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   March 14, 2016

Copyright    Contact page    Demonstration of subliminal sight

If  you  reached this page from a search engine enter the site here,

or see other cases on the Disappearance and College Suicides pages.

ADHD

Researchers of negative behaviors that happen in classrooms are unaware of a problem of the physiology of sight we all have

that engineers discovered to cause believed-harmless temporary episodes of psychotic-like confusion.

When engineers were told the temporary episodes were caused by the long term suppression of the vision startle reflex, they designed the office cubicle to block peripheral vision for concentrating workers to stop it by 1968.   ___    Still an ongoing problem today, open plan offices use Systems Furniture so that no one sits or moves in another worker's peripheral vision.

Too-close side-by-side seating in classrooms copies the physical situation engineers discovered. But unlike offices, students do not spend long hours concentrating while there is detectable movement nearby in peripheral vision.

From time to time during the classroom day students will engage this level of concentration for short periods.  Drawing, writing text, reading text, or performing math calculations all engage this level of mental investment.

That means Subliminal Distraction can only happen during those brief times, and only after the student learns to ignore threat-movement subliminally detected from other student's activities nearby.  College students converting class lectures to written notes is an example of longer exposure sessions possible in classrooms.

Subliminal Distraction is explained, and defined in first semester psychology lectures about how peripheral vision reflexes are created. 

The mental break it can cause is rarely mentioned.   My instructor only said, "Subliminal sight caused a problem in the early days of modern office design."

I recognized it as the design problem I had encountered in a newspaper story, then discussed in Electric Circuits I,  as a 22 year old engineering student in 1966. But it meant little to me until it happened to my wife in 2002.   Here

There was an incident in Ontario, Canada elementary schools where high power Wi-Fi was installed so students could use laptop computers anywhere in the school.  Students began to have racing hearts, headaches, dizziness, nausea, trouble sleeping, and psychosomatic medical complaints.

Pictures, and video used to illustrate the "Wi-Fi Illness" story showed the "special circumstances" for Subliminal Distraction.   Scroll down the Site Outline page.    Here

Parents, and activists insisted it was EMR from the Wi-Fi industrial transmitters. They made the argument that nothing else could cause the symptoms. When I emailed the parents who had Internet sites I could access, they did not want to hear there was something else that could cause the symptoms.  It was not acceptable that their students were having a mental problem.

Canadian school authorities would not reply to email, or postal mail. The single reply was a form communication weeks later apparently sent to everyone who contacted them  which indicated from the dismissive tone they had not read anything I sent them.    (I had not developed the experiment to prove psychiatric symptoms from Subliminal Distraction at that time.)   

At Leroy High School, in Leroy, New York, there was an outbreak of Tourette's like tics and seizures.     Everyone who heard the story had a solution from industrial contamination from a railroad spill years earlier, Pandas, a believed infection associated problem, to  Conversion Disorder.  ___  Key information ignored  was that the first girl to be effected was taking two art classes daily. When her symptoms began she stopped going to school, and her symptoms stopped. When she returned to classes the symptoms returned. ___ A TV interview in a home showed one girl sitting at the dining room table, without peripheral vision blocking protection,  using her computer with family near her. That's Subliminal Distraction in both cases.   __  Doctors with the two different diagnoses used different medications to treat what they thought the problem was.  Both treatments worked. The treatment for Pandas was an an antibiotic.   For Conversion Disorder psychotropic drugs were used.    Both doctors believed their diagnosis, and treatment was the correct solution.

That outcome is further proof it was Subliminal Distraction.  It spontaneously remits without treatment leaving no after effects with rest from exposure.  Any treatment modality which coincidentally stops exposure will appear to work.

This would be true for Subliminal Distraction caused behaviors such as ADD or ADHD.  Without screening for Subliminal Distraction in drug testing, it cannot be known if a remission is caused by the drug efficacy or it coincidentally happened because Subliminal Distraction decreased during the drug testing. 

No one has investigated Subliminal Distraction as the cause of ADD and ADHD.

Since the phenomenon happens in the mind below thought, reason, and consciousness, the simple test would be to enlist students who have disruptive behaviors diagnosed as ADHD, and provide them protected seating, peripheral vision blocking devices, or both.

Exposure from all sources should be eliminated.  That would include video game play, and computer use at home.   While texting on a phone is not a high exposure situation, all such exposure should stop to provide complete rest from all possible sources of Subliminal Distraction.

The cumulative effect of Subliminal Distraction exposure from different activities arises from the fact that the trigger signal which starts the attempt to execute the reflex, detected in peripheral vision, is movement, and position information only. There is no color or shape information in the vision input which triggers the vision startle reflex.    Without color, and shape all the input will be the same.   An image to identify the source of the detected movement is not created until you complete the reflex, turn and look at the source.    There is no difference in the stimulus from movement of a family member, and movement of images on a two dimensional source such as a big screen TV.   Likewise the activity to engage full mental investment does not matter. It is all the same at the level in the brain where the reflex trigger signal is evaluated, and the attempt to startle begins.  ____   It is not the nature of the exposure activity but the level of mental investment engaged.  Daydreaming can be enough mental investment to allow Subliminal Distraction exposure.

A careful successful trial of my demonstration of subliminal sight, and habituation in peripheral vision shows that no image is created when the trigger signal happens.  Here

The demo also verifies you can suppress the vision startle reflex, necessary for the experiment to cause anxiety, and depressive ideation from Subliminal Distraction. The experiment instructions are free by email only. While safe with precautions, it it too dangerous for open publication on this site.

There are some indications that low level exposure which would not cause the full mental break, or other psychiatric symptoms, can keep an episode ongoing once a behavior begins. 

Something as simple as safety glasses with wide particle blocking temple arms, blacked out to block peripheral vision would start the testing.

Sending seriously problematic students to a Montessori school without classrooms is another solution.

A more expensive solution is to redesign the classroom to a room with each student seated behind peripheral vision blocking partitions.

Depending on the level and length of previous exposure it could take a week or more full rest from Subliminal Distraction to show results.

Parents would have to monitor home activity.   If the parent is not home until after work the student could break the test procedure by playing video games, or using a computer on social media in an unprotected location with detectable movement in peripheral vision.

Subjects do not believe something they cannot consciously experience is causing psychiatric symptoms.

An indirect proof to bring the subject of Subliminal Distraction to public attention is to prove ICU Psychosis in Hospitals is Subliminal Distraction.

One in three patients who spend five days in a hospital ICU has a psychotic-like episode that remits once they leave the ICU.   When this problem appeared in offices engineers solved it in four years.   Doctors have been arguing about what to name the problem in the ICU for about fifty years.

Hospitals have absolute control over patient treatment. Only one patient in each room simplifies the measures needed to block peripheral vision.

The short term intense exposure in the ICU creates the light episode usually seen as the temporary episode in offices.  That's why it quickly remits once the patient leaves the ICU.     There have been anecdotal cases of a patient's ICU Psychosis stopping when their eyeglasses were returned to them while still in the ICU.   Wide temple arms close to the eye would be enough to block peripheral vision.

But chronic low level exposure you would expect to cause ADD and ADHD without the psychotic-like component will be more persistent. For that reason I advise trying to stop all exposure until there is a recovery from the problematic behaviors.