vision. If you have several hours exposure from human traffic at the library, while reading at an open table or seated in a reading room chair, followed by long hours watching TV with a critically misplaced ceiling fan sweeping detectable shadows around the room, the combination of those two behaviors might cause the problem. The suggestion is that either activity alone would not consume enough exposure time even if the critical movement is present.
Copyright 2003
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Tell everyone you
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