13 milliseconds are hardly enough to fully understand the pics from the r/hmmm subreddit. You might need to do some double or triple takes to fully get the meaning and notice what's really going on there. But people like that kind of stuff on the internet: the r/hmmm subreddit has over two million followers (or internet aesthetes, as they call themselves).
If you're unsure what qualifies for a "hmmm" image, the subreddit has some guidelines. They claim that hmmms are supposed to be textless and rely on the visual only. A good hmmm, according to the subreddit, will "make you think about the context, do a double take, invoke a deeper meaning, or just leave you thinking about how or why they exist."
On the weird side of the internet, ripe with communities like r/lowrescrops, r/internet funeral, and r/mildlyinteresting, the r/hmmm subreddit stands out for its dedication to aesthetics. "hmmms should be aesthetic and meaningful, avoid anything that is merely r/mildlyinteresting," the subreddit's bio states.
It's no surprise, then, that the community has "internet as an art" in its description. Thus is the art of the internet: random, nonsensical, sometimes confusing, self-referential, and doused in sarcasm. So what if it takes us a few moments to understand what's happening in a picture? We've got nothing but time to procrastinate when we're online, right?
If we were to treat these confusing images as art, then there's no shame in having to look at them just a bit longer than usual. Yet that's not to say that people tend to look at paintings for very long. One survey, for example, found that people look at a painting for an average of 17 seconds.
The Louvre claims that most visitors look at the Mona Lisa for about 15, and a survey from the MET found that people look at an artwork for about 32.5 seconds. Do those 17 or 32.5 seconds allow us to fully understand a work of art? Depends on the person, of course, but the same goes for confusing internet images.
Our brains might be able to categorize the objects in a photograph in milliseconds, yet we're not quite able to understand its full meaning that fast. Just like we need to look at a painting for longer than 30 seconds, we might need longer for that meme or confusing pic in order for our brains to be able to decipher it.
The way we see and interpret images is quite fascinating in general. The amount of things that happen all around us and bombard our visual senses is enormous. Our eyes also don't see a stable image all the time: we walk, move our heads and eyes, and even blink, so, the visual input changes constantly. Yet why is the image of the world around us always so stable?
