Sensory Blackout

Magic and the Brain - BoingBoing

I remember watching the first half of "What the 'Bleep' Do We Know" (before I got abysmally bored with it) and being struck by the piece on the natives who first encountered Columbus. The shaman of the tribe, after being told about Columbus's ships out on the water, went to the shore and stared out to sea. For several days he didn't see anything and then suddenly the ships appeared. The explanation is that it simply took the shaman's brain that long to come to grips with objects that were completely outside of his frame of reference. Magic tricks seem to play on this loophole in our minds as we come to expect certain results from certain actions. What bothers me though is the thought of what else out there might we, right now, miss because it is so far outside our frame of reference that our brains simply don't register the information. Is it possible that there are things in this world that we have laid eyes on but simply failed to see because our brains couldn't cope with the information?