S.L Robbins & Associates

Poof!

The bunny disappears.

The scarf turns into a dove.

The man’s mutilated dollar is crispy-new.

Unless you’ve been put under a spell by the Harry Potter craze, you probably don’t believe these magic tricks are real. But-admit it-even when you think you’ve got it all figured out (you skeptic, you), the magician surprises you again.

You and the rest of the audience were probably concentrating hard, checking the magician’s sleeves, watching his or her hands. How could you have missed the pivotal point of the trick?

You blinked.

Well, you may have physically blinked from staring so hard, but, most likely, you mentally blinked. You missed some relevant information. Magicians are masters at manipulating and diverting our attention, of making sure we miss that crucial information, but how? They understand how our brains work.

Both magicians and psychologists use a bunch of different terms-”cognitive illusions,” “choice blindness,” “attentional blink,” “selective perception”-to describe what’s happening in the brain when we watch magic tricks, and they’ve done all kinds of crazy studies to reveal how this relates to the huge attentional blindspots we have when it comes to our surroundings.

Take Simon and Chablis’ famous gorilla study, in which they asked participants to focus on counting the number of passes made by a team; the participants’ attention was so riveted on the ball, they didn’t even notice the person in the gorilla suit walking right in the middle of the circle! While we can laugh at the team’s blindness to such an outlandish object in their midst, don’t be fooled-your brain would play the same trick. We perceive and remember only those objects and details that receive our focused attention-even if there is a big hairy gorilla in our face.

Most of the time, we’re unaware of this attention gap. While we have the illusion of grasping it all, research suggests that our brain singles out one particular piece of information and rejects competing information. Eye-tracking studies especially reflect this attention-hopping phenomenon; while we might feel like our eyes are gliding smoothly down a blog post, news article, or this paragraph, our eye is actually fixating every 7-9 characters, moving in a rapid, disjointed way.

In the same way our reading experience belies what actually happens, we’re fooled by what we think we attend to and what we actually attend to. While we think we have a steady stream of conscious experience and attention, our reality is a series of experiential hiccups. We think we’re watching the magician’s movements, but we miss out on key information. And research suggests that we constantly, actively construct the world around us to fill in these gaps according to our assumptions and experience and not necessarily what’s actually happening.

Cognitive scientists call this “selective perception,” and, in fact, we need it to help us function; our brain would burn out from cognitive overload if it had to attend to all the information we encounter every day. Instead, our brain makes quick decisions on what is relevant, what makes the most sense to pay attention to. It’s this handy mechanism that helps us notice, file away, or discard information according to previously established mental models.

This phenomenon affects all of our daily choices. We’re bombarded with all kinds of ideas, attitudes, claims, and soundbites each day, and what we tune into is what shapes our choices and experiences. When we’re looking for a particular thing-a conclusion from a set of data, a negative behavior from a student, an outcome from a meeting-we focus on certain stimuli and completely miss others. We suffer from the attentional blink that causes us to accumulate blindspots to important information.

For individuals and organizations who want to remain relevant by having new, different, and better solutions to pertinent problems, this phenomenon is crucial to understand. Once we’re mindful of our attentional blink, we just might start to pay attention to the stuff we could be missing out on, stuff we don’t yet understand. As cognitive researcher and gorilla-study man Daniel Simons says, “The main thing is knowing that you’ve got limitations.”

Magic is one medium that reveals these limitations. With their mastery of mind-bending illusions, magicians starkly display our cognitive tendency to “blink.” And while there’s really nothing magical about attention, it is increasingly important to consider as more diverse data shows up on our attentional screen from all our various podcasts and blogs and iPhones and other global plug-ins. In our twenty-first century world, that’s one reality that’s not about to vanish.

Don’t miss out on important information-information about your employees, co-workers, or consumers that might just be the key to better employee relations, organizational improvement, or the next big thing. Be mindful-not only of where you’re looking-but also of what you’re paying attention to.

Don’t blink.

Think About It
1) You might be making efforts to make your hiring practices more inclusive and more diverse. But what else are you missing? Are there internal barriers in place that keep new employees from advancing or veteran employees from continuous improvement?

2) Consider a time when you failed. What information might you have been missing that was vital for success?

3) What blindspots might you have when it comes to the people around you? What information could you be missing that might allow you to be a better listener, learner, manager, parent, or friend?

Tags: Blindness, Brains, Chablis, Cognitive Illusions, Gap, Gorilla Suit, Harry Potter, Harry Potter Craze, Illusion, Magic Tricks, Magician, Magicians, Midst, Pivotal Point, Poof, Psychologists, Scarf, Selective Perception, Surprises, Surroundings

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