Douglas Adams had an adjacent concept called the "Somebody Else's Problem Field" -- a field that surrounded things that were so confounding that people's brains decided that was "somebody else's problem to deal with" and rendered them invisible.
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Yup! The thing about the Vertigo trope is that as far as I can tell it's literally true. An event has to be legible to the viewer in the JC Scott sense of 'legible' or it doesn't register as an event. My college psych class did the count-the-basketball-passes video and like 3 of us saw the gorilla.
sep 3, 2025, 12:08 pm • 1 0 • view
RTD/Dr Who has similar with the perception filter.
sep 3, 2025, 11:15 pm • 2 0 • view