When I first started as a martial artist, I remember having
sparring matches against opponents and getting a form of tunnel vision in which
I completely focused on the opponent in front of me. This was helpful because I was able to notice
when my opponent was about to attack, thus I was usually able to counter the attack;
however, it meant that I had difficultly perceiving anything besides my
opponent. My attention was so focused on
my opponents that I used to lose track of my surroundings and I lost a good
amount of points and matches because I stepped out of bounds. As I continued
training and practicing my martial arts I was able to get more comfortable with
my surroundings in the ring and was soon able to determine my location just by
muscle memory, which allowed me to
divide my attention between my footing and my opponent. Thus, much like the experiments conducted by
Walter Schneider and Robert Shiffrin (1977) showed that it is possible to carry
out two tasks at the same time with practice and by processing one of the tasks
almost without thinking, I was able to achieve a similar outcome as I could
track my location in the ring without consciously thinking about it. This is pretty similar to the way I performed
my sleight of hand and magic.
As I mentioned in my last blog post,
I used to practice and perform sleight of hand and magic when I was young. I had to spend many hours practicing the
techniques and the tricks so that I could perform them with little thought by
relying on the muscle memory I had acquired by practicing and performing the
techniques for days on end. By using my
muscle memory I was free to focus on interacting and communicating with the
audience, which allowed me to get the audience to focus on what I wanted them
to.
Many of the techniques that I used
are based on the fact that people are not able to consciously pay attention to
two things at the same time. This worked
because most people are not practiced enough to pay attention to one thing yet
notice the subtle movement happening somewhere else. The techniques rely on spectators getting a
similar form of tunnel vision as the one I got in martial arts. They would
focus on a misdirection that I caused and would be so intent on not letting
anything sneaky happen in that location that they do not realize that the
“magic” happened right in front of their very eyes.
Thinking about it now, essentially all the
tricks and sleights of hand that I am able to successfully perform are due to
selective and divided attention. Due to
the amount of time that I spent practicing my techniques I am able to divide my
attention between both the audience and the trick without difficulty and I am
able to influence what the audience pays their selective attention to. The audience, which is generally looking to
discover the secret to the tricks anyways, will focus so much on one location
that they completely miss which is actually happening. Therefore, next time someone is showing you a
magic trick try not to focus so much on a small portion of the trick but on the
act as a whole and see what a difference it makes.
*I included a youtube
video with a simple trick that uses misdirection. I tried to find the fairest video I could of
the trick that did not reveal how it was done and this was the best I could
find. So take a look, think about what
grabs your attention and what slides under it. Have fun.
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