If Robbins moved his hand through the air in a straight line between two points, he said, it was less effective at holding people’s attention on the end point than moving his hand in an arc motion. When Apollo Robbins started working with Martinez-Conde he told her that he had a hunch that certain ways he moved his hands seemed to affect how well he could direct a person’s attention. On the stage, specific movements can also trick us. “If you’ve got a bit of rapport with somebody and they trust you, it’s easy,” says Brown. In 2009 a Russian bank employee gave over $80,000 of cash to a woman who apparently hypnotised her. In theory, he adds, the power of suggestion alone is enough to persuade the most streetwise person to hand over their valuables. “The biggest ploys used by theatrical pickpockets and the kind of street pickpockets that will actually engage with you, is simply an incredibly alluring display of confidence,” he says. She should know: as a researcher at the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience in Arizona, she has studied how Las Vegas stage pickpocket Apollo Robbins performs his tricks.īrown thinks confidence plays a major role too. But neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde, the author of the book Sleights of Mind, says that a good trickster can use it against you. Most of the time that is a good thing – it allows us to filter out all but the most important features of the world around us. The most important of these loopholes is the fact that our brains are not set up to multi-task. Some are so good at it that researchers are working with them to get an insight into the way our minds work. In fact, the key requirement for a successful pickpocket isn’t having nifty fingers, it’s having a working knowledge of the loopholes in our brains. According to neuroscientists our brains come pretty much hard-wired to be tricked, thanks to the vagaries of our attention and perception systems. I felt so stupid.”īut she needn’t feel bad. I didn’t even notice until an hour later. He must have slid out the 20 euro note at the same time. “He said “no, no, that’s too much” and offered to look in my purse to find a smaller coin. “He said he was collecting for a church charity so I pulled out a euro,” she explains. Which makes it all the more surprising that a “nice man” bearing flowers managed to swipe 20 euros from her purse, while she was holding it in her hands and looking straight at it. She also taught me from an early age to be suspicious of strange men, especially when they give you presents. My mother has eyes in the back of her head.
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