Misdirection
The managing of an audience's attention, the central principle of stage magic.
Also: attention control, inattentional blindness, cognitive illusion
Misdirection is the way a performer guides what an audience looks at, expects and remembers, so that the key moment goes unnoticed. It works through gaze, movement, speech, timing and surprise, and a skilled magician steers the mind more than the eyes. Psychologists and neuroscientists have studied magicians since the 2000s, including Gustav Kuhn, Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, and use the results to understand attention, inattentional blindness and memory. The most famous experiment in the field, the invisible gorilla study of 1999 by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, shows how a viewer can fail to see something in plain sight. Magicians have long known this, and they treat it as a craft they practise and teach.