The web already regulates flashing light to protect one set of brains. It is time we thought about the rest — and Israel is quietly showing how.

A colleague wrote to me this week with an unusual request. Could a meeting be moved from one video platform to another, because long sessions on certain software left her with crippling migraines. It would have been easy to read this as fussiness, the sort of small accommodation that busy people wave away. It is not. It is an early signal of something the digital economy has not yet been honest with itself about.

We have built a world in which hundreds of millions of people now spend the larger part of their working day staring into conferencing software. These products were engineered for features, for integration, for market share. They were not engineered for the brain. Brightness, on screen clutter, flickering motion, the constant flash of notifications: every platform imposes a different visual load, and for a brain prone to migraine that load is not neutral. The migraine brain is unusually reactive to flicker, to high luminance and to busy motion, which is precisely what an afternoon of video calls delivers in abundance.

What is striking is that we already accept the principle at stake. The web has a rule, observed by every serious designer, that content must not flash more than three times in a single second, because........

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