This is a concept that we don’t use metaphorically enough.
In parts of the Netherlands, quiet, straight roads that form even, repetitive landscapes are known to make drivers less attentive and less likely to react quickly to a sudden obstacle. The absence of external visual stimuli (or distraction) leads to reduced attention and agility. This is called polderblindness. It’s tunnel vision with an external cause. Break the uniformity — plant trees at variable distances on the road — and you break the monotony for good.
I first came across the idea in Noreen Masud’s memoir A Flat Place (2023) — a skilfully told, short but expansive work where Masud narrates her love for flat landscapes as they help her come to terms with complex trauma and grief. On polderblindness, Masud writes,
“That’s what they call it in the Netherlands, when you’ve been driving through the flatlands, or polders, so long that your perceptions of time and space collapse; you can no longer react quickly enough, in the case of a sudden obstacle.”
So much of Masud’s memoir unpacks perception, or at least different ways of reading perception, without being overtly theoretical. In flat landscapes, along the waterlogged edges of Britain, she often finds herself in a trance, grappling with the imposing flatness – not an absence but “something strong and original and living”; “the place of grief, but also the place of the real.”
This passage on polderblindness appears in the chapter on the fenlands of eastern England. “It was as if my episodes of derealization found physical form in that landscape,” Masud writes.
Polderblindness is, therefore, used by Masud as a brilliant and illuminating metaphor to explain derealization (a dissociative disorder often associated with complex trauma or cPTSD) —
“When I derealize, the world becomes distant and two-dimensional: a ribbon of time, where all moments exist at once, with colours, and shapes, and mouths opening and closing harmlessly. People become blurry, and I have a strong sense that they are not actually there.”
I leave you with a question: Can distraction be good for the human mind, for perception?