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Not exactly, but our representation of what's behind us is a lot more sparse than we would assume. That is, I might not be surprised by what I see when I turn around, but it could have changed pretty radically since I last looked, and I might not notice. In fact, an observer might be quite surprised that I missed the change.

Objectively, Simons and Chabris (and many others) have a lot of data to support these ideas. Subjectively, I can say that these types of tasks (inattentional blindness, change blindness, etc.) are humbling.



Well, it's a bit of a spoiler to encounter this video in this context, but this is a very good video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRFMuGBP15U

Even having a clue why I'm linking this, I virtually guarantee you won't catch everything.

And even if you do catch everything... the real thing to notice is that you had to look. Your brain does not flag these things naturally. Dreams are notorious for this sort of thing, but even in the waking world your model of the world is much less rich than you think. Magic tricks like to hide in this space, for instance.


Yup, great example! Simons's lab has done some things along exactly these lines [0], too.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBoMjORwA-4




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