Inattentional Blindness Is Not Something You Remove: The Outline of What You See Is Set by What Counts as Important

Inattentional blindness refers to failing to register something that is fully in front of you. It is not an object to be removed. It is the outline that appears when the criterion deciding what counts as important is projected onto what you see.

The neighbouring phenomenon and what this term points at are separate things. The sense of I cannot do this that stands up when you turn towards an action is the restoring function, treated in a mental block is not a defect. That one is dynamic: a signal appears when you touch the edge. This one is static: no signal appears at all. If you feel resistance, you are seeing the thing. On this side nothing rises as a candidate, so not even hesitation occurs.

In practice the difference shows up like this. With resistance, the person can put it into words: this feels heavy, I cannot get started. With the other, there is nothing to put into words. No memory of passing something over, no memory of hesitating, so looking back afterwards leaves no gap to find. What was there is the impression that nothing was there.

The research literature describes the phenomenon carefully, and it mostly stops at description. Definitions, the classic demonstrations, applications in driving and in medicine. What the literature does not take up is the question most people arrive with: if this happens to everyone, why can I not simply decide to see more?

The answers that do address that question come from elsewhere. Set a goal outside your current situation. Raise the level of abstraction. Widen your field of view. The instructions are available in many places and they broadly agree.

What remains, in larger numbers, are the reports that following the instructions changed nothing. And those reports are usually handled by saying the effort was insufficient, or that the person did not want it enough.

The trouble with that handling is that nothing could refute it. It infers a shortage of commitment from the fact that nothing changed, then explains the fact with the inference. Whatever the outcome, the account survives. An account that always survives is an account that predicted nothing.

A different reading holds that the instructions are not insufficient; the condition under which instructions work has to come first. That reading at least admits of refutation. If the condition can be named, the instructions should behave differently depending on whether it holds. And the condition sits somewhere other than in how badly the person wants it.

What follows takes apart, in order, what the term covers, where the widely repeated mechanism overreaches, and why the outline does not move while the criterion stays put. At the end I place what can be checked instead of a removal technique.

What the Term Covers, and Why It Is Not the Eye’s Blind Spot

Scotoma, the term used for this in the coaching literature, comes from medicine, from the Greek for darkness. It names a region of lost vision inside the visual field, and ophthalmology and neurology use it for exactly that.

Stop at the etymology, though, and one misreading gets in.

The eye’s blind spot is a related but separate thing. It exists because there are no light-receiving cells where the optic nerve passes through the retina. Structurally, something is absent there. Carry that image straight across into cognition and you arrive at the idea that recognition, too, has a missing piece.

What happens once the term crosses over, though, is not that. On the cognitive side there is no place where the apparatus for receiving is itself missing. The closer image is an obstruction, not an absence.

An obstruction and an absence differ in a way that matters. With an absence, there is no apparatus to receive anything. With an obstruction, the apparatus is intact and the current arrangement is what keeps the thing from arriving. The area a car mirror cannot cover is hidden by the body of the car, not by a fault in the eye. Change the position and the same eye sees it.

The difference changes what can be done. If something is absent, it has to be supplied from outside. If the view is obstructed, moving changes what arrives.

The everyday examples sit on the obstructed side. You are about to leave and cannot find your house keys. The appointment is fixed and you cannot be late. You work through the likely places, open the same drawer twice, and still nothing. Then the errand is over, you come back, and the keys are where you first looked.

In the explanation usually attached to this example, the origin sits in the assumption itself. Telling yourself firmly that they are not here builds exactly that premise, and shuts the keys in front of you out of view. The searching is what keeps the searched-for thing from appearing.

The keys were there the whole time, and light from them reached your eyes. What was missing was whatever would have raised them as keys.

What the term covers is not the state of lacking information. If information has not reached you, you simply do not know it, and looking it up settles the matter. What the term points at is the state of having received something and never having it rise into awareness. So there is no feeling of having searched too little, and no feeling of knowing too little. Nothing seems to have happened.

That is the first reason this is hard to work on from the inside. No cue is generated on the person’s side to indicate that something is missing.

Where the “Filtering Out” Account Overreaches

The most repeated account says that unimportant information is screened out at the entrance. There is a filter in the brain, the reticular activating system, which lets through what matters to you and screens out what does not. That is why things you have no interest in never register.

The account fits ordinary experience well. Decide to buy a watch and other people’s watches start appearing. Start looking at a particular model of car and the streets fill with it. As an explanation it does its job.

Fitting ordinary experience and being right about the mechanism are separate things, though. On a screening account, what does not matter never arrives at all.

But a state in which nothing arrived is not inattentional blindness; it is an unknown that looking something up resolves. Take the screening account and the state the term was pointing at disappears. What is left is not knowing, not the thing that sits in front of you without rising.

So the phrasing becomes: nothing is discarded at the entrance; what differs is the handling after entry.

Why the mistaken version travels further also has a structure to it. The simpler account is the one people meet first. And a term that has once been processed as already known is hard to update afterwards. The same mechanism is at work in how the term itself is understood.

One note on the name. The reticular activating system was described in neurophysiology that dealt with levels of wakefulness. Applying the name to the selection of attention borrows it from a different field. Whether the borrowing holds up does not bear on deciding the mechanism.

Screening or non-activation can look like a difference in wording. The practical consequence runs the opposite way.

If things are screened out, what you cannot see is not in your possession. Not being in your possession, it has to be supplied from outside. So the advice turns towards finding someone who will point things out to you.

If things are merely not activated, what you cannot see is already in your possession. What is missing is not information but the criterion that would mark it as important. The moment the criterion moves, what you are already holding stands up. Where you go looking shifts from outside to inside.

The house-keys example cannot settle it. A screening account handles the episode just as well: the keys were screened out while you searched, and the screen lifted when the errand ended. The same event fits either description. Everyday impressions do not select between them. A different kind of material is needed.

What Can Be Settled Is the Behavioural Level

What happens inside the brain is not something the experiments below can settle. What can be settled is what was observed as behaviour. And there are stable results there, going back a long way.

Hearing one voice in a noisy room was formalised by Colin Cherry in a 1953 paper in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, using a method in which different speech is played to each ear and only one side is repeated back. What listeners could report about the unattended side afterwards was limited to physical features such as the speaker’s sex. The content did not remain.

Then in 1959 Neville Moray, using the same setup, found one exception. A listener’s own name is noticed even when it arrives on the unattended side (paper). That single result shows two things at once. One is that the side nobody could report on was still handled well enough for its contents to be judged. Had it been discarded, no judgement could have been made. The other is that what came through was not volume or which ear it arrived in, but how much it mattered to the listener. Arriving under identical conditions, only the side carrying importance rises.

The visual side has results of the same shape. Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris reported in Perception in 1999 that observers counting basketball passes routinely fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. The gorilla is in the eyes of everyone who misses it.

These are experiments from before the brain could be imaged. They are therefore no basis for claims about where in the brain anything happens. What they establish is what happened at the level of behaviour. That is all the argument about the outline needs. Once the single point holds — that information which never reached awareness was nonetheless received — the argument about the outline goes through.

The older account is not a falsehood. Screening still covers most everyday cases well enough. This is a gain in precision rather than a correction of an error. But a difference in precision here changes the direction of the prescription, so which version you hold does reach practice.

The More Moves You Add Inside the Frame, the More the Frame Holds

When you look for a move, you look among the options you can see. Naturally. Options you cannot see are not part of the search.

The difficulty is that the set of options is produced by the current criterion. While the criterion is unchanged, repeating the search returns candidates from the same set.

Someone whose rates will not rise thinks first about negotiating. Then about raising skill to justify a higher rate. Then about moving to work that pays better.

All three can be carried out, and all three produce effects. All three also sit inside the form in which time is exchanged for money.

Outside that form there are other options. Take a shape in which input and return are not proportional. Build something once that goes on producing value. Make the judgement itself the product. None of these rise as candidates while the premise of selling time is held in place. The ceiling belonging to that form is taken apart in the ceiling on earning alone.

I went round the inside of that form myself, over several years.

When I was trying to make a living from music, what actually produced income was the occasional production job. The content was not mine to choose. What was asked for was something like this well-known artist or a bright, general-purpose background track, with no word on who would hear it or where it would be used. What came back were revision notes. A little brighter. A little more mainstream. Every instruction worked in the direction of sanding the outline off.

The place where skill could be tested was the competitions. Submit a track. Rejected. No word on what was missing. Submit again the following week. Rejected again. In the end, not one of them went through. And still what I thought about was the single question of how to get selected. Move towards the sound being asked for. Match the length. Build the opening, since I had heard that judgement happens in the first three seconds.

Laid out now, the arrangement is strange. The place I was pouring effort into and the place income was coming from were different places. I was stacking technique into competitions that never went through, and living off work that required none of it.

The technique did improve. Listen to a track from six months earlier and the roughness is audible. The next month’s income was still unpredictable. What I held at the time was an unexplained flatness, a bank balance, and the conclusion that feeling no drive for music I loved was a weakness in me. While the cause sits on your own side, the remedies can only be built on your own side too. Everything I tried over those years sat inside that range.

And there is something else I could not see at the time. The same industry was full of capable makers working at strikingly low rates, at all hours. I watched that from outside and decided I would not end up there. Because I could see it, I took myself to be outside it.

I was inside the same structure. They were waiting on commissions from companies; I was waiting on competition results. Different party to wait on, same way of deciding income. If anything I was worse off, since my channel was less stable.

That oversight had nothing to do with how much I knew or how carefully I was looking. The fact that I could see it from outside was itself producing the judgement that I was outside.

The claim is not that raising skill is pointless. The precision I gained in those years is still with me. What was pointless was not the skill but the expectation that raising it would change the form.

Is nothing, then, worth doing? It is. What has to move is not the skill but the criterion of importance, and that criterion has reasons for resisting movement.

The Criterion for Importance Is Made of Who You Have Been

What judges importance is made of who you have been. The interests you have held, the life you have led, the reality you have moved through. What relates closely to that rises into awareness; what relates thinly does not. There is no other material available. Nothing in hand can mark as important something you have not yet met.

One consequence follows. What yesterday’s version of you judged important is judged important again today. So the world in front of you is assembled out of information that yesterday’s version already marked.

Which means what you are looking at is itself an output of who you have been. Judge by looking at that scene and the landing point stays inside that range. Use the conclusion as grounds for the next judgement and the range hardens further.

That is the second reason this is hard to work on from the inside. The material for the judgement and the criterion for the judgement share an origin.

Someone considers what work suits them. The material available is the jobs they have done, the occupations they have heard about, the ways of working they have seen close up. Examine that material carefully and a well-founded conclusion comes out. The conclusion does not exceed the material. Ways of working absent from the material are never assessed as unsuitable; they are handled as though they did not exist.

And from the inside, the work carries the feeling of having thought it through. Because the feeling is there, the conclusion feels reliable. The more carefully you think, the further the outside of the range recedes.

The point is not that the past determines the present. What is under discussion is the origin of the criterion, not a claim that criteria cannot move. They can be moved. What cannot be found is the entrance, as long as you are surveying the inside of the current range.

Having seen this structure, the immediate reaction is to distrust every judgement you make, and distrusting all of them leaves you unable to act. Having an origin and being unreliable are different things. In most situations the criterion built by who you have been works correctly. Shopping, sequencing work, judging distance in a relationship — it is sufficient for all of them. It becomes a problem only where you want to change the place you are standing. That is the only case in which the answer lies outside the range.

Where the Criterion for Importance Came From: Parents, Employers, and the World Around You

That criterion is not something you made. Your parents’ measure, your employer’s measure, the measure held by the world around you. You go on measuring yourself with an instrument you received.

For example, grow up in a household where a parent earned a certain salary as an employee and your own estimate lands somewhere near that level. And other options and routes never rise as candidates.

This reads easily as an accusation, so let me be clear. Nobody planted this in bad faith. Measures are transmitted through good intentions. Precisely because someone cares, they hand over the criterion they trust. The person handing it over does not experience it as transplanting a criterion.

And the person receiving it does not experience receiving anything. A criterion arrives not as content but as the obvious. What has become obvious is not examined. What is not examined is not seen.

This is what makes a received criterion so hard to identify. Something handed over as an opinion can be agreed with or argued against. Something handed over as the obvious offers no surface to agree or disagree with. This is what work is sits in the background rather than in the argument, and backgrounds are not debated.

Being told an explicit ceiling on what you might earn is uncommon. Yet the estimate tends to settle somewhere near the level you grew up around. What was transmitted is not a figure but the sense that the figure is normal. A sense carries no number, so nothing ever tests it.

The same holds for the form of work. Where employment sits in the background, self-employment was not rejected — it was never considered. Where self-employment sits in the background, employment is the thinner option. Both sides experience their own side as neutral.

Caring what other people think grows from the same root. If the instrument of measurement came from outside, the sense of being measured comes from outside too. That side is treated in why other people’s judgement gets to you.

Tracing where the criterion came from can read as shifting responsibility onto parents or employers. Tracing an origin and moving responsibility are different operations. The point of tracing is to tell whether the criterion in use was adopted by choice. If it was chosen, keep using it; if it was merely received, you can choose again. Responsibility is not needed for that.

There is a side effect in the other direction as well. Having found that a criterion was received, the impulse is to discard it for that reason alone. That is the same move inverted, and it still hands the decision to the origin. Discarding because the origin is external is still deciding by origin. What decides is whether the criterion works for where you are now going.

“How to Remove It” Fails When You Take It as a Question of What

The two most common ones are to set a goal outside your current situation, and to raise the level of abstraction.

Neither is wrong. What goes wrong is taking them as questions of what.

Take setting a goal outside your current situation. Most people start by searching for content — which goal to set. But the material for that search is supplied by the current criterion. What lies outside the current situation carries low importance under that criterion, so it does not appear among the candidates.

What gets chosen instead is fairly consistent. Whatever the current criterion scores as large. More income, more scale, more recognition. All of them are items the current criterion already rates highly. So what is selected is not outside the situation but the furthest point along its extension.

There is one way to tell. Whether the route to that goal is already visible. If it is, the goal sits on the extension of the present.

Raising the level of abstraction fails in the same shape. The view from above is not available until you are above. Try to acquire the vantage point before climbing and you stop moving.

This does not mean the instructions cannot be carried out. What cannot be carried out is one way of receiving them: select unseen content out of visible material. There is a route that changes the direction of the choosing rather than its content. That route lies in whether the criterion can be sourced from somewhere other than the past.

One more thing. These procedures work clearly once the criterion has moved. What does not work is entering through the procedure before the criterion has moved. The problem is order, not content.

If following the procedure feels comfortable throughout, the criterion has not moved. An option from outside gives the current criterion no reason to rank it first, so unease shows up while you are handling it. Going through smoothly means the whole thing was processed inside the current criterion.

The point about order can also look like a wholesale dismissal of the people offering procedures. It is not. Most of them have been through a movement of the criterion themselves. To someone who has been through it, the experience looks like a procedure. The structural loss is that turning it into a procedure drops the information about order.

And the loss is hard to see from the author’s side. The order you came through looks self-evident once you are past it. What looks self-evident does not get written down. What was not written down is the reader’s first obstacle.

It Is Not a Defect: Without It, Nothing Would Be Liveable

Told only that the criterion narrows what you see, the mechanism looks like an obstruction and nothing else. It is not.

The reason lies in a constraint on resources. Processing everything that arrives at equal weight, continuously, would take more energy than a living body can supply. So the arrangement that does not process all of it is the one that was selected.

This is an optimisation under a constraint. It is not a fault.

Picture its absence and living stops working. Every object in view, every sound around you, every point of contact on your skin would rise into awareness with equal weight. In that state you could not follow the person in front of you or stay with a single task. Not raising things into awareness is the same function as concentrating, seen from the other side.

Put differently, wanting concentration while not wanting blind spots is not a coherent request. One function cannot be taken only from the convenient end. Directing attention to something is the same operation as not raising the rest.

In psychology the phenomenon is treated under the name inattentional blindness. Arien Mack and Irvin Rock gave it systematic treatment (Mack & Rock, Inattentional Blindness, MIT Press, 1998), showing experimentally that a fully visible object goes unrecognised when attention is engaged elsewhere. The point carried by the term is that this is a matter of how attention is allocated, not of eyesight.

So “it is not a defect, therefore leave it alone” does not follow. An optimisation under a constraint is right inside the constraint and not outside it. If the situation has changed since the criterion was formed, a correctly working mechanism produces incorrect results.

The instrument is not broken; what it is applied to has changed. A ruler measures accurately, and when the object changes, measuring accurately is what produces the error.

This account can also be read as an endorsement of leaving things as they are. It is natural, so it is fine. What is claimed here goes only as far as not an object for removal. Not removable and not movable are different.

The opposite misreading is a reaction: knowing it is natural makes it easy to handle carelessly. Everyone has it, so having it is not a problem. Everyone having it and it operating in your situation are separate matters. A general fact does not excuse a particular case.

The Better It Has Gone for You, the Newer the Blind Spots

I work as a performance coach, in this field, on this side of it. I am in the same business as the people offering the removal techniques.

With that said, the structure by which success builds a blind spot applies to me as well.

Experience of success builds a strong criterion. The methods that worked gain importance, everything else loses it. The stronger the criterion, the narrower what rises into awareness.

So this is not confined to people for whom things are not going well. It operates most forcefully in the areas where someone has a clear record. And to that person, as always, nothing seems to be happening.

What makes it worse is that success comes with evidence. A method that worked carries proof that it worked. A criterion backed by proof offers no reason for doubt, and without a reason for doubt it drops out of review. The stronger the record, the less that area gets examined.

For anyone offering removal techniques, this is awkward. The person giving the guidance is inside the phenomenon being described. And one’s own blind spots are, by definition, not observable from the inside. Filling the side you cannot observe takes someone standing where it can be observed. Eyes that do not yet share your criterion are what that means in practice.

The same holds for this article. What has been laid out here was assembled from material selected by the criterion I currently hold. Someone holding a different criterion, looking at the same phenomenon, would produce a different outline. I have no way to check that from here.

A side effect: this kind of self-reference is usable as an escape hatch. Write I have blind spots too, so I may be wrong and no claim can be damaged. That is not the use being made of it. Adding a limit and weakening a claim are different. What is set out here is set out in a form whose sources can be traced. While it can be checked, a limit does not reduce the strength of the claim.

What is being said is that the contents of this article are also something for you to check on your side. What can be used for that is whether what counts as important is being settled from the future side.

What Has to Change for the Outline to Change

The origin of the criterion is who you have been. Interests you have held, the life you have led, measures you received. All of it sits on the side of what has already happened.

Which leaves one question. Can the origin of the criterion be placed anywhere else?

It can. A goal you set yourself takes that position.

Look at the order. A criterion built from the past keeps making today’s important things the same as yesterday’s. Judgements land inside that range and the range hardens. The direction reverses when the goal is placed first. What is needed in order to get there gets decided, and what is needed gains importance. What counts as important now is determined from the side of the future.

The instruction on how to remove it fails when taken as a question of content. So where do you enter, if not through content? The answer is to change the direction of the choosing.

The range you can currently sit in comfortably is made of where the interests you have held so far reach. Where they reach falls, in most cases, inside the interests of you and the people close to you. Which means a goal that benefits only you sits inside that range however large you make it. Add a digit to the income, widen the scale — while the set of beneficiaries is unchanged, the range is unchanged.

Turn it around and a goal placed in terms of what you can provide lands outside that range. Not because you compared candidates and picked an outside one. Because the direction of the choosing changed, it is no longer inside. Widening the set of beneficiaries past yourself is itself what takes you out of that range.

So the entrance is not where size is being contested. Whatever you are absorbed in now will do — place first who it is useful to. If you want more money, decide before you have it what it will go towards. Only the order is reversed. The material is already in your hands.

Given that structure, the most direct route is having someone alongside you who holds a standard outside your current range. I do that for a living, so recommending it comes with an interest attached. What I can write here is the side that moves without a companion.

And there is one requirement that cannot be dropped. The goal has to be one you set. The problem of a received measure is not solved by bringing in someone else’s measure, because the origin stays outside. Whether the criterion you end up with is your own is not something you can judge. The criterion that would do the judging came from whoever handed it over.

So I am not going to write which goal to place. Writing it would make it a goal selected by my criterion. What this article has been about is a received criterion settling in as the obvious. Handing one over runs that structure once more.

What I can look at instead is whether the set of candidates has changed. Options that would not previously have been considered at all — have they started arriving as things to consider? The test is not whether you acted, but whether it entered the set. What is not in the set will not become action however much will is applied. What has entered the set responds readily to the ordinary work of getting started.

The term has travelled together with removal techniques. What the verb remove presupposes is a covering, and something underneath that appears once it is taken away. There is no covering. What there is is a criterion for importance and the outline that criterion produces. The outline cannot be removed. It changes shape by as much as the criterion moved.

The question changes with it. Not “how do I remove it” but “where am I deciding from”. The first asks for something on the outside. The second can be checked from where you are standing.

The outline treated here is one part of a single structure: the order of wanting and recognising. The resistance that stands up when you turn towards an action is in a mental block is not a defect; why behaviour that never enters the set does not happen is in not acting is not a failure of will; and the handling of received criteria themselves is in a habit of thought is not something to correct. The overall map is gathered in what cognitive science shows.