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Thoughts compete for your attention
Too much input
The reason is capacity. Eyes, ears, and skin send information every millisecond, which would add up to terabytes a minute. Google Glass was meant to record everything its wearer saw, and it flopped partly because most of what happens in a day is boring and not worth keeping.
Two kinds of signals
Two kinds of signals win the contest. Bottom-up attention seizes the mind when something important happens, such as a piece of a building falling toward someone on the street. Top-down attention is goal-directed: looking for a friend in a busy railway station who will be wearing a red dress filters out everyone not in red.
Inner thoughts compete
Inner thoughts enter the same contest. In a lecture, attention fades in and out, and a thought like needing to book a restaurant for the evening can capture it even with the eyes open. Closing the eyes to think is just the extreme form of putting every resource on one thought, and only a small number of items, perhaps just one, can be processed at a time.
How much information do the senses send?
The human retina sends roughly 10 million bits per second to the brain, according to a 2006 estimate by Kristin Koch and colleagues in Current Biology. A 2024 paper in Neuron by Jieyu Zheng and Markus Meister argued that conscious behavior runs at about 10 bits per second. That makes the gap between what the senses collect and what a person can act on about a million to one.
Why do people miss things in plain sight?
In 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris asked viewers to count basketball passes in a video. About half of them failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. Attention focused on one task leaves little room for the rest of the scene, and the effect is called inattentional blindness.
Why does sudden movement grab attention so fast?
In 1984, Steven Yantis and John Jonides found that an object suddenly appearing in a scene captures attention even when people are told to look elsewhere. Abrupt onsets are among the strongest bottom-up attention captors. The visual system is wired to flag them quickly, since a new object or movement in the field of view is more likely to matter than a static one.
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