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Comment by have_faith | Hacker News Reader

The next stage from this is how a spectator remembers a magic trick later on. Good magicians work backwards from this understanding in designing an act or trick. "He put the card in the middle of the deck, and it appeared in his pocket". This is about as granular as the average spectator remembers a magic trick only minutes or even seconds later. It says a lot about how lossy our memory really is even when we are concentrating our hardest. Maybe counter intuitively the harder someone looks the easier it is to direct their attention.

I would recommend anyone learn a simple magic trick or two, if only to help you design your products better. All of the information you learn about how people move through the phases of a trick seem transferable to lots of disciplines.

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I remember a magician talking about a particular routine where he did everything, but when the spectators later retold it, they felt like they did it (eg: "I took a card and then..." when in reality the magician gave them the card, something like that anyway). I started reading the book "Sleights of Mind"[1] a while back, I need to go back and finish it. It talks about this subject in depth.

I performed a simple trick for a friend once and then, maybe an hour later, another friend arrived so I performed it for him too. The trick involved swapping something out and doing some very basic sleights to hide the fact that it was swapped. My first friend was watching, knowing the outcome, trying to figure out at what point I swapped, but he didn't spot it. He later asked me "did you swap it before or after X", which I found interesting, because all of the work was done long before X. I love the tricks where the trickery gets done early on and then its just theatrics before the reveal. It really makes it hard for spectators to piece together the events. :)

[1] "Sleights of Mind: What the neuroscience of magic reveals about our brains" -- http://www.sleightsofmind.com/

On this topic, one of my favorite HN comments compares magic tricks to hacking someone's brain:

Magic tricks are hacking! You are hacking someone's mind, particularly their assumptions and attention. The exploits to human psychology and attention are just as sure as the exploits to crack or unlock a smartphone and many other software exploits. The difference is that software can be patched but the evolved behaviors that are the root of the exploits used by magicians are very hard to "patch"...

Full comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992826

Now replace the word 'Magic tricks' with 'Persuasion'

> Maybe counter intuitively the harder someone looks the easier it is to direct their attention.

The Monkey Business Illusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY

That's a very cool illusion, but it's not relying so much on the viewer looking hard, but on training the viewer to explicitly ignore anyone dressed in black. If you asked them "remember everything that happened in the video" you can bet they'd notice the monkey business.

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