Yup; same here. It started with the earliest intrusive ads. At this point you could display a big purple banner on my screen and then 60 seconds later break into my office, put $60million on the desk, a gun to my head, and ask the content of the banner to keep the money and not get shot, and you'd likely have to shoot me.

I'd like to have an eye tracking study done on my viewing because the brain has a separate center that controls direction of gaze that is not part of the visual cortex that processes sight. With a normal human subject looking at a normal scene, an eye-tracking study will reveal in a few seconds the outlines of everything in the scene, trees, doors, windows, people, etc. because the eye tracks the interesting parts and edges.

Also relevant is the fact that only a tiny section at the center of the field of vision is actually in any kind of focus - you cannot read anything resembling normal sized type with your peripheral vision.

There's also the phenomenon of 'blind sight' where with people who are cortically blind, i.e., their eyes and optic nerves work, but their visual cortex doesn't (e.g., due to head injury to that part of the brain) When shows a panel of vertical or horizontal stripes in a forced choice test (i.e., they can answer "vertical" or "horizontal" but not "I don't know"), they answer correctly at rates much higher than chance (iirc from courses a decades ago, ~70%). It was thought that they might be unconsciously extracting the H/V information from the area that still controlled the gaze direction.

I'm wondering how many of us have 'ad-blindness' that isn't just filtering our visual input, but is actually guiding our gaze away from intrusive content so we literally never see it because the focal area never rests on it.

Anyone more up to date on neuroscience have any info?

Yes. Eyetracking is rather useless as what we see depends on the task we have to perform. We filter out what we don't need and don't even register it consciously. As such, general eye tracking studies can only tell you so much... Case in point: dancing gorilla awareness test, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.

I should have been more clear.

Yes, filtering inputs is important and happens at every level of the sensory, nervous, and brain systems. I'm describing two substantially different levels of filtering and the dancing gorilla test isn't the one I'm focused on here, as it's the high-level attention filtering, as the gorilla is surely not filtered out by the subconscious eye motions (i.e., never seen), but filtered out by the higher-level attention mechanisms. I expect that much ad-blindness is indeed these high-level mechanisms.

What I'm wondering is if after decades of avoidance training, the separate gaze-orientation center (I forget it's proper name right now) which is subconscious and separate from the visual cortex, is trained enough to minimize the eye's gaze in the annoying areas such that the focus point never lands on them and they never get the opportunity to be read (and ignored by the higher level mechanisms). Eye tracking studies using actual eye tracks and not merely heatmaps would tell us the difference - if the tracks still follow the edges, bright spots, etc. into the adverts, then all the 'blindness' is cortical, but if the eye tracks avoid the ad zones, it's been trained down to a lower level.

Ah, I see. I think you are correct on that one. One could even say 'banner blindness' was was caused google to be successful in the beginning. Then, after a decade or so, people also became google ads blind. As a result the google ads became increasingly more like organic search results, until now, where you almost an't see the difference.

> where you almost an't see the difference.

Which is 100% an intentional dark pattern designed to maximize profits for the ad economy by tricking you into looking at something you don't want to look at. If users liked ads and found them useful, their brains wouldn't automatically learn to tune them out. On the contrary, if ads were so valuable to users, it would be a plus to make it easier to see them!

I mean, search engines throw an absolutely enormous amount of computational power at "organically" discovering, classifying, indexing, and searching the entire internet for the most relevant and useful results, and then the dollar machine instantly demotes them below paid placement. The cognitive dissonance is astounding.

> the fact that my brain seamlessly adblocks pages at no cost to myself

I wouldn’t be so sure it’s at no cost, it seems possible that parsing/blocking a lot of that stuff causes some kind of mental/sensory strain or fatigue.

Absolutely for me. I feel a lack of focus when I have to block it on my own.

It didn't for me 10 years ago but now it does.

I've had my coworkers sharing their screens for a presentation and chrome will pop up ads on their screen in front of 20 people.

(and the fact that I remember it was chrome... ugh)

It's somewhat automatic, but definitely not cost-free. Spend awhile with uBlock Origin and optionally something like PiHole, and you'll be amazed at how much less exhausting reading online is.

Is there a point to PiHole if your uBlock Origin works?

I read web content via all sorts of apps that aren’t web browsers (mail, rss reader, various electron junk, not to mention mobile apps that are simply skins over web pages). A browser plug-in doesn’t help for those cases.

To me, the security implications of a compromised uBlock on my browser with access to everything seem worse than a compromised pihole on my network.

Am I wrong on this? Honestly not so sure.

uBlock Origin catches almost all of it, but PiHole catches the rest. Also great for devices which cannot run an ad-blocker. (Mobile apps, smart TVs, etc)

I doubt it's as cost-free as you imagine. Rather than regale you with an ADHD perspective, I'll just say you're probably still reading it but just not thinking about it consciously. I would make a small bet that it's easier to prime a person with targeted advertising if they generally don't pay attention.

lol. The auto-block sometimes misfires, though!

I recently emailed a museum to ask about tours since they didn't have any information on their website. They replied with links to all the information on their website, that was in literal plain sight, but that I totally and completely missed because my brain just straight adblocked them. I almost had to force myself to "see" them. They just so closely matched that ad spam you see at the bottom of news sites and blogs that I'd just keep skimming past them.

It might be worth telling them if you haven't

My experience using tools to remove unnecessary / intrusive webpage elements (directly through the Element Inspector, via CSS managers such as Stylus, or the uBlock Origin element-blocking tool.

Even non-advertising elements such as social-media icons, related articles lists, sidebars, and the like. The more the display is limited to simply the text I intend to read, the less stress and distraction I feel.

Virtually all studies of multitasking show that multitaskers both overestimate their abilities and their performance is negatively affected by the attempt.

Ignoring intrusions is a task.

Pour one out for those with ADHD who aren't able to do this and haven't installed an adblocker.

Actually I have ADHD and I suspect I mentally ad block even more than most people. They are given 0 attention and focus because they are a dumb boring thing

Interesting, this is the opposite of the folks I know with ADHD. I suppose it is a pretty varied condition, united by inability to control attention.

I have difficulty blocking out the sound from ads which have audio, and they seem to bother me noticeably more than they bother most people, but visual ads I just tune out altogether.

When you try to add something to your amazon shopping cart, you frequently get an "extended warranty" popup. If you just close the window/tab, the item silently doesn't make it to your shopping cart.

I don't know how many things go unpurchased because of this.