At a teaching conference about “brain-based learning” almost 20 years ago, I heard someone make the following analogy.
The speaker asked us if we had ever noticed our refrigerators humming away in the kitchen. We had! Then he asked whether we’d stopped noticing the sound even though it was clearly still happening. We had experienced that too!
This was because, he explained, our novelty-seeking brains decided that it was no longer worth paying attention to an unvarying signal. In the hierarchy of information our brains might focus on, which could include survival-related information or highly charged emotional information, the noise from a kitchen appliance ranked somewhere below the experience of watching paint stay wet.
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