The importance of attention for our cognition and behaviour is often glaringly apparent when we experience various inattention failures. At times we find ourselves constantly distracted by things we wish we could ignore. At other times we are so focused we may fail to notice obvious sights such as a friend walking towards us, and may not even hear a person talking to us: we experience “inattentional blindness and deafness”. In my talk I present our recent psychological and neuroimaging research that explains the causes of these paradoxical experiences, as well as what makes some individuals more prone to them than others. The work has wide range of applications in real world settings, and a few recent examples will be described as well.