We have ‘deja vu’, for where something that hasn’t been seen before seems strangely familiar. There is the opposite, ‘jamais vu’, for something that is familiar but suddenly seems alien.
How about the phenomenon where something is so common and well-known to you, that you no longer see it? It’s like having a psychological blind spot.
For example, I’m looking for a pair of scissors around the house. I look in the bedroom, but fail to acknowledge that the pair of scissors that have been sitting on the shelf for years are what I’m looking for - I’m so used to seeing them there that my mind has abstracted them away somehow and they are no longer “scissors”.
I think this is a better example. There’s a painting on the wall in my house. I’ve walked by it every day for 30 years, so I’ve completely forgotten that it exists, even though to a visitor, it stands out clearly. Scientific American just had an article on this. Here it is. It’s called perceptual blindness.
I know what you mean, a kind of familiarity breeds contempt where the object is so familiar that it ceases to have any “meaning”. It’s funny that you chose scissors. I recently couldn’t find my pair. Eventually I sat at the computer and worked out that I last used them at Christmas for gift wrapping, which I had done at the computer table. And there they were about 18" from the monitor I am now using. They even have bright red handles. Looking around now amongst the things on the table, are - shoe polish, a 9V battery, my magnifying glass and the sellotape dispenser. If I had needed any of these things I would not have known where to start looking although I “look” at them every day.
The meaning that any object has is confered by ourselves whether conciously or not and the superficial nature of our powers of observation is the crux of many mental tricks. A friend of mine is an ex cop and now works as a private investigator. He was telling me about tricks for doing surveillance work and lots of them play on things we don’t notice. Apparently people don’t pay attention to someone sitting alone in the passenger seat of a parked car - your brain makes up a story about the person waiting for the driver and that’s it. And don’t forget the old principle of “hiding something in plain sight”.
I hope there is a word or phrase for this, it deserves one.
Anything commonplace and familiar will look strange and unfamiliar once you really start to pay attention to it. That’s what the existentialist experience is about (see Sartre): the ‘void’ or ‘nothing’. In the end, nothing exist necessarily, it just exists, and realization of that fact makes it strange.
Children live in this perpetual state of wonder. Adults seem to forget that they once were children.
I can’t offer any formal psychological jargon, but the phenomenon you refer to is well-known. The brain takes the sensory information we have about the surrounding world and builds a cognitive model based on it. Because the brain cannot process information about every sensory input all the time, it has to prioritise, and so it gives most attention to that which is new and different in the immediate environment rather than things which seem to conform to the cognitive model already in place. This is possibly an early survival mechanism, in that it’s the new/different things that might be dangerous and need to be noticed and addressed first. So you can call it attention fatigue, or jaded familiarity, or whatever you like: the fact is, the things which we see and are familiar with every day are the things we actually cease to notice because the brain sees no need to take note of them.
“jejunais vu”, I’d guess for "don’t notice it because it’s too familiar.
Now, are you aware of your tongue? Just think about it–you’ve got a wet piece of flesh just filling up your mouth, all slimy and lumpy–oops, there it is again.
I can get “deja vu” and “jamais vu” to translate in google’s language tools, but not this. Is it correct? When I search on the term itself (without the ‘vu’) I see a lot of porteguese sites. But this is interesting.
Although not the elegant off-the-tongue-rolling type of phrase you’re probably looking for, in social work / counseling fields there’s a term for it: “The Elephant in the Living Room”.
I think it comes from some old story about a family with a huge elephant (live? sculpted? I dunno…) taking up 9/10 of their living room, and accomodating visitors in the cramped spaces around the perimeter, and discussing with their visitors the difficulty in finding space enough for all that they want to do. Finally someone mentions the elephant and they go “Huh? What elephant?”
So, by extension, anyone who has an “elephant in the living room” is overlooking something that is entirely applicable to their current problem, because they take it for granted and don’t notice it.