There is a moment in one of my mentalism routines where I place a sealed envelope on the table early in the piece. It sits there for about three minutes while I talk, interact with the audience, and build toward a reveal. By the time I pick that envelope up again, I have to re-introduce it. I have to draw the audience’s attention back to it. Because somewhere in those three minutes, the envelope became invisible.
Not literally invisible. It was sitting right there in full view the entire time. Nobody moved it. Nobody covered it. If you had asked anyone in the room “Is there an envelope on the table?” they would have said yes. But they were no longer looking at it. It had been in view long enough that it stopped being interesting. Their visual system had classified it as part of the environment — background, not foreground. Furniture, not a prop.
Then, later in the routine, I introduce a second object. Something new. Something that was not there before. And every eye in the room goes to it. Immediately. Without being asked.
This is the newness principle, and it is one of the most useful attention tools I have ever encountered.
Newness as an Attention Tool
Darwin Ortiz lists newness as the seventh of his eight tools of attention control, and his description is characteristically precise: they look at whatever arrived last. The longer something is in view, the less interesting it becomes. Whenever a new prop or element is introduced, it initially captures attention.
I read that and thought: of course. This is obvious. We all know that new things attract attention. But “obvious” and “useful” are not the same thing, and the distance between knowing something intellectually and applying it in practice is where most of the learning happens.
The newness principle is useful not because it tells you something surprising, but because it gives you a timer. Every object in your performance has an attention clock, and that clock starts ticking the moment the object appears. In the first few seconds, the object captures attention automatically. After thirty seconds, it is losing ground. After a few minutes, it has become background. The audience may still be aware of it, but their attention has moved on to whatever is newer.
This means that if you need the audience to pay attention to an object, you want to introduce it as close as possible to the moment when their attention matters. And if you need the audience to not pay attention to an object, you want to introduce it early and let the newness timer run out.
The Habituation Effect
What Ortiz describes as newness, psychologists call habituation — the gradual decrease in response to a stimulus that is presented repeatedly or continuously. Habituation is one of the most fundamental processes in the nervous system. It operates in every species from sea slugs to human beings. It is how our brains filter the constant flood of sensory information down to something manageable.
Your nervous system is built to detect change. Things that are constant, stable, and unchanging get filtered out. The hum of the air conditioner disappears from your awareness after a few minutes. The pressure of the chair against your back fades. The visual clutter of your desk stops registering. Your brain allocates attention to what has changed, not to what remains the same, because change is where new information lives, and new information is what might require a response.
Research from cognitive psychology confirms this in the performance context. Studies on inattentional blindness, including the famous work by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, demonstrate that people routinely fail to notice things in their visual field — even dramatic, unexpected things — when their attention is occupied elsewhere. Objects that have been in view for a while are particularly vulnerable to this blindness. They have lost their novelty, and without novelty, they no longer compete effectively for attention.
This is both an opportunity and a hazard for performers.
The Opportunity
The opportunity is straightforward: when you introduce something new, you get a window of free attention. The audience looks at the new thing because it is new, not because you told them to, not because your eye contact guided them, not because your patter directed them. They look because their perceptual system has detected a change in the visual field, and that change gets flagged as potentially significant.
This window is incredibly valuable. It means you can introduce a prop at exactly the moment you want the audience to focus on it, and their attention will be there automatically. No effort required. No verbal direction. No gestural guidance. Just the newness of the object doing the work.
I have restructured several of my routines around this principle. Instead of having all props on the table from the beginning — which means everything habituates simultaneously and nothing has the advantage of newness — I bring objects in one at a time, at the moment they become relevant. The deck appears when the card routine begins. The envelope appears when the prediction is needed. The pad and pen appear when the spectator needs to write something.
Each introduction creates a micro-burst of attention. The audience’s eyes follow the new object because they cannot help it. And because I have timed the introduction to coincide with the moment when I need their attention on that object, the newness does my attention-directing work for me.
The Hazard
The hazard is the flip side: if newness captures attention, then introducing something new at the wrong moment will capture attention at the wrong moment.
This is a mistake I made several times early on. I would bring out a new prop while I was still talking about the previous one. Or I would set up an element for the next phase of the routine while the current phase was still in progress. Each time, the audience’s attention would split. They were trying to listen to what I was saying, but their eyes kept drifting to the new thing that had just appeared. The newness of the object competed with the content of my speech, and the newness usually won.
The solution is sequencing. One thing at a time. Finish the current moment before introducing the next element. Let the audience fully absorb what is happening now, and only then introduce what comes next. This sounds simple, but it requires discipline. The temptation to pre-set, to prepare the next phase while the current one is running, is enormous. It feels efficient. It saves time. But it costs attention, and in performance, attention is the only currency that matters.
I now have a rule: nothing new appears on stage until the audience has had time to fully register the current moment. If I am building toward a reveal, I do not reach for the next prop until the reveal has landed. If a spectator is reacting to something that just happened, I do not introduce the next element until the reaction has crested. The new thing waits until the audience is ready for it, because newness is too powerful a tool to waste on a moment when the audience is already engaged elsewhere.
Pre-Setting: Using the Timer Strategically
The newness timer also works in reverse: if you want an object to be unremarkable when you use it later, introduce it early.
This is one of the most elegant applications of the principle. An object that has been sitting in view for several minutes is no longer new. It has habituated. The audience has categorized it as part of the environment. When you eventually pick it up and use it, there is no burst of fresh attention. It was already there. It is background. Familiar. Unremarkable.
Magicians call this pre-setting, and it is a foundational technique in show construction. The envelope that sits on the table from the beginning of the show. The glass of water that was there when the audience arrived. The notepad that has been sitting next to the performer’s case the entire time. By the time these objects become relevant to a routine, they have lost their newness. The audience barely notices when you pick them up, because there is nothing new about them. They were always there.
The strategic brilliance of pre-setting is that it turns the audience’s habituation reflex into an advantage. You are not fighting the newness timer. You are using it. You introduce the object early, let the timer run down to zero, and then use the object when its invisibility serves you.
Compare this to the alternative: pulling the prediction envelope out of your pocket at the moment of the reveal. That is dramatic, yes. But it also invites suspicion. The audience thinks: where did that come from? Could something have been written on it at the last second? The newness of the envelope creates attention, and that attention naturally turns analytical. The audience examines the new thing because their perceptual system has flagged it.
But an envelope that has been sitting on the table since before the show started? That is part of the furniture. It is old news. And when old news turns out to contain a prediction that matches the spectator’s free choice, the impossibility is amplified precisely because the envelope did not draw any special attention.
Managing Multiple Objects
In routines that involve several props, the newness principle becomes a sequencing challenge. You have to decide not just what to introduce, but in what order, and with what timing.
The rule I have developed is: the most important object should be the newest object at the moment it matters most. If I need the audience focused on a particular card, that card should have appeared most recently. If I need them focused on an envelope, the envelope should be the freshest element in the visual field.
This sometimes means introducing supporting props early — letting them habituate — so that when the critical prop arrives, it has no competition. The table, the mat, the card case: all of these can be pre-set. They become background. And then when I produce the one card, the one envelope, the one object that the entire routine hinges on, it is the only new thing in a field of old things. It gets the full benefit of the newness window.
Newness Beyond Props
The principle extends beyond physical objects. Newness applies to anything that changes in the performance environment.
A change in lighting is new. A change in music is new. A shift in your body position — standing after sitting, moving after being still — is new. A change in vocal register is new. Each of these changes captures a burst of attention through the same mechanism as a new prop: the audience’s change-detection system flags the shift and directs attention toward it.
I use this constantly in my keynotes. When I have been speaking from one position for several minutes and I feel the audience’s attention starting to drift, I move. Not dramatically. Just a shift — from one side of the stage to the other, or a step forward toward the audience. The movement is new. It breaks the pattern of stillness. And the audience’s attention resets.
Similarly, a change in vocal pace or volume creates newness. Speaking faster after a slow passage. Dropping to a whisper after speaking at full volume. Each change recaptures attention because each change is, in perceptual terms, something new.
The Freshness Budget
I think of every performance as having a freshness budget. Each time I introduce something new — a prop, a movement, a shift in energy — I spend some of that budget. Each introduction captures attention, but each also raises the bar for what counts as novel. After several introductions in quick succession, the audience can become overstimulated. The newness effect diminishes because everything is new, which means nothing is.
The art is in pacing the introductions. Spacing them out. Letting each new element have its moment before introducing the next. Giving the audience time to habituate to one change before presenting another.
Whatever arrives last gets looked at. It is a simple principle. But applying it well requires you to think about timing, sequencing, pre-setting, and the attention lifecycle of every element in your performance. The newness timer never stops running. Your job is to make sure you are introducing the right thing at the right moment — and that everything else has had time to fade quietly into the background.