the world shrinks to one glowing point and everything else goes dark, including your judgment.
means a narrowed focus, physical or mental, where you fixate so hard on one thing you stop registering everything around it.
from originally an ophthalmology term for constricted peripheral vision from conditions like glaucoma or retinitis pigmentosa, borrowed by psychology in the mid-20th century to describe cognitive narrowing under stress or obsession.
weapon focus effect — eyewitnesses fixate on a gun, forget the attacker's face, documented since 1980s studies.
apollo 13 fixation — early alarms nearly got misread as one glitch instead of a cascading failure.
driving while texting — attention narrows so hard drivers miss pedestrians in plain sight.
chess time pressure — players fixate on one threat and blunder into a bigger one nearby.