Our attention is constantly being misled.
An idea not lost to artists and magicians.
Our fallible concentration span has, in fact, been exploited for millennia.
Over 500 years ago Hieronymous Bosch in 'The Conjurer'
artfully depicts the following Flemish proverb:
'He who lets himself be fooled by conjuring tricks,
loses his money and becomes the laughing stock of children.'
The painting shows how open we are for deception
if our attention is directed elsewhere.
As Bosch was aware all those years ago, we cannot always trust our own mind.
But, what the proverb doesn't allude to is that we are,
in fact, all laughing stocks – because reality is full of tricks,
constantly fooling many of our decisions.
To see how, I took a trip to a magic lab at Goldsmiths, University of London,
and spoke with magician and psychologist Gustav Kuhn.
He uses the study of magic to understand
exactly how well we perceive reality and what we can learn from our flaws.
So magicians, they've developed really powerful tricks
to deceive the human mind,
and they push human cognition to their limits.
And, as scientists, we're interested in understanding the nature of these tricks,
because they can tell us a lot about the human mind.
One of the most interesting things about magic
is that it exploits a lot of our misconceptions about perception.
What the scientific study of the mind has shown is that we are only aware
of a small fraction of the information that's out there.
This is something that's central to magic,
because magic is not just about manipulating what you're seeing,
but is also manipulating your beliefs about what you are seeing.
So, Melissa touch one of these. Okay.
So we're going to use a banana here. So that was an 'outcome force'.
Now, you might wonder, well, how could I know that you end up with a banana?
Well, here you had a 'free choice'.
So, if you touch the banana, we're going to use the banana. If you touch the carrot,
I'll say we're just going to remove the carrot and I'll give you the banana.
So you always know what we'll end up with?
We're always going to end up with the banana. This is a method known as forcing,
and it puts under question how much control we have over our own decisions.
Forcing is a principle that magicians use to influence your decisions.
So in a card trick, for example, I might ask you to pick a card.
And even though you feel like you've had a free choice,
I was in full control over the card that you ended up with.
And so we can use these types of tricks
to study how to influence people's decisions.
Let's illustrate just how much our decisions can be made for us with simple placement strategies.
So I've got four cards here. Melissa, can you just touch one of the cards?
Take the card. Look at it.
Now, how free was that choice? Free.
And yet 60% of people will choose exactly the same card.
The decision did feel free to me, but as Gustav explained, he had influenced my choice.
What I did here, was I've placed them in this order.
Now what you'll do is you'll rely on a cognitive bias
to just go for the card that's simply right in front of you.
So if you're using your right hand, that will be this card
for me, that card for you there.
But of course, these principles are played out on a much bigger scale.
So, for example, in supermarkets, advertisers – they've been aware
of many of these principles for many years as well,
and they will use them to try and serve you certain products.
So if they want to sell you a high value item,
they will put it in more prominent locations, maybe at the checkout.
They'll use bright lights to illuminate these objects and these principles –
they can nudge your decisions. And what's really quite alarming
about a lot of this is that – you're not aware of it.
Our brain is bombarded with vast amounts of sensory information,
and they're simply impossible for us to process all of this information.
So instead, we evolved a very efficient attentional system that allows
us to simply select the information that's of importance.
But of course there's a downside, because what it means is that
unless you're actually attending to something, you simply won't see it.
So, for example, in the Hollow Mask Illusion,
as you're looking at this mask, it appears solid, even though all
of the perceptual information tells you that it's actually hollow.
Melissa did see a coin move up the final time.
So this is usually known as the 'vanishing ball illusion'.
I didn't actually throw the coin the final time.
And yet your brain fills in the gaps
and you are experiencing things that you expecting to happen
in the future rather than the things that do actually happen.
The same applies to everyday life, too.
Our whole experience is just one big visual illusion,
but it's an illusion that we generally mistake for reality.
We like to think of our visual experience in terms
of pictures. But the brain doesn't receive pictorial information.
So, when you're seeing a cat walking across the street,
you're not seeing pictures of a moving cat.
Instead, you're getting lots of little pieces of information
that give you the inkling that it could be a cat.
So, what you're seeing as a cat is not necessarily a picture of a cat,
but your brain is simply conjuring up images of a cat.
And even for me, even with all of this abstract expertise, it's impossible
for me to prevent myself from being influenced by these external forces.
If we know just how easily we are tricked
into decisions that aren't our own, what can we do about it?
So I think awareness of our limitations, that can give us a bit
of a help in terms of adapting our behaviour.
Once you understand just how little you are consciously aware of,
that gives you a much better idea
of your own abilities and the abilities of others.
It's not all doom, because a lot of our research has also highlighted ways
in which we can reduce some of the impact that these biases have.
So, for example, in these card tricks, if we ask people
to consciously reflect about their decision to take a break,
think about why they make this decision.
Then these decisions become much more random.
In other words, they're less influenced by some of these cognitive biases.
So next time you're voting or picking up a bar
of chocolate that's on offer at the supermarket.
Stop and think about who or what is pulling
the invisible strings that led you to make this apparent choice
and then see if you change your decision accordingly.