{"id":59685,"date":"2022-02-13T13:21:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-13T17:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=59685"},"modified":"2022-02-14T14:38:59","modified_gmt":"2022-02-14T18:38:59","slug":"what-is-inattentional-blindness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/what-is-inattentional-blindness\/","title":{"rendered":"Inattentional Blindness: What It Is &#038; How to Overcome It"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>What is inattentional blindness? Why does this effect occur? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Inattentional blindness is a tendency to zone in on certain aspects of a situation and disregard the rest. Inattentional blindness is the result of the brain&#8217;s limited cognitive capacity: it simply doesn&#8217;t have the resources to process everything. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Keep reading to learn about the phenomenon of intentional blindness, why it occurs, and how to combat it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"block-57b2e804-dc3b-4706-b3e6-84c08f85fbfb\">Inattentional Blindness<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>What is inattentional blindness? Inattentional blindness means humans tend to zone into specific elements of a situation, focusing only on the details they deem important. Once in this focused state, you might not notice even obvious distractions: Your <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/mental-filtering\/\">brain filters<\/a> them out, deeming them less important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p id=\"block-095f26fc-7845-44ef-8e8c-7a80fd1a046e\">However, the biggest problem with the illusion of attention is that <strong>you believe your <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/how-to-improve-observation-skills\/\">observation skills<\/a> are great,<\/strong> Dobelli argues. Because your brain doesn\u2019t retain any information about \u201cunimportant\u201d observations, you think you\u2019re noticing everything in your area and overestimate your abilities. This overconfidence means you don\u2019t question your true abilities or challenge yourself to notice more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p id=\"block-07ef7e01-5800-49df-8273-224beb5b842f\">The illusion of attention isn&#8217;t a problem when you\u2019re focusing on one activity and the rest of your surroundings continue as usual, such as reading a book while walking in a familiar area. In this case, your attention can split to handle the tasks of reading and walking, Dobelli explains.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p id=\"block-f88fda39-ae45-4175-afee-366f77ebe237\">However, <strong>once an unusual event is introduced, your brain can\u2019t handle all its tasks at once and starts to make mistakes due to your overconfidence<\/strong>, Dobelli says. For example, if your dog walked in front of you as you\u2019re reading, you might step on its tail. Because you believe your observation skills are stronger than they are, you aren\u2019t careful enough to avoid stepping on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-why-inattentional-blindness-occurs-and-how-to-combat-it\"><strong>Why Inattentional Blindness Occurs and How to Combat It<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/science\/neurophilosophy\/2011\/aug\/11\/neuroscience-psychology\">The illusion of attention occurs because your brain has a limited amount of sensory information it can process<\/a>, called cognitive capacity. Once you\u2019ve reached cognitive capacity, your brain can\u2019t accept new information, even if the information is obvious or important. This inability to process is called <strong>inattentional blindness.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The senses most strongly connected to inattentional blindness are sight and sound: These senses take in so much information that they easily overpower your cognitive capacity. This is why you turn down your music when searching for a street: Your brain could handle the tasks of driving and listening to music, but adding the effort of hunting for a street pushes you over cognitive capacity, and you must lessen one sensory input to process another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, most of the time, you don\u2019t realize you need to lessen one sensory input to process another. This is because, as noted above, your brain <em>filters out<\/em> the new input: Its lack of cognitive capacity means it doesn\u2019t notice the new input at all. Because you don\u2019t realize that information didn\u2019t register, you become overconfident in your observational abilities, thinking you caught everything. The only way to combat this overconfidence is to realize how much you don\u2019t notice by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.richasaking.com\/illusion-of-attention\/\">getting other people\u2019s input<\/a> on situations and <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@7jerome\/how-to-avoid-the-illusion-of-attention-24542246abe4\">challenging your expectations and assumptions<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What is inattentional blindness? Why does this effect occur? Inattentional blindness is a tendency to zone in on certain aspects of a situation and disregard the rest. Inattentional blindness is the result of the brain&#8217;s limited cognitive capacity: it simply doesn&#8217;t have the resources to process everything. Keep reading to learn about the phenomenon of intentional blindness, why it occurs, and how to combat it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":38034,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,160],"tags":[576],"class_list":["post-59685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-psychology","category-science","tag-the-art-of-thinking-clearly","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.3 (Yoast SEO v24.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Inattentional Blindness: What It Is &amp; How to Overcome It - Shortform Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What is inattentional blindness? It is the human tendency to zone in on certain aspects of a situation and disregard the rest. Learn more.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/what-is-inattentional-blindness\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Inattentional Blindness: What It Is &amp; How to Overcome It\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"What is inattentional blindness? It is the human tendency to zone in on certain aspects of a situation and disregard the rest. 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