Inattentional Blindness
You can stare right at something and not see it
Inattentional blindness is the failure to see something fully visible when your attention is focused elsewhere. In the famous demonstration, viewers asked to count basketball passes routinely miss a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. The phenomenon reveals a core feature of how vision works: your eyes take in far more than your brain consciously processes. Attention, not the eye, determines what reaches awareness, and anything outside that spotlight can go completely unnoticed.
In real life...
When doing something that demands focus, like driving, crossing the street, or monitoring a screen, build in deliberate "reset" moments where you broaden your attention and scan for the unexpected. You can't will yourself to see what you're not attending to, but you can train the habit of periodically widening your attentional spotlight.