How Sleight-of-Hand Magicians Trick Our Brains
Baku, October 13 (AZERTAC). When watching an expert magician make a playing card vanish, pick-pocket a volunteer or perform any other startling sleight-of-hand trick, it seems that the harder you try to pay attention to their lightning fingers, the more easily you`re fooled.
This is no coincidence. As you will learn on "Brain Games," a new series on the National Geographic Channel that illustrates the minor miracles required to pay attention and form memories, brains run on just 12 Watts of power. That`s about a third of the amount used by an average refrigerator lightbulb. Such limited resources make us highly susceptible to trickery, because it only allows us to concentrate on one thing at a time. Magicians utilize people`s inherent single-mindedness to great effect.
Brains have two kinds of attention. The first, called "top-down" or decision-making attention, is what you use when you decide to focus on a stimulus or task (such as this article). Top-down attention is controlled by the part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. Second, we employ "bottom-up" or surprise attention when we quickly shift our focus onto an unexpected stimulus, such as a ringing phone. This is a more primitive response system controlled in areas of the brain called the sensory cortices.
Magicians trick you by occupying both forms of your attention. Left with no others, you`re completely and hopelessly distracted from their sleights-of-hand.
In "Brain Games," a sleight-of-hand artist named Apollo Robbins, who once made headlines by pick-pocketing Secret Service agents who were accompanying former President Jimmy Carter, says, "Distracting people can be quite simple."
Robbins employs "top-down distractions" by getting people to focus either on a conversation or on his actions. By being entertaining - or just confusing - he demands their attention. Meanwhile, on the side, he quietly removes their watches or scarves. "If I need to steal from a difficult spot, I like to use a `bottom-up` attention strategy to direct the focus," Robbins says. Clapping loudly, a sudden movement, or in an example demonstrated in the show, waving a spoon in the air, are all examples of such strategies.
You might think that you, unlike most other people, wouldn`t fall for such simple strategies, because you`re a multitasker — you can pay close attention to several things at once. However, according to experts, multitasking is an illusion.
"Realistically, we can only process one thing at a time. We`re effectively `serial processors,`" says David Strayer, a psychologist who conducts research on attention at the University of Utah. "When we try and multitask, we`re just switching from one activity to another."
Despite the fact that brain scans show we can only focus on one thing at a time, Strayer explained, people often have the illusion that they`re balancing all their tasks equally, and performing well at all of them. "You become blind to your own impaired performance," he said.
This may be why it`s so frustrating when you fail to catch a magician in their act. You really thought you were paying attention to everything — so how did they manage to trick you?
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