Magic is about controlling attention and focus
Summary
- Magic is about manipulating focus or attention
Details
- You think that you can control your attention, but we are all fallable and have biases built in, that magicians can take advantage of
References
- Brandwashed - Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy - Martin Lindstrom
Quotes
He discovered, at this young age, the most important fact about magic. He explained years later: ‘It’s really about the limits of attention.’ The job of a magician is – at heart – to manipulate your focus. That coin didn’t really vanish – but your attention was somewhere else when the magician moved it, so when your focus comes back to the original spot, you’re amazed. To learn magic is to learn to manipulate someone’s attention without them even realising it – and once the magician controls their focus, Tristan realised, he can do what he wants. One of the things that he was taught at camp is that a person’s susceptibility to magic has nothing to do with their intelligence. ‘It’s about something more subtle,’ he said later. It’s ‘about the weaknesses, or the limits, or the blind spots, or the biases that we’re all trapped inside of’. Magic, in other words, is the study of the limits of the human mind. You think you control your attention; you think that if somebody messes with it, you will know, and you’ll be able to spot and resist it right away, but, in reality, we are fallible sacks of meat, and we are fallible in predictable ways that can be figured out by magicians and messed with.