Lancaster below

This morning I was walking along the northbound platform of Lancaster Station and I saw that this door was open. I've never noticed it before and, additionally, it's never occurred to me that there might be a basement below the station.

As I stopped to photograph it, other people walked past. No one else stopped and, of course, no one decided to venture down the stairs to see what was beneath the station.

This put me in mind of the 'perception filters' from Doctor Who and Douglas Adam's 'Somebody else's problem field', as well as the entrance to The Leaky Cauldron in Harry Potter and even Neil Gaiman's 'Neverwhere': they all boil down to that same phenomenon, the human ability to filter our perceptions. (What I found so tiring about watching Sherlock Holmes is that he notices *everything*.)

There's actually a name for this, which is "selective attention" and there's a brilliant experiment involving basketball and a man in a gorilla suit which highlights the extraordinary extent to which this occurs. You can read about it and see the experiment here.