Eli5 what is happening when an object is missing, but is right there in your vision however the brain blocks it?
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Our brains visual system has small attention dips whenever you have reward signaling.. more specifically we know it must be dopamine signaling, its the whole concept why wheres waldo works. If you have enough things that look almosr like waldo we will miss waldo even if he is righr next to it… thats also why all those “spot a red Z and an orange R things work… we can set it up that there is a red Z in the pic the same time as the orange R. As long as theres enough confusinf signaling theres only one getting spotted by our brain… for instance seeing the word red in orange or an orange Z can throw us off hard.
This is a limit of our inner visual system we have found out because theres plenty of exercises we can do to take more care to our outer peripheral vision… which literally runs at a faster processing speed and is running over different neurons… if we train this we can get better at spotting thrse things…. so the brain does pick it up its just our eyes focus and reward system blocks it usually.
Andrew hubermann has a bunch of podcasts about this, it’s hella interesting.
General rule of thumb if you pay attention to something you will miss and block out other parts. Its unavoidable…we as humans do like 99% of our stuff subconsciously if we attend to the feel of the wind rn we will start feeling it. Our brain just blocked it till we attended to it… blocking stuff out of focus is a thing our brain is mad good at.
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