“Inattentional blindness” is an example of distraction and unawareness of the present moment.
Apollo Robbins’ illustrated the potentially serious consequences of inattention in his interactive Las Vegas, USA show, “The Gentleman Thief.”

He tells “targets” in the audience that he is about to steal from them, then uses visual illusions, proximity manipulation, diversion techniques, and attention control, to complete his imperceptible heists.

Unlike in real life, Robbins returns belongings to owners.
Former US President Jimmy Carter’s Secret Service agents were among those who  reclaimed their belongings.

These illustrations help people improve perceptual capabilities.
This increased awareness can reduce traffic accidents, industrial mishaps, and security violations.

The U.S. Department of Defense deploys Robbins’ skills at its Special Operations Command research and training facility at Yale University.

Defense application of these perceptual manipulation skills were identified by Barton Whaley of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and Susan Stratton Aykroyd in their Textbook of Political-Military Counterdeception.

Their historical survey of deception and counter-deception practices noted that amateur magicians’ practices were more advanced than those used by U.S. political or military intelligence analysts in the 1970s.

SUNY Downstate’s Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde collaborated with Robbins on Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deception.

Their empirical results supported Robbins’s observation that the eye will follow an object moving in an arc without looking back to its point of origin.

This perceptual tendency enables Robbins to distract audience members and to remove their possessions from their bodies.

Perceptual errors in illusions can suggest diagnostic and treatment methods for brain trauma, autism, ADHD, and Alzheimer’s disease.

These conditions may improve when patients practice observing illusion performances because they learn to train their attention and to focus on the most important aspects of their environment.

At the same time, they can suppress distractions that lead to disorientation and “inattentional blindness” (intently focusing a single task while overlooking things in plain sight).

Psychologist and illusionist Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire demonstrated inattentional blindness when viewers failed to notice environmental changes while they focused on a card trick. 

Wiseman used these perceptual anomalies as a metaphor.
He suggested that people can recognise opportunities in life when they intentionally increase their attention.

University of Illinois’s Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin of Vanderbilt University demonstrated that observers were unaware of a person in a gorilla suit walking near people passing a basketball .

With Harvard’s Christopher Chabris, Simons reported that half of the observers said they missed this unusual detail when they focused on counting the number of ball passes by one team.

However, the same people easily recognized the gorilla when they were not asked to focus on a distraction task.

This finding shows that most people are unable to effectively “multitask” because they have limited ability to hold a visual scene in short-term memory (VSTM), suggested University of Chicago’s Edward K. Vogel and Maro Machizawa of Hiroshima University and separately by Vanderbilt’s René Marois and J. Jay Todd.

Gustav Kuhn of University of London collaborated with illusionist Alym Amlani and Ronald Rensink of University of British Columbia to classify cognitive, perceptual, and physical contributors in Towards a Science of Magic:

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  Ronald Rensink

  Physical misdirection by a magician’s gaze or gesture,

• Psychological misdirection with a motion or prolonged suspense,
• Optical illusions that distort the size of an object,
• Cognitive illusions to prolong an image after the object has been removed,
• Physical force and mental force influence “freely chosen” cards.

Perceptual and cognitive illusions can cause people not to see things that are present.
This effect can lead to overlooking interpersonal cues, life opportunities.
and more dangerously, inattention in traffic accidents, and victimization.

Mindful awareness helps people pay attention to the present experience and to opportunities and to  mitigate potential perceptual misinformation.

-*How to you maintain focus to reduce “inattentional blindness”?

Related Posts

• Making Magic Meaningful as a Life Metaphor
• Action Beats Visualization to Improve Performance

©Kathryn Welds