Unintentional Blindness, a fascinatingly under appreciated phenomenon of human cognition.
It refers to [your] ability to miss the seemingly obvious, when attention is focused elsewhere. You’ll remember the ‘Invisible Gorilla’ experiment from school?

It kills.

Eastern Airlines Flight 401. The flight crew fixated on the *minor activity solving an indicator lamp malfunction, neglected to register the inadvertent disengagement of autopilot ‘altitude hold’. Consequentially, the plane began descending from its 2,000 feet altitude for several minutes, as the flight crew focused on the minor fault.

The crew realised less than ten seconds before catastrophic uncontrolled impact with the ground. 96 people were killed.

Remember the last time you saw a driver pick-up their mobile? Attention is divided between *minor activity on the phone and the task of driving. The implications of Inattentional Blindness are diverse, significant and utterly relevant to you, today. Gender quips aside, it is easy to embrace ‘multitasking’, leading to overlooked critical emails, hazards and operational failures.

The focus on a specific major-or-minor task can blind humans to ‘the critical’ hidden in plain sight. The constant juggle of tasks can lead to missed vital emails or overlooking significant data trends. Such oversights, while seemingly small, are not just about what we miss but also about the ripple effects of these missed elements.

1. When was the last time you missed something something important right in front of you?

2. Can you remember an instance of being overly focused on a smaller cog neglecting the smoking?

3. What is your personal strategy to mitigate this phenomenon?

Footnote:
How long did it take to consciously realise the Inattention Blindness trap in these words before reading this sentence?