Example: when you live next to a train station, the train sound is very apparent when you first move there. However, after a while, you don’t notice it anymore.
How does that work?
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This is largely the principle of Adaptation, your brain’s ability to adjust to new stimuli. Like shouting when you finish listening to loud music, your brain has decided “this is the new normal” and continues along that other until new information tells it “oh, I’m being loud.”
Living next to a train station or along the landing path for an airport, your brain hears the noise and soon enough regards it as regular, and tunes it out when you’re not actively paying attention. Visitors might ask how you can deal with the noise and you’ll answer “with what noise?”
Your eyes actually do something very similar, but in a matter of seconds since they regularly have to process so much information. If you *gently* press a finger on the upper and lower lid of one eye to hold it in place while closing the other, your vision will start to grey out. *GENTLY.* You aren’t hurting your eye, the receptors in your eye are basically sending “No new information” to your brain and start to “go idle”. By moving your eye again or even waving your unoccupied hand in front of your face, your vision will clear up again because there’s new info that needs to be passed on.
This also ties into the Just Noticeable Difference, which is the change between stimulus that you can actually tell. If the trains go past regularly, you might not notice them, but if one blows its horn that will still get your attention.
Other things you might not notice thanks to adaptation: the feel of your clothes on your skin, where your tongue is in your mouth, do you feel hot or cold right now? And more.
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