So true. Add knowledge. Take knowledge of geology - someone describes to you what a drop stone is, and suddenly you can be looking at an exposed landscape and see hundreds of them. Before that, all you see is the landscape.

Add the fact that we're social animals, and that creates a filter that can be difficult to ignore. People will ignore safety advice if they think its socially expected. Take for example the recent nightclub fire in Russia - crowded nightclub, obviously not enough fire exits: an informed person's first impulse should be to leave the nightclub, miss the music, another day perhaps. Instead people want to stay and experience the music with the crowd. 113+ died.

I have a friend who relates it all back to the amygdala, an old, old part of our brains which I confess I still don't understand very well, but it pretty well controls how we deal with stress, conflict and challenges in life. But it can be summed up in the survival response, never underestimate the power of denial. A part of our consciousness constantly filters for what is important and what is perceived as not, and you can sometimes teach or trick it to filter differently, though acquisition of knowledge or occasional denial of our social instincts.