Change Blindness
Summary
A person’s eyes observe his or her surroundings and communicate that data to the brain. The brain would be overloaded if it tried to tackle every detail of every object at once. We are all equipped with the means of selecting the key aspects of a scene, one at a time. This attention system allows us to concentrate on one thing, while the rest of the world falls into the background.
All this happens so automatically that we don’t notice it. But our brains are constantly scanning the scene, not just passively analyzing what’s coming in, but actively deciding what it is it wants to see.
Change blindness is the idea that we often miss large changes to our visual world from one view to the next. We’re often not able to see large changes that would appear to be perfectly obvious to somebody who knows they are going to happen.
It seems that we don’t have to point our eyes in the right direction. We also have to point our brains.
Keywords: change blindness, concentration, focus, neurology, SEP, somebody else’s problem
