Why familiar things become invisible to us
The picture above the sofa. The view from your kitchen window. The building you pass every morning.
At some point, they stopped being things to notice and became part of the background.
Our attention is economical like that.
Once something becomes familiar and predictable, it doesn't need quite as much of us. Psychologists use the word habituation for one version of this: when a repeated stimulus gradually attracts less of a response.
Think about a ticking clock.
You hear it when you first enter the room. Ten minutes later, it hasn't stopped ticking. You've stopped listening.
And perhaps the same thing happens, in a softer way, to parts of our everyday world.
It's one reason new places can feel so visually rich. On holiday, suddenly you're looking at doors. Balconies. Signs. Tiles. People's windows.
Your own street probably has all of those things too. You just already know it.
Maybe noticing doesn't always require finding something new.
Sometimes you only need to look at something familiar as though you haven't seen it before.
Choose one thing you pass every day and look at it properly today.
You may be surprised by how much of it you've been missing.
Research on habituation and selective attention helps explain why repeated, predictable information can demand less of our attention over time.
Based in part on research by Catharine Rankin and colleagues on habituation, and by Marvin Chun, Julie Golomb and Nicholas Turk-Browne on attention.