How to Coach Yourself and Others Beware of Manipulation | Page 213

5.2. Misdirection and Deflection as used by magicians
Misdirection also refers to the magician’s ability to manipulate people’s attention, thoughts, and
memory.
“The principle of misdirection plays such an important role in magic that one might say that magic is
misdirection and misdirection is magic”
Hugard (1960, p. 115)
Misdirection can literally be defined as
pointing out the wrong way.
Another way of defining misdirection is
by focusing on its function. Any magic
effect (what the spectator sees) requires
a method (the method used to produce
the effect). The main purpose of
misdirection is to disguise the method
and thus prevent the audience from
detecting it whilst still experiencing the
effect.
Our conscious experience of the world
is determined by a cascade of cognitive
and neurological processes; generally
starting with the encoding of perceptual
information, which is then further processed and stored in memory, before being retrieved and thus
entering consciousness. Magicians have developed techniques that manipulate different levels of this
perceptual chain. For example, what we attend to (i.e., manipulating spatial attention), how we
remember an event and how we interpret causality.
Time misdirection works because magicians separate the method from the magical effect and this
separation generates false causal links between unrelated actions, preventing the audience from being
able to mentally reconstruct the trick.
Magicians often talk about misdirection in terms of creating zones of high and low interest, whereby
the former will attract attention at the expense of the latter.
In fact, misdirection is not merely to divert attention away from the secret move. It is more about the
magician’s capacity to draw attention to a particular place, which he calls frame, at a particular time
(Robins, 2007; Magic of Consciousness Symposium; http://assc2007.neuralcorrelate.com).
This creates a sort of tunnel vision in which any action occurring outside of the frame goes unnoticed
and, in addition, the smaller the frame the stronger the sense of misdirection (see also Ascanio and
Etcheverry, 2000)

5.2.1 The four degrees of misdirection
Ascanio and Etcheverry (2000) described 3 degrees of misdirection:
1. Simultaneous Acts
The first degree would be when the magician performs two simultaneous actions, the method behind
the magic trick, or secret move, and a distractor. Having to attend to both, the spectator cannot focus on
the method and that, in general, suffices to make this go unnoticed.

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