Have you ever been walking around your house and all of a sudden starting asking, “What happened here?”
Those dishes piled up, or the cloths filled the hamper, or the garage clutter gathered while you were busy paying attention to work, or school, or extracurricular stuff, or family drama, or any other tasks.
When you are paying attention to something specific that you miss something else, that is inattention blindness.
We all have limited sensory processing capacity. As much as we think we see all, hear all, and know all, we mostly miss just about everything in the world. I’m not sure how many decimals you would have to go to for accuracy sake, but gut feel, it’s so many decimal places that it’s easiest to say that each person misses 100% of all activities going on in the world at any given time.
This is at odds with the fact that all day we are being bombarded with information, news stories, tasks at work, conversations, etc. Yet, what is all that really doing?
Informing us of all those things we missed in the first place.
There is no way to overcome this. The only option is “intentional vision”. Choosing what you want to see, what is important to you, and making sure that you look out for and possibly share it with others.
P.S In my opinion, short-sightedness is a synonym of inattentional blindness. I’ve written about short-sightedness before:
None of this is Right 