Art and Science Team Up To Steal Your Attention With Magic..
By Susana Martinez-Conde for Scientific American
When we focus our attention, we sometimes fail to detect changes–even spectacular, seemingly impossible-to-miss changes—that have taken place right in front of us. Cognitive scientists call this “change blindness”.
Change blindness is so prevalent in our perception that Hollywood movie producers often employ a continuity editor: someone whose job is to make sure that impossible things don’t accidentally occur during and between scenes, due to the editing process..
This is not so different from what happens in your brain when card tricks fool you. Whenever you pay attention to something, your brain automatically and powerfully suppresses other information that is not relevant to the task. Magicians don’t distract us in a literal sense, but create attentional points that our perceptual and cognitive systems are helplessly drawn to…