Scientists appear to be traditionally smarter, and experts regarding what’s going on in the world. However, magicians seem to have beat them to the catch, by conquering cognitive attention. There must be a distraction to properly fool the fool. Magicians are scientist in a way, by using their skills to trick the viewers. The skills that magicians use to misdirect the spectators, can be useful to Neuroscientist for their own scientific advantage. This experiment works by first drawing the spectators’ attention towards the person being identified in the trick. For example, the trick where the beautiful woman with the tight white dress on becomes the target, and is now the focal point for the audience. This distracts them from the gadgets that are being used to change the dress color to red. The magician knows exactly how to guarantee that the spectators attention is being misguided through this process. This process is known as neural adaptation; a change in the alertness of the sensory system to a continuous stimulus over time. In this case the red dress would be the adapted stimulus.

Neuroscientist are late to the party, and are slowly catching up to magicians’ manipulation of attention and cognition. Scientist are becoming familiar with “magic” by comparing it to scientific study, understand the mind, and to create stronger experiments. This new-found technique can be used to grasp attention and keep it! The same theory applies to the use of attention grabbing for patients with ADHD, Alzheimer’s disease, etc. This method could also trick patients into focusing on what’s important. Resulting in the elimination of patients not getting the best out of every situation, that requires a specific ongoing focus.

I know what you’re wondering. How can one be extremely blind to something that’s being manipulated in their faces? Well, missing information due to a brief interruption during an act, is called Change Blindness. We as humans are not aware of our surroundings which also leads to Inattentional Blindness; when a person doesn’t catch items that are in plain view. As you can see, our problem is that we don’t pay enough attention. People are blind in their own choices and preferences, which refers to Choice Blindness. However, when magicians complete their acts of magic they’re using Illusory Correlation. Illusory Correlation; is when one perceives a relationship between variables even when no such relationship exits. Which is why it’s our duty to remember that correlation does not imply causation. Meaning, we can’t assume that what the magician has done with one variable has a direct correlation to the variable effected.

During magic tricks were being robbed of our alertness to a situation and our surroundings. Compared to pickpocket thieves, who rely on invading personal space and distracting victims. This is just one of the ways we are being misdirected because of how unwatchful we are.

Magicians are accidental scientist. Their work creates the foundation for Neuroscientists to follow, build, and expound on. There are many obstacles that create the thin line between our alertness, and our blindness. The illusionists have created a formula to keep us under their influence but still awake in most cases. Science can be found everywhere and we shouldn’t over look what’s right in front of us.