Just as we all perceive light as coming from above, we see darkness as rising from beneath.                                                 This has implications for constructing an effective website.

    The human brain is set up to fear chaos and to try to create order. The old mind fears darkness, because darkness is where we can’t see, and chaos may live in it. It disempowers us. In the deep mind we all know that chaos doesn't come from nowhere. We keep an eye out for the origins of chaos, and when it’s light we’re less likely to be taken by surprise. When we want to communicate, we consequently need to use light and plenty of it, or else risk alerting the old mind to be suspicious.

How it works

    In a world where there's plenty of light and we can see, let’s just say that you’re someone who has to write the word Lilliput a lot. You might live in Lilliput Street or happen to be a fan of Jonathon Swift.

    So you write Lilliput very often and then on one occasion you make a mistake and write Lillliput. When you scan the text for errors, you might pick up the fault, or you might not, depending on how good you are at proof reading. That error is actually quite hard to spot. The way the brain does it is by realizing that the picture formed by the word is incorrect – makes it too long, in this case, longer than the correct spelling. This is a right-brain function. If you happen to be good enough at spotting your errors, then after the alarm is trippped – er, tripped – you go back to the word with the left brain and you see a small forest of verticals. The left brain has to carry your consciousness into this to see what the problem is, so you can correct it. It isn’t easy to move through that forest. It requires an effort of will. Light is required to be shining on whatever’s to be seen. All going well, with some close attention the extra letter will stand out and can be removed.

    The key for the initial alarm to ring is the shape or the length of the picture formed by the word. The brain is wired to look generally for faultiness of shape, and after going in through that door, it can then go towards curing the fault.

    And now to websites and print reversals.

     When we look at a block of text, the usual conscious impact of that is composed of the content. If we read a newspaper and we discuss it over breakfast coffee, the terms of our discussion are generally factual – who or what said or did this or that. We don’t turn the conversation to the size of the typeface or make conversational guesses about the leading (the size of the space between the lines).

    But just as the mind has an instant, right-brain response to the shape of a word that it has to discern through the forest of its own sticks, it also responds to presentation of that text.

    The function of the sun is to cast light on matter so we can interpret it. This is what the brain is used to. When things are dark, we’re wired to be resting. Even the strength of the digestion is linked to the sun, and it diminishes at sunset.  Our old-mind wiring tells us that if we walk in the dark, we can fall and break a leg, and so get left behind by the tribe to starve. Bad things happen to us when we can’t see. Look out a window and you’ll see the natural state for the communication of visual information is for light coming from above to surround objects and make them stand out.

    When text comes at us as white on black, the old-mind wiring has an instant reaction of suspicion. Why is this factual material shrouded in darkness? Who has something to hide? Does that something have big teeth, and are they sharp?

    The natural formation of factual material to be presented to the mind is for the dark – the matter – to be illuminated by the surrounding light. That means dark text on a white background, and not the reverse.

    This doesn’t mean that people are incapable of discerning the meaning in a print reversal. The left brain can be set to work to pick it out.

    The problem is, though, that the attention might not survive for that length of time – the big danger is that during the fifty-millisecond impact time the old mind succeeds in raising the alarm, because something isn’t right. In that time, the brain wiring fires because darkness and light are not laughing matters to brains. Darkness historically brings danger.

    After all that, it shouldn’t be surprising that the placement of light and dark on any website layout can be amongst the trickiest tasks in trying to reduce the potential for handing out some old-mind alarm signals.  Light should be perceived to come from the right places, and so should dark.