The other day I was holding a sharpie marker in my hand that I was using to hold myself up on a counter and couldn’t for the life of me find it until it was pointed at by a coworker. I have also seen others and myself not see a food item (such as ketchup or salt) on a table when it’s in plain sight.
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I can’t speak for the latter but the former (holding an item and you don’t know it’s there) has to do with short term memory vs long term memory. The way the brain works, it stores information in different ways, and if you don’t “commit” something to your long term memory, you basically forget it within a short period of time, usually less than 30 seconds. So basically because you didn’t think it was important, if something like 15-30 seconds go by and you didn’t think about the fact that you were holding a sharpie, you forget that you are in fact holding a sharpie. And when you start looking for it, the information is lost, and you start from square one.
The second one, not seeing objects in front of you, might have to do with image processing, which I don’t know much about. If it’s for a few seconds then maybe it’s just in your blind spot though, haha.
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