So my waking routine, get up, put the kettle on, get coffee and sugar from the cupboard…and I couldn’t find the coffee. It’s always in the same cupboard, but not necessarily in the same spot, as things get rearranged daily in that cupboard.
Thus I have the sugar, and start pulling things out from behind other things searching for my precious instant caffeine, but no coffee. It’s just gone.
Seconds from despair, I reach for the real coffee to brew a pot and LO…there’s my coffee, right in front of my bloody face. And it had been sitting there, staring at me the whole time.
Yeah, I know everyone has done this, probably umpteen times, but I’d like to know if there’s a name for this phenomenon.
I think of it as a black hole that moves around my house, sucking things in and then spitting them out, sometimes in places where I know I didn’t put them.
I believe the official expression is “hiding in plain view”; not quite the same as “hidden in plain view”, which means someone else has left it there on purpose, knowing that something in plain view will look more innocent and therefore less interesting than if it was hidden.
In Spanish we’re lucky it wasn’t a dog, for it would have bit you, or a bull, for it would have run over you.
A related phenomenon is “have you checked under the socks?” This is what happens when something isn’t found because it is in its usual spot but there is something in front of it; you know, just like when there has been a load of socks in the laundry and then suddenly the teenaged boys can’t find the rest of that drawer.
“Can’t see for looking” is a common way to describe it here in the UK. No idea how regional, or indeed original that is. It’s like a trivial case of “can’t see the wood for the trees”
There was a Twilght Zone or OuterLimits episode - someone managed to ‘step outside time’ - and it showed that between moments, there was entire crews moving things about to the next moment in time (think the way old animators would do each cell of an animation) - and the explanation there was that one of the crew forgot to put the keys where you just sat them, and then corrected minutes later.
‘Snake’ is what I often call it (re: post #3) - and one thing I have learned over the years -
No matter how hard I look for something - it will always be in the last place I look for it.
Race to Escape recently referred to this as “Inattentional Blindness”. Wiki defines inattentional blindness as, “the event in which an individual fails to recognize an unexpected stimulus that is in plain sight.”
It was The Twilight Zone episode A Matter of Minutes. This is what my wife and I always refer to when it happens to us. We blame it on the blue people.
I found the thread I was thinking of earlier - here - the (I think) opposite phenomenon to the one being discussed here is ‘priming’ - that is, when your mind is conditioned to notice or snap your attention to things that match a learned pattern.
I think something related might be happening here - maybe the ‘pattern’ in your mind for the TV remote somehow gets corrupted and you fail to see the real object because it doesn’t sufficiently match the pattern.
Or in some cases, the physical appearance/configuration of the object might not present as it usually does. I always put my keys in the same place on a small table. My mind is conditioned to expect my keys to be sitting in an exposed position on a bare patch of tablecloth. One time, the keys were obscured by a small piece of paper that was only just big enough to hide them (and didn’t even drape to properly cover them - and nothing much else was even on the table) - and my keys were ‘lost’. It took someone else to find them (and I looked like an idiot).
