Anyone know the psychological term for not seeing something that is right in front of you? For example, you are looking for the salt shaker, but you can't find it anywhere, then you finally notice that it's on the table right in front of you, where it was all along.

Years ago I knew a term for this, and it wasn't "negative hallucination." Anyone know what it is?

Thanks,
Mike

According to Douglas Adams, the salt shaker is surounded by an "SEP field", which is generated when we consider it "Somebody Else's Problem", and hence, invisible.

Hi Mike,
I have to tell you that I have always called it exactly what you said: 'negative hallucination'.
I just e'mailed a couple colleagues and they came back (without prompting) and called it the same thing.

All the best,

Bobser

Hi mike,
me again.
I am sure negative hallucination is correct. However the term can also be used for when one sees something they have never even imagined before (they simply cannot conceive it) they don't see it.
cheers

bobser

This reminds me of Lesley's marked deck; the secret is literally right in front of the spectators's eyes, and it's not some code or pattern that needs to be deciphered. I've heard that our brains can't handle the overload of visual information, so we filter out a lot of it and concentrate on what seems important.

If it is related to brain trauma, then it can also be called neglect. Often that includes an entire visual field...Like eating on the right side of your plate, right down the middle. It is interesting stuff.

Maybe its a litle profan: but how about "to overlook something" or "to lose sight of something"

anywhere I read (i think it was milton erickson) that there is no such thing as negative hallucination. because what happens is that the background is hallucinated over the object.

I hadn't thought of it that way, Thomas, but that's actually a good point. "What do you see now?" "The street... just the street..."

Well the easiest and most persisting natural occurence of this has to be the "blind spot" of the human eye, so maybe that would be a term that most people can easily relate to? Everybody knows it exists, it's easy to demonstrate and it's not a huge leap of faith to then wonder just how much more of the world is subject to similar peculiarities, how many "psychological blind spots" effect how we percive the world?

Another related, though perhaps not as useful (for your needs) state is "Tunnel Vision."

"Selective awareness" is yet another concept that could be used along the lines you are heading... for example; your awareness is so focused on looking for the salt shaker (focused on it's visual specifics) that the feeling of already holding it in your hand dosn't register as important - despite the fact that it is alerting you to the very thing you are looking for - simply because your awareness is so focused on visual input that overrides or at least takes front row in your mental processing - it's not until you relax your search criteria that everything suddenly becomes clear.


Anyhow I hope this lot is of some help.

Psychologically invisibility?

It's called Mass Hypnosis.

It happens every night when whole families gather in the TV room to watch TV but no-one can seem to find the Remote Control, but it's in plain site ( somewhere ? ).

Some specialists feel that this is somehow connected to Remote Viewing.

I know this dosen't help,
Derek

Michael,
this bothered me all night until this morning at breakfast it slid along the correct neuron...
It's actually called 'Hysterical Blindness'.
All the best,

Bobser.

Bobser:

I don't think hysterical blindness works on this one. People with HB claim to not be able to see anything at all. They're somewhat easy to pick out because they wake up unable to see, but don't seem all that worked up about it. (I came across this once working as a nurse in the Missouri corrections system). On the other hand when I'm looking for my keys that I KNOW were on the table five minutes ago and I'm late for work...I am kind of worked up about it.

I like DanielLove's selecive awareness better. We have a mental picture in our head of what we are looking for and if it doesn't look exactly like what we have in our head it doesn't register and we just keep looking.

I call it not being able to see beyond the end of my nose, or as my dad used to say, "blind in one eye, can't see out of the other".

Ok Moderncelt, I could be wrong.
However can I just say that it certainly isn't DanielLove's (sorry Dan), since this has got nothing to do with what we're looking for. Rather something appearing which we have never seen before (see my earlier post).
Having said that, I could be wrong again.

I'm actually much better as a mentalist.

Bobser.

They discuss it in a fair amount of detail in Transformations - Bandler, Grinder. But they don't use any other name. (They definately call it "negative hallucination".)

It is a phenomenon that NLPers learn to use as a tool/skill
You can use it to 'not see' things or people that you don't want to see
Most people can just ignore things to a certain extent but in NLP you can learn how to ignore things that normal people would find hard or impossible to ignore
Cheers
TJ