Founded in 1919 as a counterweight to the tide of nationalism and censorship that swept the nation during the First World War, the New School in New York’s Greenwich Village has long been a bastion of avant-garde thinking and progressive ideals. Early on it served as a sanctuary for professors fleeing repressive policies at other schools—most notably, Columbia—and during World War II it became a haven for Jewish intellectuals escaping the Nazis. Former students include Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Norman Rockwell, Marc Jacobs, Tony Curtis, Ani DiFranco, and sexologist Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
The New School currently houses the laboratory of Arien Mack, a research psychologist and pioneer in the field of cognition who for the last twenty years has paved the way for a rigorous scientific study of attention and misdirection—the very bedrock of magic.
I’d seen misdirection in action ever since I started doing magic, but I wanted to understand how it actually affects the brain. What are the underlying cognitive mechanisms at work when a person watches a magic show? What role do these mechanisms play in other areas of our lives? And how can a deeper understanding of the psychology of attention be used to enhance one’s magic?
I met Professor Mack at her cozy office in the maze of rooms that is the New School’s psychology department, housed within a cement tower in downtown Manhattan. On the floor beneath Mack’s, in rooms filled with toys and outfitted with small TV sets, infants were being temporarily separated from their mothers to see what attachment type they were—secure, avoidant, ambivalent, or disorganized. (Whichever attachment style you display in infancy can determine the fate of your adult relationships, one of Mack’s graduate students explained to me.) There were also labs studying memory, motivation, guilt, shame, racial awareness, kinship, reciprocity, OCD, ADD, and autism. Waiting for the elevator, I’d asked a young researcher what her group was working on. “We look at how the perception of spatial distances affects moral judgments,” she said brightly. I showed her a card trick, and she threw me a puzzled look—probably not unlike the one I gave her when she told me her specialty.
A charmingly frank Brooklyn-born skeptic—when I looked at her Facebook profile, I saw that under “Religious views” it read, “confirmed atheist”—Mack has lucid brown eyes, a warm smile, and a highly sensitized bullshit meter. She’s one of those academics who can field questions with a gesture—an arch of the eyebrows, a shrug of the shoulders—to let you know if your thought is worth pursuing or if you’re better off keeping quiet, and in this regard she reminded me of my physics professors, only more stylish in her navy slacks, white blouse, and chunky gold jewelry. As I shook her hand, my eyes lingered on her bright orange diving watch.
Having told her a little bit about why I was interested in her research, I soon found myself staring at a black computer monitor inside one of her testing stations, my head cradled between an ophthalmic chin rest and a padded plastic brace. It felt a lot like being at the eye doctor, except instead of a technician asking me which was clearer, one or two, A or B, a British grad student was telling me to hit any key. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said.
I took a deep breath, turned my focus to the monitor, and pressed the space bar. My task was to watch for a large lopsided cross that appeared in the center of the display and to determine whether the horizontal line or the vertical line was longer. After a series of trials, Mack’s grad student asked me if I’d seen anything else while looking at the cross. I sat back and shook my head. I was then shown four pictures—a house, a car, a boat, and an airplane—and asked if any of them looked familiar.
I shook my head again. “Nope.”
“If you had to pick one, which one would it be?”
None of them stood out, but I went ahead and picked the car. Wishful thinking, perhaps? The downtown train had been cheek by jowl.
The test I’d just participated in was the latest twist on an experiment Mack had designed years ago to investigate the relationship between perception and attention. The cross, Mack explained, was a distraction. While I watched it, comparing the vertical and horizontal lines, a picture had flashed briefly on the screen. Under normal circumstances, it would have been obvious, easily spotted by any observer. But because my mind was preoccupied with the cross task, it escaped my notice. Later, when repeating the experiment multiple times sans cross, I spotted the pictures with ease—car, boat, road—and was able to describe them accurately.
Mack first began carrying out this sort of experiment in 1988, with her late colleague Irvin Rock, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interest began with a simple question: How much of the world do we consciously take in when we aren’t paying attention? Mack has since carried out this brand of experiment on hundreds of subjects in an attempt to figure out just how much we notice when we’re distracted.
The answer, verified time and again, is next to nothing. In scores of studies, the evidence points to a simple yet astounding fact: inattention all but eliminates conscious experience. Objects and events appearing directly before our eyes, in what psychologists call the zone of fixation, frequently go unnoticed when our attention is elsewhere, as if our vision somehow stops working when we’re distracted. Mack and Rock coined the term inattentional blindness to describe this astonishing failure of awareness, all the more astonishing for having escaped discovery until recently.
What’s more, our vision isn’t all that’s affected. Audible noises become inaudible, simple words turn to gibberish, and even tactile sensations go unfelt when our attention wanders. “Attention appears to be necessary for all sensory modalities,” Mack explained to me in her office. “There is no conscious perception without attention.” Even minor distractions can render us deaf and blind, unable to perform simple tasks, regardless of the nature of the distraction. A visual task such as measuring a cross, in other words, can dull not just your sight but also your hearing and your sense of touch.
Misdirection has an uncanny ability to blind us to the obvious. Perhaps the most famous experimental example is a thirty-second film, created by University of Illinois cognitive scientist Daniel Simons, in which six basketball players—three in white T-shirts and three in black T-shirts—are seen passing a ball. The viewers are instructed to count the number of passes by the white team. Halfway through the film, a woman in a gorilla suit walks on-screen, stops in the middle of the tussle, and beats her chest repeatedly before exiting stage left. The gorilla remains on-screen for a total of nine seconds. Our intuition tells us that anyone not in a coma would notice the gorilla. But as Simons has discovered time and again, most people do not. More than half of all the subjects to whom he’s shown the film completely miss the gorilla because they are focused on the passing game. When I later spoke to Simons (whose book, The Invisible Gorilla, which he co-authored with Union College Psychology Professor Christopher Chabris, chronicles this and many other gaps in our awareness), he admitted that even after having screened the film hundreds of times at lectures and conferences all over the world, it still stuns him. “Every time I show the video I still kind of hold my breath because I’m convinced that everyone is going to notice,” he said.
Inattentional blindness is shocking for the simple reason that, as Mack put it, “We all think we see what we’re looking at”—and in a sense, we do. Technically speaking, everyone sees the gorilla. It’s on-screen for nine seconds—thirty thousand times longer than the shortest event a human can perceive. The image enters our pupils, strikes the retina, and barrels down the optic nerve all the way to the brain. Experiments using eye-tracking devices confirm this fact. People who don’t perceive the gorilla spend just as long looking directly at it—a full second on average—as those who do.
The same is true when watching magic. People tend to think magicians use misdirection to control where a spectator is looking. While this is certainly true some of the time, misdirection in magic is mostly about controlling a person’s attention—which can be totally independent from their gaze. UK psychologists Gustav Kuhn and Benjamin Tatler recently illustrated this with a series of experiments in which subjects watched a magician vanish a cigarette by dropping it in his lap during a moment of misdirection. (This is called lapping in the argot.) Using the same eye-tracking tools Simons employed in his gorilla experiment, they found that a person’s odds of spotting the secret method—that is, the lapping—did not depend on where they were looking at the time of the drop. Even those who were staring directly at the magician’s hand when he lapped the cigarette failed, in almost all cases, to spot the ditch.
As these experiments demonstrate, seeing isn’t believing. Just because you look directly at something doesn’t mean you will perceive it. If the brain doesn’t process a given visual stimulus, it’s as though it never existed. Misdirection, in a sense, masks the image, rendering it invisible. Psychologists sometimes call this loss of information “functional blindness,” to distinguish it from blindness caused by physiological defects in the structure of the eye, like what Richard Turner has. Inattentional blindness is a cognitive illusion as opposed to a visual one, an illusion not of the eyes but of the mind.
As it turns out, cognitive illusions have staggering real-world consequences. Inattentional blindness, for instance, is why you shouldn’t talk on the phone while driving. It’s not because your hands are busy, as is commonly thought, but because your mind is busy. The competing cognitive task is what puts you at risk, not the mechanical act of holding the phone to your ear. At highway speeds, a fraction of a second may be all the time you have to avoid a crash, and anything that widens your reaction gap can drastically increase the odds of an accident. Multitasking—not that other m-word your grandmother warned you about—is what makes you go blind.
A wealth of evidence has confirmed that using a phone severely lengthens reaction times and diminishes overall alertness, profoundly impairing one’s ability to drive. Studies comparing drivers on cell phones to drunk drivers have found no measurable difference in performance: both are equally dangerous behind the wheel. According to one analysis, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, the use of a phone while operating a motor vehicle quadruples your risk of a collision.
Far from a safety measure, hands-free devices are just as dangerous, if not more so, as regular handheld phones, because they promote a false sense of security while still hogging your attention. Indeed, several experiments have shown that hands-free devices do nothing to reduce the cognitive impairments associated with phone use. And yet many states, such as New York and Maryland, will waive citations issued for driving with a handheld phone if the motorist agrees to purchase a hands-free device.
(You may be wondering if talking on a hands-free phone is any different from chatting with a passenger in the car. It is—for several reasons. For one, the passenger may provide an additional set of eyes with which to watch the road for any imminent dangers. Other reasons include the fact that people who are in the car with you will likely understand if you need to focus and adjust the tempo of the conversation accordingly.)
Brain blindness of a sort not associated with cell phones may also account for the astonishingly high number of motorcycle accidents in the United States (much higher than in many other countries). Most motorcycle accidents on U.S. roads involve cars, and the vast majority of these occur when the car hits the motorcycle: the driver sideswipes the bike during a lane change or cuts off the cycle in mid-turn. In a significant number of these wrecks, the motorists did everything they were supposed to do—they signaled, checked their rearview and side mirrors, looked over their shoulders to make sure nobody was in their blind spot—and yet they still hit the bikes. What happened?
One explanation, Simons has argued, is that the drivers technically saw the motorcycles—that is, the image struck the retina and travelled down the optic nerve—but as with the gorilla, they didn’t consciously perceive the motorcycles in time to avoid a collision because they weren’t expecting to see them. A series of experiments in Mack’s lab has revealed that expectations play a pivotal role in what we perceive and that under certain circumstances the absence of expectation in and of itself is sufficient to induce a temporary state of inattentional blindness. Simons’s research confirms this result: we are less likely to notice that which we do not expect. And since motorcycles are far less common in the United States than they are elsewhere, and certainly less common than cars, drivers often don’t expect to see motorcyclists, which in turn makes them less accessible to conscious perception.
This interpretation jibes with studies on traffic accidents involving cyclists and pedestrians. Loosely speaking, the safest places to walk and bike are those with lots of pedestrians and cyclists. The reason for this is that the average driver expects to see pedestrians and cyclists in places where they are common and is therefore more likely to register them in time to avoid a collision. In New York City, for example, where there are more cyclists and pedestrians per square mile than anywhere else in the country, the rate of automobile accidents involving cyclists and pedestrians is well below the national average, most likely because motorists know to look out for them.
If memory is attention in the past tense, as psychologist Daniel Goleman has put it, Mack’s work on misdirection also helps shed light on why magic tricks often produce false memories—something virtually every conjuror has seen firsthand. This phenomenon was demonstrated some years back by the American magician John Mulholland when he performed for a group of psychology students during a lecture he gave at a major university. Midway through his talk, Mulholland described—but did not perform—a trick in which a coin teleports across the room. When asked a few weeks later to recount what had happened during the lecture, four out of five students said they remembered a coin traveling instantaneously from one end of the classroom to the other, even though this had never happened. This sort of anomaly can occur because, as has now been verified in dozens of studies, the mere act of imagining an event is enough to produce a false memory of it.
The inherently suggestive nature of magic automatically works in favor of encouraging false recollections, and even the hobbyist knows that spectators will remember all sorts of crazy things. More than once I’ve stood among a group of magicians trading war stories about spectators who swore they had witnessed true miracles:
I just thought of a card and he found it.
The card was flying around the room and bouncing off the walls.
He floated five feet in the air in the middle of my living room.
Spectators convinced they’d once seen the impossible often put me on the spot:
Can you make my card fly out of the deck and burst into flames?
No, but I can make it appear inside a lemon!
Of course, false memories aren’t confined to magic. Through the power of suggestion, psychologists have managed to implant all sorts of bogus memories in the minds of normal adults. People have been made to remember objects—buildings and cars and stop signs and electronic equipment—in scenes where no such objects were present. Memories of objects that were present were found to be highly malleable. Cars in a mock crime scene changed color. A yield sign became a stop sign. Mickey Mouse underwent gender reassignment to become Minnie Mouse. In one study, psychologists even managed to instill impossible memories of early infancy, despite the fact that the first two years of everyone’s life are opaque to memory, for reasons that are poorly understood. Even when the participants knew they were being fooled, these mnemonic swindles still worked. And once implanted, false memories can be tough to distinguish from real ones, even with the use of brain imaging machines.
The real-world implications of false memories can be quite serious. For one, false memories can undermine the legal system, sending innocent people to prison while acquitting guilty ones. Eyewitness testimony, even in the age of DNA evidence, remains a deciding factor in most criminal cases. But memory research suggests that eyewitness misidentification accounts for roughly 90 percent of wrongful convictions. Many accepted police procedures—lineups, interrogations using leading or accusatory questions, and the visualization techniques utilized by sketch artists—have been proved to distort memories. In certain extreme cases involving highly suggestible individuals, these methods have triggered fictitious confessions on the part of innocent people who, over the course of an investigation, developed false memories of a crime they did not commit.
In addition to scrambling our memories, misdirection also lowers our gullibility threshold, making us more prone to believe information we know is untrue. Psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin tested this idea by giving mock juries a series of written statements about an alleged criminal. All the participants knew which statements were true and which were false (because they appeared in different color type), but in the course of the trials, some of the jurors were presented with distractions. As it turned out, those who were distracted were far more likely to remember the false statements as facts. Not only that, but when the false statements made the crime seem worse, the addled jurors imposed a much longer prison sentence.
For obvious reasons, we tend not to recall events that our minds fail to register in the first place. It’s the tree falling in the forest. Put simply: we don’t remember what we didn’t notice. Because of this, we tend to overestimate our powers of observation. The gap between what we think we notice and what we actually notice is a reflection of our tendency to make judgments based on what readily comes to mind, something psychologists call the availability bias. When law enforcement agencies began putting pictures of missing children on the backs of milk cartons, for instance, the perceived rate of childhood abductions, as measured by national surveys, shot up drastically. To this day, parents fear kidnapping more than accidents, even though a child is one hundred times more likely to be killed in an accident than by a kidnapper. People also overstate the risk of shark attacks and lightning strikes simply because gruesome deaths make memorable headlines. In a similar fashion, we overestimate our powers of observation because we tend not to remember those instances when we failed to notice something.
In magic, when people fail to spot the secret to a trick, they tend to blame their vision, invoking the age-old saying “the hand is quicker than the eye.” In fact, the human eye is a blazingly efficient instrument capable of spotting flashes of light as brief as ten milliseconds—that’s 1/100th of a second, the shortest time interval on a digital stopwatch. A mere five photons—or quanta of light—are sufficient to trigger a conscious visual response. Magicians have long known that they don’t stand a chance of outrunning the audience’s eyes. “It is a common mistake to suppose that the quickness of the hand deceives the eyes,” observed the superlative English conjuror of the early twentieth century David Devant. “You cannot move your hand so quickly that its passage cannot be followed by anyone who is watching you.” The hand, in other words, is decidedly slower than the eye.
A better saying would be “the hand is quicker than the mind,” because, again, it’s the mind, not the eyeball, that’s at fault. A failure to notice, not an inability to see, is what characterizes cognitive illusions such as inattentional blindness. Misdirection, not speed, is the key to most magic tricks. “It’s more important to have good cover than it is to have good sleight of hand,” scam expert Whit Haydn told me at the Magic Castle. “If your cover is good you can get away with bad sleight of hand.” Magicians employ misdirection—be it verbal, visual, or tactile—to force us into multitasking mode, thereby inducing a temporary state of impaired awareness.
When magicians do employ speed, more often than not it’s to ensure that a given subterfuge falls within the span of an inattentional moment. A flash paper explosion or a puff of smoke, for instance, may distract you for only half a second before your focus snaps back to the magician’s sleeves, but that’s long enough. The glittery showgirls dancing about the stage also serve as instruments of inattentional blindness—drawing our attention (though not necessarily our gaze) away from the illusion at key moments. The same is true when doves fly into the air, as Vegas magician Lance Burton has observed. “At that point,” he once told a fellow conjuror, “you can do anything you want.”
I OFFERED TO SHOW ARIEN Mack a trick. I removed a red Bicycle deck and asked her to name any card. “Nine of diamonds,” she said. I smiled and placed the deck in her left hand. “Hold it tightly,” I said, grabbing both her wrists. “Imagine that the nine of diamonds is getting heavier, falling to the bottom of the deck.” I shook her wrists back and forth. “Can you feel it, Arien? Would you be impressed if I could get the card to jump out of the pack?” I let go of her wrists and told her to look at the bottom card. She turned the deck over to see the nine of diamonds on the face of the pack. “That’s very good,” she said, smiling and shaking her head. “I’m impressed.”
I said good-bye and made my way for the door. Just as I was about to leave, I spun back around and asked for the time. Mack looked down at her forearm, eyes narrowing, and a baffled expression crept across her face.
“Here,” I said, extending my left arm toward her. “Use mine.”
Upon seeing her orange diving watch coiled around my wrist, Mack’s chin hit her chest. She raised her arms above her head and laughed loudly then dropped them back down into her lap. “It’s amazing what you don’t notice when you’re distracted, isn’t it?” I said, flashing a cheesy grin. Mack straightened in her chair and pushed her tortoiseshell frames up to the bridge of her nose. She looked at me, head angled slightly to the right and back, a playful gleam in her eyes.
“Want to do an experiment?”
OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS, I became a fixture in Arien Mack’s laboratory, an oddball hanger-on who crashed her weekly group meetings with a deck of cards in hand. Tuesdays with Mack at the New School became as integral to my routine as Saturdays with Wes and Co. at Rustico II. Initially I was concerned that the other members of her lab construed my hyperactive eagerness as the telltale sign of a spectrum disorder. But whatever misgivings they might have had evaporated after a few card tricks.
Designing a psych experiment, I soon learned, is a lot like putting together a magic show. You begin by finding an audience (your test subjects), engaging them under what are typically false pretenses, and then you proceed to mess with their heads. The biggest difference is that you have to pay them, although it’s amazing the sort of Ludovico-style mind control undergraduates will subject themselves to for five bucks or candy from a stranger.
The experiment Mack and I designed was a test of tactile insensitivity—the tactile analog of inattentional blindness—using the watch steal as the critical stimulus. She’d done some preliminary studies on tactile insensitivity, in which it was revealed that people often don’t detect puffs of air on their arms when they’re focused on a demanding task. This was interesting, but nowhere near as dramatic as the results of her vision research. Our goal was to do for tactile insensitivity what her previous work had done for inattentional blindness. Mack was almost as excited about our scheme as I was. “This is the sort of experiment I’ve been wanting to do for years,” she told our group. We dubbed the project the Guerilla Experiment, a nod to Simons’s film but also to “guerilla magic,” the brand of street magic popularized by David Blaine, in which the magician walks up to random strangers and blows their minds with a few fast, hard-hitting miracles. The name was my idea.
MY FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE art of watch stealing had come a few years back, when my father’s Seiko was stolen from me by the man who calls himself Magick—a Harley-riding headbanger with long black hair and a prosthetic eye for a finger ring—on one of my Saturday visits to Tannen’s. I don’t remember any of the other tricks I saw that day. Nothing else compared. How could I have been so gullible? Could anyone, even people with two names, learn to do that?
“Teach me,” I pleaded. “I need to learn.”
A consummate salesman, Magick smiled calmly and pressed a VHS tape into my hands. “Here, man,” he said with a sidelong glance. “This is all ya need.”
The box cover showed a toothsome Dean Martin type smiling in a tuxedo and wearing seven or eight luxury timepieces on his left arm. It was called The Watch Steal Video, and it basically advertised itself as Thievery 101 for a mere $29.95. At that moment I would have thought it cheap at any price. The man on the cover was Chappy Brazil, a legendary New York street performer who moved to Sin City in 1999 and died shortly thereafter under tragic circumstances. In a morbidly ironic twist of fate, Brazil himself fell victim to the consequences of inattention. The night he finished making The Watch Steal Video, Brazil was riding his motorcycle to a friend’s house for a screening of the final cut when an LVPD squad car racing to a crime scene failed to notice him and slammed into his bike at pursuit speed, killing him instantly. He was thirty-three years old.
So how exactly do you remove a person’s watch without their noticing? It’s easier than you might think. The simplest watches to steal are the ones fitted with buckles, which work more or less like a belt. Slightly more challenging are watches with flip clasps; and by far the toughest are the expanding metal bands that have to be pulled over your hand. The Rolex is one of the hardest timepieces to steal. Even so, artful dodgers can pinch Rolexes off rich folk like candy from a baby. “The first watch I ever stole was a Rolex,” Magick told me with a chuckle. “I was just like . . . fuggit.”
For me, saying fuggit was the least of my concerns. Overcoming my instincts and ingrained guilt and ripping into someone’s jewelry required pluck of the sort I had not yet managed to acquire. Attempted robbery, even for entertainment purposes, was still attempted robbery, was it not? And although I didn’t know this at the time, I’ve since learned that several successful magicians stopped stealing watches after one or more spectators threatened to press charges. (Rumor has it Jerry Seinfeld once got a guy fired for stealing his watch at a show.)
Watch stealing is far more invasive than the average magic trick, which is why it gets such intense reactions. It’s the kind of thing people seldom shrug off. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that something so obvious could ever go unnoticed. Maybe we’ve learned not to trust our eyes in some cases, but our sense of touch? Few effects so starkly illuminate the holes in our perception. The watch steal is the invisible gorilla of magic.
For such an epic payoff, stealing watches is fairly straightforward, especially if you stick to the low-hanging fruit and only go for watches with buckles. To steal this type of watch, you make a C with your hand and press your thumb against the face of the watch while your middle finger curls around the person’s wrist. The tip of the middle finger should more or less align with the tip of the tongue. Most watches have a little loop to hold the tongue down against the band, so first you need to free the tongue by curling your middle finger inward, easing the tongue back out of the loop. Once this is done, your finger goes underneath the tongue and bends it all the way back, at an angle of almost 180 degrees, until the prong comes out of the hole. Once the prong is free, Chappy Brazil advises us to flick it back down and push the tongue slightly askew, just off to the side, so the prong doesn’t slip back into one of the holes as you yank the watch off the wrist. Finally, in a quick but fluid motion, you pull your hand away while palming the watch in your curled fingers.
An old Dickensian cutpurse’s training tool will help you get your criminal career under way. Grab yourself a broomstick or a mop and wrap a towel or rag around the pole enough times to make it roughly the diameter of a human wrist. Then secure the towel with tape or rubber bands. Strap as many watches as you can find around the pole and practice removing them one-handed without looking. With a little practice—okay, a lot of practice—you’ll get to the point where you can remove a watch in under five seconds.
As with any magic trick, the mechanics are but a small part of the illusion; psychology is the secret sauce. First and foremost, you need an excuse to grab your victim’s wrist, because if you yank at their watch for no reason they’ll almost certainly notice. I usually steal a spectator’s watch under the guise of doing a coin trick. Let’s imagine you’re that spectator and the watch is on your left wrist. I remove a coin and ask you to hold out both of your hands, palms up. If you’re wearing long sleeves, the watch will become exposed as you extend your arms toward me. After placing the coin in your right hand, I’ll tell you to close your fists as I grab both wrists, raise your arms almost to your face, and clamp my fingers around the watch.
“I’m going to show you how a coin can teleport,” I’ll say.
At this point I usually press down on the watch so that your touch receptors adapt to the sensation. The resulting sensory after-impression—literally, neurons still firing—blurs the pressure from the watch with the pressure from my hand, making it harder for you to feel the absence of the watch after it comes off your wrist (although it turns out that, while helpful, this isn’t really necessary). As I begin unbuckling the strap, I may move your arms back and forth in short straight lines while saying something like “If I shake hard enough, the coin will jump between your hands.” In magic as well as in pickpocketing, it helps to move in quick back-and-forth spurts when you want to shake off a person’s focus. If, however, you want them to follow your hand, it’s better to move along a smooth, curved trajectory. It’s not clear exactly why this is the case, but neuroscientists have hypothesized that these two forms of motion engage different parts of the visual system. Short linear bursts trigger so-called saccadic eye movements—extremely rapid but discontinuous darting of the eyes during which visual awareness is suppressed for intervals as brief as twenty milliseconds—whereas curved movements activate smooth-pursuit neurons, brain cells programmed to follow moving targets. This adaptation makes sense given that a straight line is a relatively predictable path, so your eyes can safely jump ahead, while a curved trajectory is less predictable and must therefore be tracked more closely.
If I know your name I’ll say it out loud two or three times as well. Your own name is like a tractor beam for attention. It pulls you in. Have you ever been in a noisy room when suddenly you hear your name called out amid the din? The peculiar ability to hear meaningful sounds selectively through white noise is called the cocktail party effect. In a similar vein, one of Mack’s experiments revealed that people are able to pick out their own names from a list of names even when under the spell of an inattentional state. If, however, the name is off by just one letter—Molly instead of Milly, or Bob instead of Rob—it tends to go unnoticed.
To add another layer of smoke, I’ll usually throw out some questions. Are you right- or left-handed? Can you feel the coin in your hand? Responding to questions is a lot like trying to count the number of passes in the gorilla video or comparing the vertical and horizontal lines of a cross. Parsing a question, accessing the necessary information, and formulating an answer are fairly demanding cognitive tasks, enough to bring about an inattentional state.
Once the watch is loose, I slip it off your wrist and, while you ponder the apparent anticlimax (the coin didn’t jump), I put the watch on my own wrist behind my back. Then I do a card trick to offset the awkward moment. I usually have to bite my lip at this point to keep from laughing, because your watch is on my wrist as I’m doing the trick, and you’re looking right at it. No matter how many times I do this, I always think my victims are going to notice.
But do they?
OVER THE COURSE OF SEVERAL months, Mack and I repeated this very same procedure in her lab, on subjects of varying age, gender, and race. Out of fifteen subjects in all, only three noticed, giving us a success rate of 80 percent. (As a comparison, the gorilla video fools between 50 and 60 percent of people on average.) We caught the whole experiment on tape, a cute little evidence film of crimes being committed in the name of science.
The most dramatic episode we filmed was the third trial, when the alarm on the watch I was stealing went off halfway through the scam, beeping loudly as I undid the buckle. At that point, I was sure the jig was up—but no, the woman didn’t even blink. This really took us by surprise as it provided dramatic evidence of inattentional deafness in addition to tactile insensitivity. Furthermore, in two separate trials—including the one in which the alarm went off—the prong stubbornly slipped back into one of the holes on the strap as I tried to pull the watch loose. As a result, I had to stall for time, re-grab the wrist, and unbuckle the strap again. I was afraid such a bold move wouldn’t fall beneath the critical threshold, and yet the two subjects in question were none the wiser.
In five out of the fifteen trials, we blindfolded the subjects and told them to focus on any strange sensations they felt. “I’m going to grab your wrists,” I said before starting. “I want you to tell me if you feel anything out of the ordinary.” I didn’t talk or say their names or ask questions throughout the trials—and yet, of those five, only two noticed. We conducted postgame interviews and recorded the responses, which included statements such as:
I didn’t feel a thing.
I can’t believe it.
I didn’t notice it until you told me.
I felt you tugging at one point, but I had no idea you took my watch.
I would never have thought it possible.
So you’re not a smooth-talking murderer. (I recruited some people off the street.)
Everyone expressed a similar strain of disbelief. It may not have been the most rigorous experiment in history, doing magic tricks and stealing watches, and one of our subjects, a bassist from the music school, may have been stoned, but we nonetheless gathered enough solid evidence from sober adults to provide a clear demonstration of tactile insensitivity under conditions of sustained inattention.
When we started our experiment I’d been stealing watches regularly for a while—yes, I always gave them back—and I was constantly amazed at how easy it was. Scanning people’s wrists had become second nature—it was one of the first things I would do when I met someone—and as soon as I walked into any sort of social gathering I started casing the room so I knew whom to target. I like to keep a running tally of the total value of all the watches I’ve stolen. After Mack’s experiment, I estimated my yield at around $50,000, although I should qualify this by saying that about half of this came out of one big score: a $25,000 Patek Philippe I lifted off an attractive blonde at a fancy dinner party.
Truth is, I’m a serviceable pickpocket at best. My achievements are peanuts compared with those of professional theatrical pickpockets like Apollo Robbins, a Vegas-based magician turned stage thief who makes his living robbing audiences blind, and who can boost just about anything—wallets, glasses, even neckties—right off people’s bodies without getting caught. Robbins is famous for, among other things, stealing the president’s itinerary from under the nose of a U.S. Secret Service agent who may or may not still have a job. I would never reach Apollo’s level. But I was beginning to feel like I understood the psychological principles that enabled him to get there.
My time in Mack’s lab taught me a lot, and I hope I gave something back, too. It also made me wonder: If neuropsychology ought to be a standard part of every magician’s core curriculum, as William Hirstein had suggested, what about the reverse? Should magic be routine training for neuroscientists?
It appears that, for some, it has become just that. Mack and I weren’t the only ones who’d hit on the idea of using magic to study perception. In fact, the neuroscience of magic has become a cottage industry, a burgeoning field dubbed “neuromagic” by its founders. A number of A-list conjurors—including Apollo Robbins, Teller, and James Randi—spoke at the 2007 meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, alongside the scientists and philosophers you’d expect to see giving talks at this sort of gathering. And the 2009 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, the world’s largest neuroscience conference, featured a panel discussion with Apollo Robbins and corporate magician Eric Mead, on “Magic, the Brain, and the Mind.”
Recently, a team of neuroscientists at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, the oldest stand-alone neurological institute in America, teamed up with several famous conjurors in the hope of modeling scientifically what these performers seemed to understand instinctively about human perception, citing “a rich and largely untapped source of insight into perception and awareness” and “a long legacy of informal experimentation” among magicians. Taking the mountain to Muhammad, as it were, these high-class neuroscientists were attending magic conventions and tournaments and staging magic shows in their labs as part of a grant-funded plan to use tricks as an experimental window into the human mind. According to my sources, the lead researcher of the Barrow group recently enrolled in the same three-day master class with Jeff McBride and Eugene Burger that I took when I went to the Vegas-based Magic and Mystery School. Sometimes reality is stranger than illusion.
ROUGHLY THIRTY MINUTES INTO THE film Pretty Woman, Vivian, the hooker with a heart of gold played by Julia Roberts, is enjoying a pancake. She takes a bite, and the camera briefly cuts away. In the next shot the camera is back on Vivian, and the pancake has magically transformed itself into a croissant. Another few moments pass, and it turns back into a pancake—a total of two transformations in the span of thirty seconds, an impressive feat even for a practiced magician.
Though it may be tempting to view this incredible morphing breakfast pastry as a metaphor for Vivian’s own Pygmalion-like transformation from prostitute to princess, it’s really only one of about two dozen editing mistakes in Pretty Woman, including a blooper in which a member of the crew is visible on-screen. Does this make Pretty Woman a bad movie? An amateur effort? Of course not. Flat acting and a syrupy, cornpone story are what make Pretty Woman such a dreadful film. In terms of errors, it’s below par. The Godfather, for instance, has fifty-six mistakes; Star Wars has an astronomical 271, not counting the scene where it sounds a lot like Luke calls Leia “Carrie.”
Virtually every movie has dozens of so-called continuity errors, discrepant bits of unreality left behind in the final cut, the inevitable artifacts of an editing process whereby films are spliced together piecemeal from thousands of clips. Hardcore movie buffs have made a pastime out of scavenging for these film flubs, but as far as the average moviegoer is concerned, they might as well not exist, because in a very real sense they don’t. Even when the errors are quite glaring—like the one in The Godfather when the front windshield of Sonny’s car is magically restored after being machine-gunned to shards at the tollbooth—we usually don’t notice them, any more than we notice the shutter opening and closing twenty-four times per second on a projector or, for that matter, the very fact that a movie is nothing more than a series of still images flashing by in rapid succession.
The failure to notice changes in consecutive scenes, in film and in everyday life, is called change blindness, and like inattentional blindness, it is fundamental to magic. Try this trick on someone. Secretly remove the eight of clubs and the nine of spades from a pack of cards and place them on top of the deck. Now take out the nine of clubs and the eight of spades—a similar-looking pair—and show them to your audience, saying, “I’ll take the eight and the nine and place them in the center of the deck.” Insert both cards into the middle of the pack and square it up. Pause for a moment—misdirection time again—and announce to your audience that the cards will rise to the top. Make a magical gesture and flip over the top two cards. Ta-da! This trick may sound silly, but it stumps almost everyone—Wes fooled me with it at the pizzeria—because most people mistake the pair you pulled off the top for the two cards you placed in the middle.
A lot of people probably have an anecdotal familiarity with change blindness. Have you ever altered your appearance—a new hairstyle or color, braces taken off, a change in weight—only to find that nobody noticed? Cosmetic surgeons routinely report that their work goes undetected, even when quite substantial.
Misdirection further hampers our ability to detect changes from one scene to the next. Consider the so-called face test, in which a volunteer is shown two faces in quick succession on a computer screen. Under normal circumstances, virtually anyone can distinguish the two faces, provided that they’re shown within the span of half a second. But if the subject is diverted by a task such as counting, or by a flicker on the screen, the faces begin to look the same.
To probe the limits of change blindness, Daniel Simons and his colleague Daniel Levin created their own movies filled with glaring continuity errors—far worse than anything Hollywood would ever allow. In one demonstration, the two researchers showed participants a short film of an actor typing behind a desk. Halfway through the film, the camera cuts away for a few seconds, and when it swings back, a different actor is now behind the desk. The vast majority of viewers fail to detect the switch, despite the fact that they have no trouble following the scene and describing various elements of it later on.
This con works live, too. In another set of experiments, Simons had an experimenter stop random pedestrians on the street and ask them for directions. While the unsuspecting stranger was giving the experimenter directions, a pair of stooges carrying a door walked between them, temporarily blocking the stranger’s view. During this brief moment of interruption, the experimenter switched places with one of the stooges. Moments later, the stranger was giving directions to a completely different person—and yet, strange as it may seem, most of the strangers never missed a beat. They just kept on talking as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
What is going on in the brain during these bizarre lapses? Is there a physiological explanation for how misdirection affects our neurons? To answer these questions, scientists figured out a way to induce inattentional states artificially, using a transcranial magnetic stimulator, the machine that briefly disrupts neural activity in localized brain regions by zapping them with a magnetic field. In one study, a TMS was used to disable the parietal cortex, a sliver of neurons behind the ear that aids in concentration. Subjects were then given the face test. Those in the control group passed with flying colors. But for those who took the test with the magnetic coils turned on, the faces blended into one another. This, in essence, is your brain on magic: misdirection paralyzes part of your cortex, putting it out of commission as effectively as a magnetic stun gun.
The experimental evidence suggests that the movie in your mind may lag behind reality by up to a quarter of a second—an eternity when you consider that it takes only about a tenth of a second for nerve impulses to shoot from the top of your head to the tip of your big toe—and if too much stimulus impedes on your faculties in a short amount of time, the film begins to degrade. “Even an image that strikes the retina one tenth of a second after a prior image can cancel out conscious perception of the first image,” Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch has observed. But there is an even more striking implication to this research: consciousness—like the saccadic eye movements that make up much of our vision—might not be a smooth stream so much as a series of discrete images that appear continuous only after our brains fill in the gaps. The same mechanisms that magicians exploit to make a coin vanish and reappear, in other words, may also account for the continuity of our daily experience.
OUR BRAINS EVOLVED DURING SIMPLER times. The human mind is optimized for environments that are slower and less signal rich than the ones we currently inhabit. By and large, the Cro-Magnon world moved at a more leisurely pace. But speed is the hallmark of modernity, and we sapiens left our cognitive comfort zone behind on the open steppes of the mother country well before hunting and gathering finally gave way to drive-thrus and the information age. Shaped by millions of years of evolution, the human brain is remarkably proficient at what it was designed to do. But because the selective pressures that shaped our brains were radically different from those we encounter in the modern world, there are limits to how much of our high-tech environment we can consciously take in at once. As the window of optimal response times gets shaved down, and the gap between perception and awareness widens, lapses are inevitable. Pressed to the limit, our minds are bound to falter.
The good news is that we can train ourselves to be more mindful. In a new generation of experiments, Christof Koch and his team at Caltech are running tests with subjects who’ve been coached over the course of several days at executing so-called divided attention tasks: watching the cross and keeping an eye out for the car. The results show that, to a certain extent, we can sharpen our perception, much in the way that through proper drills anyone can learn to speed-read or sing better or sharpen their memory.
Magic, I found, taught me to divide my attention more effectively. After a while I got accustomed to ignoring the pyrotechnics and focusing instead on the magician’s sleeve. I conditioned myself to watch both hands at once, and it was an amazing feeling when I realized I’d never done this before. The technique that I found worked best was to focus on the least prominent elements of a scene—the hand that isn’t waving the wand, for instance—because you’re naturally inclined to notice the more salient ones. Analogously, when listening to Bach’s lute suites—on the guitar, John Williams’s recording, some of my favorite pieces of music—I mentally foreground the bass and keep the high end in the back of my mind. This helps me hear both voices more clearly, teasing out a level of complexity in the music that is hidden to the casual listener. It’s like paying attention to all the players in a basketball game, rather than just the ones closest to the ball. Though difficult at first, after a while you acquire a knack for it, and the game takes on a whole new meaning. As I continued to hone my skills, I noticed that my powers of observation improved, and that the psychological tools I learned from doing magic pushed me toward a greater awareness of things I’d previously overlooked.
No matter how enlightened or Zen-like, however, a practiced way of seeing will never completely eradicate our mental glitches, because the organizational mechanisms by which cognitive illusions such as inattentional blindness arise are hardwired into the machinery of the mind. “Usually when we’re fooled, the mind hasn’t made a mistake,” wrote magician and inventor Jerry Andrus. “It’s come to the wrong conclusion for the right reason.” The ability to concentrate for extended periods on complicated tasks is a signal virtue of the human brain. But the flip side of being able to stay focused and ignore peripheral distractions is that we don’t always notice things outside the narrow spotlight of our attention. “What we’re good at as adults is weeding out and inhibiting all these other parts of a scene,” explains Alison Gopnik, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of The Philosophical Baby.
Children, on the other hand, aren’t nearly as good at ignoring peripheral distractions. As a result, they have a much wider attentional focus, which may help explain why magicians often have a hard time fooling them. I myself have slayed Nobel laureates with novice moves, but a group of nine-year-olds will often rip apart my best material. There may be a prosaic reason for this, which is that kids, being shorter on average than adults, are privy to certain bad angles and exposed lines of sight that adults typically don’t see. In general, magic tricks are best viewed from above or head-on. That said, a lot of experts will also tell you that it has to do with the aikido-like way in which magic flips our expectations and our ability to focus against us. Because kids don’t know what to anticipate, they tend to pay equal mind to everything, making it harder for magicians to execute secret moves without being caught. “One of the things that magicians are really good at is getting people to consciously attend to one part of a scene,” says Gopnik. “We know that children are much less good at doing that. As a consequence, they’re open to parts of a scene that aren’t available to adults.” It’s as though gullibility is an acquired behavior, and children have not yet learned how to be deceived.
The adult brain may be limited, but we can learn a lot about it by studying its limitations. For one, blind spots such as those uncovered in Mack’s laboratory nudge us toward a deeper understanding of how the brain constructs an internal representation of the world from multiple threads of incomplete information. It quickly becomes apparent that these mental representations, for all their stability and richness, are subjective constructions cobbled together from patchy, mismatched, and ambiguous fragments that are themselves subject to distortion, embellishment, and even outright fallacy. They are, to a certain extent, illusions.
Philosophers of the mind have invented a funny word, quale, to describe the subjective nature of first-person experience. Roughly speaking, qualia are ineffable sensations that can’t be mapped onto external reality. Color is the classic example of a quale. What is color, it is asked—an intrinsic property of an object or something our brain fills in after the fact? Do we colorize the movie in our mind, so to speak?
This question gets to the heart of an ongoing academic food fight over how much in our minds is a construct and how much is objectively real, with heavy hitters in both camps. At one extreme is philosopher Daniel Dennett pushing what he calls “the illusion of consciousness,” a theory that nearly everything we perceive is a Technicolor fantasy. Much of the research on change blindness and inattentional blindness seems to support this theory.
When we examine consciousness up close, it starts to look a bit like the quantum realm. Memories pop in and out of our minds like subatomic particles. Images and sounds tunnel through our senses. Perception, we find, is suffused throughout with uncertainties that would make Heisenberg blush. There’s no denying that the brain is up to some pretty sly stuff. “Magicians know that a collection of cheap tricks will often suffice to produce ‘magic,’ and so does Mother Nature,” Dennett notably observed. Consciousness may well be the greatest magic show of all.