When we are focusing on one task, we often fail to notice something obvious in our field of view. This phenomenon, known as inattentional blindness, was famously demonstrated in a study involving a person in a gorilla suit, which participants failed to spot. But now it seems the gorilla isn’t so invisible, and we do actually take in information even when we might miss the wider picture.

In a classic experiment from 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, then at…