"I'm just observant"

The first belief to look at is that the scan is perception. You see what's there. Some people notice less and you notice more, and the faults you notice are there to be noticed. That's not a habit, it's eyesight.

I'd put it differently. You're observant, and the scan is what observation turns into when only half of what's in front of you sends a signal.

Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert, two psychologists who study how feelings fade, published a model in 2008 of what they called affective adaptation, which is the process by which our emotional response to something weakens after we've been exposed to it. Their account runs like this. People attend to events that matter to them and that they can't yet explain. They react. Then they explain the event, reach an understanding of it, and once it's explained, they attend to it less and feel less about it. The thing hasn't changed. It's been filed.

Now apply that to the kitchen. The cleared table is explained. You know why it's clear, it's clear most evenings, there's nothing about it that needs understanding. It was filed long ago, and filed things don't get looked at. The pan on the hob is unexplained. It's not usually there, it shouldn't be there, and something about it needs accounting for. So your attention goes to the pan, and it goes there before you've decided anything. You didn't choose to see the pan and not the table. Your attention is built to go to the thing that isn't filed, and faults are almost never filed, because a fault is by definition the thing that isn't as it should be.

A smoke alarm is a fair comparison for two sentences. It's silent while the house is fine and loud when it isn't, and nobody thinks the alarm is giving a report on the house. It's giving a report on smoke.

The scan is the same. It's silent about the fine, not because the fine isn't there, but because the fine makes no sound. So when you say you're just observant, you're right about the faults and wrong about the rest. You're observing one half of the room, the half that's ringing. The other half, the table, the post, the school bag, is there and doing nothing to attract you, and you'd have to turn and look at it on purpose.

That's the first thing I'd like you to take from this book. The scan isn't a sharper eye. It's an ordinary eye, pointed by the way attention works, at whatever is unexplained. A person who notices what's fine as well isn't less observant than you. They've learned to look where nothing is ringing, which is a separate act and one that has to be chosen.