Strobe Lights

Strobe Lights

Why do strobe lights distort your reality?

I went into a haunted house last night with strobe lights. I walked out and I didnt know how to walk or figure out things.

It was almost as if I was walking, but my mind wasn't thinking.

why do strobe lights do that?

Visual persistance is that phisiological characteristic that allows movies and TV to give our brains the sense of motion when images are rapidly flashed on a screen. What happens is that our brains disallow seeing the individual frames or pictures that are actually shown on the screen. Because the pictures are flashed on the screen faster than the brains can discern each one, our mind sees them as motion.

Strobe lights, on the other hand, flash on and off at a relatively slow rate. When they are off we can't see anything; so our brain has no visual image to process. When they are on, we see whatever image is around us in sight. In this case, the "frames" are way slower than movies (~24 frames/sec) or TV (~30 frames/sec); so we actually can see the individual frames (i.e., the scene around us when the light is on). So the motion is herky jerky rather than smooth as with movies or TV. And that herky jerky motion is disorienting to our brains which is used to seeing smooth motion.

When you walk back into reality, away from the strobe lights, your brain takes a second or two to reorient itself back to the smooth world outside. In other words, it just got used to the strobe herky jerky and then you walked back outside where it had to reorient itself to the smooth reality.