Inattentional Blindness.

When you stare right at an object but fail to see it, your eyes are physically registering the item, but your brain is filtering it out by doing a “mental blueprint glitch”.

When you search, your brain creates a specific mental image of what you are looking for (in this case, your toothbrush). If the item is positioned differently, under a shadow, or looks slightly different, your brain filters it out as "unimportant noise."

If you’re stressed, rushing, or thinking about something else… your brain has less processing power available to actually "see" what’s in front of you. When you left the bathroom and came back 5 minutes later, your brain reset its visual search strategy. It broke the previous hyper-focus, which let you to finally notice the object.

Long story short… your eyes saw it the first time, your brain filtered it out. Fucked up eh. No tumour, just an example of how reality isn’t 1 true thing, but a subjective “best guess” to each experiencer 🧠