For the good of science, I soldiered on and played a bit further, experimenting a bit with the newly added message tab in the settings menu.
It seems to me that these obnoxious geometric patterns appear when your cursor hovers over a notification like "System Surveyed" to inform the player of the relevant location. That by itself is a good feature, however, as we all know the path to hell is paved with good intentions, and so too the path to doing a great harm upon my special eyes is paved with attempts at improving the user interface. You see, when I inevitably right-click on one of these notifications to make it go away, the associated location keeps being highlighted as if my cursor was still hovering over it. And if I right-click away several of them at once, well, suddenly the whole galaxy lights up like a Christmas tree, overloading my poor beleaguered brain and paralyzing it.
Circumstantial evidence makes me believe that these flashy green lights go away after some ingame time has passed, but they will stay indefinitely while it is paused.
Fortunately there's some good news as well: Since this green menace is a direct result of notifications, turning them off in the settings prevents future lights from appearing, though it does not get rid of already existing ones unless you save and reload the game.
On an additional upside, this just gave me a great idea for roleplaying a Gestalt Consciousness with a unique quirk: The leading node sometimes suffers from information overload and is unable to give orders or process information until it has calmed down. This would make for a great lore rationalization of the player just sitting there letting the game run without input until the annoying lights go away, no?
