In Wetumpka, AL.

The Wayback Machine will show this site is an investigation of Subliminal Distraction begun in 2002.

If you wish to help in this project, send the Home page URL to your email list and encourage everyone to do the same.

Preventing Subliminal Distraction episodes, mistaken for mental illness, is simple and free.

Copyright 2003 Edit July 23,  2017

Subliminal Distraction is a normal part of everyone's physiology of sight and hearing. Acoustic subliminal distraction does not cause psychiatric sympoms.  It has been studied as a fatiguing factor in offices.

Unless you sat in the first semester psychology class where it is explained under the physiology of sight and hearing, subliminal sight and peripheral vision reflexes, it all sounds like impossible nonsense.

There is a large deal of variability in the quality of psychology courses taught across the country. The course I took was taught as part of the nursing school for Druid City Hospital by Shelton State Junior College in Tuscaloosa. Never the less, this information should be in any competent psychology course.

If you did not take introductory psychology, find someone who did to verify this for you.

When the lecture on peripheral vision reflexes began, my instructor said,

"Did you know you can see something but not have it register in your conscious mind?"

When humans enter a mental state of full concentration so that you are no longer consciously aware of events around you, we all still subliminally experience sound, and movement nearby in peripheral vision.

Everyone has seen the Jurassic Park movies where someone says, "Don't move, the T-Rex can't see you if you don't move." You have that type primitive vision in far peripheral vision.

What you can subliminally see, in far peripheral vision,  is not an object, but a flash of movement.  When the movement stops the flash stops. It also stops when you learn to consciously ignore it. Perform the demo of subliminal sight and habituation in peripheral vision to experience this.  Demonstration of the habituation of conscious sight in peripheral vision. .

If you do not have the background in first semester psychology, human physiology, to understand what this means find a friend who has taken this course to explain it to  you. Subliminal means that your conscious mind, your concept of reality, and stream of thought, consciousness, is unaware anything is happening. Subliminal Distraction exposure happens in the mind below thought, reason, and consciousness.   When the Subliminal Distraction paranoid psychotic-like episode shapes your thoughts it appears to be your normal thought processes without outside infuence.

Far peripheral vision has only movement and position information, but not color or shape. This information travels on the M-Channel for vision in the brain.

Neural impulses for color and shape travel on the P-Channel.

Sensor cells on the rods of your retina in peripheral vision do not respond to color and are sensitive to movement.

One of the bizarre features of this arrangement is that stationary objects in far peripheral vision are invisible.

That means when movement happens in far peripheral vision it happens in your mind and vision field against a blank background. Anything that is stationary in that area of your vision field does not register in your mind.  It is not possible for your mind to form an image from neural impulses which are missing color and shape.  ___   Thus there is no competition for attention from a busy background you have in normal conscious sight for the subliminally detected flash of movement.

When threat-movement is vigorous enough to be so detected, it will trigger a primitive brain function that makes you startle, turn and look to identify the source of movement. If the movement is safe, of no danger to you, it can be ignored.

Ignoring the movement happens without conscious effort and without knowledge of that effort.  It will stop or block, suppress, the startle.

But ignoring movement in peripheral vision assigns a zero level of attention to it. You don't stop seeing the movement. You can't "stop seeing" anything in your vision field.  (First semester psychology, the physiology of human sight.)

Learning to ignore movement in peripheral vision does not turn off the primitive function to detect threat-movement and you cannot prevent your brain's continuing reaction which is to begin an attempt to startle. That brain system cannot be turned off. It is hard wired in your physiology of sight.

Those two functions, together, the subliminal detection of  threat-movement, and your brain's subliminal FAILED attempt to startle are defined as a 'visual subliminal distraction.'   The engineering design problem takes the same name, Subliminal Distraction.

You may consider this a conflict in the physiology of sight.  __  Stated again, that conflict is: You can consciously ignore movement in peripheral vision by assigning a zero level of attention to it. But you cannot   'stop seeing'   anything in your vision field.

There are no off switches for the sensor cells on the rods and cones of your retina. If stimulus reaches the sensor cells from electromagnetic radiation, light,   then neural impulses from that encounter go to your brain over normal channels no matter what you are doing. You are subliminally experiencing the stimulus.

The stimulation of the amygdala is part of that attempt to startle.  That simulation continues even when the full startle is blocked.

This creates a subliminal appreciation of threat before the full mental break strikes.  In long term exposure that subliminal appreciation will begin to color thought and reason.

This is a normal feature of our physiology of sight.     Everyone has a normal harmless level of Subiminal Distraction exposure every day.   It only causes a problem when someone creates the "special circumstances" so there is a massive number of subliminal failed attempts to execute the vision startle reflex in a compact time frame.

Because the design mistake is a physical situation, it can be experimentally replicated to prove it causes anxiety, and depressive ideation.

 Only the Warning about attempting to guess the experiment conditions is on this site.    Why?    There is circumstantial, and direct evidence that this simple problem is the long sought cause of college suicides.   If you already have psychiatric symptoms from your unrealized Subliminal Distraction causing daily activities, exposure from the experiment could push you to a serious outcome rather than the light temporary harmless episode  the experiment would normally cause.     

Acoustic subliminal distraction functions the same way but has sensory adaptability.

The sensor cells in your ear can chemically deplete, sensory adaptability, so the neural impulses to your brain which create sound decrease in intensity as you process intense vibrations in loud noisy environments.

 When the loud noise stops the sensor cells in your ears replenish their chemicals and normal hearing returns.

There is no acoustic brain process to trigger a startle which will cause psychiatric symptoms. (Google acoustic startle and Moro response.)    

Micro movements of your eyes refresh sensor cells on rods and cones of your retina so that sight does not have sensory adaptability. The neural impulses from your eyes to your brain are always at full strength.

Although volunteers have searched the APA data base for me  three separate times, there were no papers found using  "subliminal distraction" as the search term.

No one contacted in (now) sixteen  years has been willing to explain why a massive number of subliminal failed attempts to execute the vision startle reflex causes a mental event.   I made a guess what it is but do not have the back ground in neurology to say that my guess is the correct solution.

Discovery of mental breaks.