It depends what type of laptop it is! It’s probably an LED/LCD screen, though – these screens are made up of hundreds of rows of tiny glass boxes, and in each one is some liquid crystal. The liquid is used to change the colour of light being shone through it, so we can see the whole range of colours on our screens (I talked about this in a question about televisions: /niobiumj12-zone/2012/06/27/how-are-the-tvs-made/).
When you push down on these, all sorts of things can happen – the little glass boxes can be permanently damages (leaving “dead pixels” which are black or white dots that never go away). These are normally caused by the electronics being broken, and permanently setting some boxes on or off, so you only see full white colour or full black colour in those areas.
Sometimes you don’t permanently damage the screen, and it just looks a bit funny for a while. This is just because things are pushed slightly out of place by the pressure of your finger (the liquid crystal, for instance, is very easy to move around if you push down on a screen). Over time everything slowly goes back to the position it was in originally, and hopefully there’s no permanent damage!
I have some dead pixels on the screen I’m using to write this answer! I dropped my MacBook once and there are bits of the screen that are always very bright white. I need to replace this laptop!
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