One cold January morning in 2008, at a subway station in Washington DC, a man wearing a baseball cap arrived carrying a violin.

He spent the next 45 minutes playing a series of pieces by the great German composer, Johann Christian Bach. During that time 1,097 people hurried past but of these only seven stopped to listen. A three-year-old boy was among the most interested. He would have been happy to hang around but his mother dragged him away. When the recital finished the man was greeted by silence. Nobody noticed him packing up. No one applauded. He left unrecognized. He had made $32.  Vida Adamoli investigates

What those commuters did not know was that their busker was the Grammy Award winning violinist, Joshua Bell. He was playing an extremely complicated repertoire on an instrument worthy of his classical star status - a $3.5 million Stradivarius.

Joshua Bell’s incognito busk was a social experiment designed by a writer on The Washington Post. He wanted to discover whether our perception, taste and priorities change according to the environment we are in. Are we receptive to beauty when busy with mundanities in everyday surroundings? Do we stop to appreciate it? And can we recognize talent if it is presented to us in an unexpected context?

The results were thought provoking. How much of value do we miss in our hectic, sensory-saturated lives? What don't we see or hear because we’re too distracted to notice? I’m reminded of the first two lines of a poem written in 1911 by the tramp-poet, Willian Henry Davies: ‘What is this life if full of care/We have no time to stand and stare…’

The feature resulting from this experiment won The Washington Post a Pulitzer Prize. Read it and see the secretly filmed video here