The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons tries to answer this question. These guys made the video where people are supposed to count the n

The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons tries to answer this question. These guys made the video where people are supposed to count the number of basketball passes (I won't say what's actually in the video in case you haven't already seen it). The pilots were likely afflicted by a form of inattentional blindness. Their brains certainly heard the stall warnings, but they were filtering them out so that they could focus on "the important stuff." People do stuff like this all the time, like crash their cars into motorcycles because they were so preoccupied looking for oncoming automobiles (not bikes).