Healthy Land. Healthy Food. Healthy Lives.
MARCH / APRIL 2020
Holistic Management, The Troxler Effect, and Willful Blindness BY ANN ADAMS
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uring the holiday break I went with my grandson, Isaiah, to the children’s museum in Albuquerque called Explora. One of the exhibits was a spinning wheel that was there to demonstrate “The Troxler Effect.” In essence, you could spin a wheel that had alternating red and white lines below a Plexiglas surface upon which you could put various objects. The idea was to focus on the objects and in doing so, the red and white lines would disappear on the spinning wheel. This effect is named after a Swiss philosopher named Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler who noticed this phenomenon in 1804. The cause for this effect is the retina becoming desensitized to stimulus that has become unchanging. Also,
Holistic Land Regeneration INSIDE THIS ISSUE The land regeneration goals of Holistic Management practitioners are usually tied to increasing ground cover and perennial grasses. Read about the efforts of and results on the Tomkat Ranch on page 4, the Lazy M Ranch on page 5, or Greenacres on page 24.
In Practice a publication of Holistic Management International
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according to the museum docent, this effect is part of the brain’s efforts for efficiency. We pay attention to that which is novel (therefore potentially dangerous). Once we become accustomed to the stimulus, it fades from our memory so our brain doesn’t get overloaded by all stimulus being equal. In this way, what is “known” disappears. The need for the brain to prioritize what it focuses on makes perfect sense, and we know that mindfulness and conscious behavior can influence what the brain focuses on. But, with our busy lives how can we be sure we are being observant to the stimulus around us without narrowing our attention so much that important stimulus “disappears?” I believe Holistic Management provides such a tool for this prioritization through the holistic goal. It creates the “big picture” vision that keeps us focused and paying attention to information that either is helping us create that desired outcome or moves us away from it. It allows us to engage in a holistic thought process rather than a reductionist approach that can result in a narrow focus that leaves out other parts of the picture. Margaret Heffernan author of Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril explains that we ignore information, from our loved ones, investors, or politicians, because of the cognitive limits of our brain: “Whether individual or collective, willful blindness doesn’t have a single driver, but many. It is a human phenomenon to which we
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all succumb in matters little and large. We can’t notice and know everything: the cognitive limits of our brain simply won’t let us. That means we have to filter or edit what we take in. So what we choose to let through and to leave out is crucial.” Again, the holistic goal is a vital filter that fulfills the role of determining what we filter or edit through our big picture lens. It helps us avoid the “known blindness” of the Troxler Effect, seeing that which is familiar while focusing on the critical objectives we need to accomplish to move us toward our holistic goal. Because our holistic goal encourages us to pay attention to any information that will help us move toward our vision and values, looking at all the tools available to us to create the outcome we want, we are less susceptible to the willful blindness that can occur when we are focused on what we don’t want.
If you are curious about your response to the Troxler Effect, you can view an example by visiting the webpage: https://www. sciencealert.com/crazy-new-optical-illusionbreaking-internet
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