I happened to be talking to my baby brother (hey, he is 10 years younger – 62 this month – he will ALWAYS be the Baby), and he showed me a trick he used to increase the speed at which his devices charged.
You go to Settings–>Accessibility–>Color Filters. Turn it to On status, if it is off. Gray Scale will show as one of the options. Select it.
ALL your computer’s screens will show in Grayscale. Even the browser.
Now, what I can see is that this reduces the “GrabMe” aspect of pages, pictures, and popups. You won’t grab for your device, obsessively checking to see if there are new messages. I would expect to see a drastic reduction in wasted time on social media, ‘news’, and sites trying to grab your attention.
I experienced this once before, when our color TV quit, and we didn’t have the money to replace it immediately. My father donated his old black & white portable TV to us. What I immediately found was that aimless TV watching fell sharply. We tended to turn the TV on for specific shows or purposes (to find out the weather forecast, for example), then turn it off again.
I’ve since seen this option suggested on other sites – link here – and think it would be a neat idea for teachers to pass this along to students and their families, maybe even promoting a Gray Week Challenge. Anything that reduces dependency on devices would be a plus.
2 comments
Primates, among other species, are hardwired for color. Black and white/grayscale will not provide the level of visual input the brain is accustomed to having. Unless motivated by a specific reason the default choice would be to look at something with colors rather than grayscale. Black and White TV from the old days was only successful because of the novelty and lack of any other choice that was in color. Once color TVs became available at reasonable prices the sale of B&W TVs tanked. I suspect it’s been decades since grayscale tv’s/displays have even been manufactured.
Trying it.
I like it!