The power of your partner’s self-absorptionâ??how he or she can sit so cheerfully through dinner, oblivious to the fact that you’re visibly upset, for exampleâ??may amaze you, but don’t write off the relationship so fast. There are a couple of good excuses to explain such clueless behavior, and they’re likely to apply to you as well.
The first excuse has to do with an innocent brain glitch called attentional blink. Originally described by Canadian scientists in 1992, it occurs in certain circumstances when, for a split second, “we literally become unconscious of what might be happening right in front of us,” says Richard Davidson, PhD, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsinâ??Madison. Researchers can elicit the blink by showing subjects a rapid stream of numbers on a computer screen and asking them to hit a button every time they see a 3. When two 3s appear closely together, Davidson says, almost nobody hits the button twice. “It’s as if the mind gets stuck on the occurrence of the first and misses the second.”