Hi, we're here from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn why sometimes you miss what's right in front of you.

You'll also learn from author Dana Thomas about the environmental costs of fast fashion and what you can do to help.

Let's dress up some curiosity.

There's a reason why sometimes you miss something that's right in front of you. You know what I'm talking about.

Maybe you use the flashlight function on your phone

while looking for your phone.

Or something more common to me,

I'll be looking for my glasses while I'm wearing my glasses and I have perfect vision looking for my glasses and I'm not using that as a hint that my glasses are on.

That's a thing? Yeah. Okay. Well it turns out that stuff like this is actually pretty common.

The phenomenon is called inattentional blindness and it happens when you encounter

something in a place you're not expecting.

No matter how strange, blatant, or eye-catching it is,

our brains just don't want to notice things where we don't think they belong.

For example, in 2014, researchers attached dollar bills to a tree on the quad at Western Washington University.

College, right?

The dollars were attached to a branch that extended out over the walking path, And the spot was chosen specifically because researchers had seen lots of students

have to duck to avoid that branch or push it to get it out of their way.

And the students still did this after the dollars were attached, but hardly anybody noticed the money.

There's another way that our brains can gloss over the details of a scene too.

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