I have been known to search for my car keys when they are in my hand, or nervously prance around looking for my glasses when they were perched on top of my head.  Worse than that, I have even looked for my glasses while I was wearing them.  After all, it makes it much easier to find them. If you want to hide something, they say, put it in plain sight.

In the 1990’s, a group of researchers coined the term “inattentional blindness” to refer to the effect of not seeing something due to one’s attention being focused elsewhere.  The research that evolved from this approach was compelling.

It turns out that inattentional blindness is not only common, but it can easily kill you.  I have heard it said, for example, that the last thing many motorcyclists remember seeing before an accident are the eyes of the driver of the car that plowed into them. The driver of the car looks right at the motorcyclist, but because he isn’t expecting to see him, he just doesn’t.

In one study, a group of people were shown a short film showing three people in black T-shirts and three people in white T-shirts dribbling and tossing basketballs among them.  The subjects were asked to count how many times the players in white shirts caught a ball.  In the middle of the film, a woman in a black gorilla suit walks onto the floor, stops, turns, and waves at the camera.  She then slowly turns and walks off camera.  When the subjects were asked if they had seen anything unusual, fully half of them didn’t report seeing the gorilla at all.  Even when they tried the exercise a second time, a large percentage of the subjects didn’t see the gorilla.

This sort of thing has been replicated many ways and with many groups, including pilots.  In the late 1990s, NASA conducted an experiment to see if commercial pilots would notice distractions while making landings in a flight simulator.  In the simulation, an object rolled out onto the runway just as the plane was landing.  One-fourth of the highly experienced pilots noticed nothing out of the ordinary and landed on top of the distraction.   Interestingly, untrained pilots who had no preconception of what to expect during a landing, always spotted the distraction.

One way to look at inattentional blindness is that it is just one point along the spectrum of attention and distraction.   In order to function, humans must constantly filter extraneous information, and in essence, go on autopilot.  Sleep is a kind of inattentional blindness, which is probably why it isn’t such a good idea to fall asleep while driving a car or flying an airplane.

This may all explain how it is that hiding something in plain sight makes it difficult to find.  Perhaps the act of “looking” for something is its own form of distraction; we are engaged in the looking and not the seeing.   Seek and ye shall find may be a truism, but perhaps if ye seek too much ye shall find nothing at all.