Did you know that you don’t actually see most of what you look at?

Imagine that you walk into a room and approach a sign that says “experiment here”. A nice young man hands you a form to fill out, and bends down behind the counter to put it away. A completely different man, with a different voice, different hair, and different clothes stands up, hands you another form, and sends you to a room down the hall. You’d notice right away that it was a different person, right?

That’s what most people think. But when researchers actually tried this experiment, they discovered that 75% of people don’t notice it’s a different person!

It’s actually part of a very common phenomenon called “change blindness”

Basically, your brain has a lot to deal with. It has to run your body, collect your thoughts, keep your balance, pay attention to what its smelling and hearing and feeling, and process every single image that comes in through your eyes. If it had to pay attention to every single thing, your brain would get overwhelmed. So instead, your brain just ignores anything that it doesn’t think is important. We can miss huge changes in our environments simply because our brain isn’t focusing on them at the time.

That’s part of what makes police investigations so difficult. Even with several eyewitnesses to a crime, they may miss an important clue simply because the brain isn’t focused on it. Something as important as one man changing into a completely different one when he stands back up!