There are two fundamentally different ways to direct someone’s attention. You can tell them where to look, or you can make them look. These sound similar. They are not. The difference between them explains why some misdirection is reliable enough to stake your performance on, and why some misdirection is a gamble.
I discovered this distinction through an experience that was embarrassing at the time and educational in retrospect. I was performing at a corporate event in Innsbruck — a medium-sized conference, about eighty people, standard setup. During a routine that required a brief moment of attentional cover, I used a verbal instruction: “Watch closely now, this is the important part.” I pointed at a specific object with my right hand, directing the audience’s gaze.
It worked for most of the audience. Most people looked where I pointed. But at least three or four people did not. I could see them in my peripheral vision, their eyes on my other hand. They had heard the instruction. They had understood the instruction. They had simply… not followed it.
Two months later, performing the same routine at a different event in Graz, I replaced the verbal instruction with a physical action. Instead of telling the audience where to look, I dropped an object — a small, harmless item that made a noticeable sound when it hit the table. Every head in the room snapped to the sound. Every single one.
Same goal. Different mechanism. Radically different reliability.
Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Attention
The science behind this distinction is well-established in cognitive psychology and is central to Gustav Kuhn’s framework for understanding misdirection. There are two systems that control attention:
Top-down attention is voluntary. It is goal-directed. It operates when you decide to focus on something — when you follow an instruction, when you choose to pay attention to a specific stimulus, when you deliberately direct your gaze. Top-down attention is flexible, intentional, and under conscious control.
Bottom-up attention is involuntary. It is stimulus-driven. It operates when something in the environment captures your attention without your consent — a sudden movement, a loud sound, a flash of light, an unexpected event. Bottom-up attention is reflexive, automatic, and largely beyond conscious control.
Here is the critical difference: top-down attention can be overridden. If someone tells you “look at this,” you can choose not to. You might be curious about something else. You might be suspicious that the instruction is meant to distract you. You might simply not feel like following orders. The instruction is a request, not a command, and your compliance is optional.
Bottom-up attention cannot be overridden. If a sudden sound occurs to your left, your attention snaps to the left before you can decide otherwise. If something moves in your peripheral vision, your eyes track the movement before you have time to consider whether you want to. If a new and unexpected stimulus appears, your perceptual system engages with it before your conscious mind has any say in the matter.
This is not a difference of degree. It is a difference of kind. Top-down attention is a suggestion. Bottom-up attention is a reflex.
Why This Matters for Performance
The practical implication is immediate: misdirection based on bottom-up triggers is more reliable than misdirection based on top-down instructions.
When you use a verbal cue — “look at this,” “watch closely,” “focus on this hand” — you are activating top-down attention. Most people will comply. But compliance is not guaranteed. The skeptical spectator, the contrarian, the person who has seen magic before and suspects that instructions are there to be distrusted — these people may deliberately resist the instruction. And among those who do comply, the compliance is shallow. They are choosing to look where you asked, which means they are also aware that they are following your direction, which means they can choose to redirect their attention at any moment.
When you use a bottom-up trigger — a movement, a sound, a contrast, a novel stimulus — the audience’s compliance is involuntary. The skeptical spectator’s eyes snap to the sound just as quickly as the trusting spectator’s eyes. The contrarian who prides himself on not being misdirected finds his gaze pulled toward the movement before his conscious mind can intervene. By the time the audience realizes their attention has been captured, the moment has passed.
This explains something I had noticed for years without understanding it. My most reliable misdirection moments were always the ones that felt natural — the ones where the audience’s attention shifted organically rather than being directed by instruction. The gesture that happened to create a movement. The question that happened to engage their minds. The action that happened to produce a sound. These “happened to” moments were not accidents. They were bottom-up triggers, operating below the level of conscious resistance.
The Survival Circuitry
The reason bottom-up attention capture is so powerful has evolutionary roots. The reflexive response to movement, sound, and novelty is an ancient survival mechanism. In the environment where human perceptual systems evolved, a sudden movement in the periphery might be a predator. A loud sound might signal danger. A new, unexpected stimulus might represent a threat that required immediate evaluation.
The brain did not evolve to evaluate these stimuli before responding. It evolved to respond first and evaluate later. The attention shift happens in milliseconds, before conscious processing has time to engage. This is why you flinch at a loud noise even when you know you are safe. The reflex fires before the evaluation completes.
For performers, this means that bottom-up triggers bypass the audience’s critical faculties entirely. The audience does not decide to look at the movement. They look at the movement, and then they decide whether the movement was interesting. By the time they are deciding, they have already looked — and the moment that needed cover has already passed.
Ortiz describes movement as one of the most powerful attention tools specifically because of this involuntary quality. The reflex to follow motion, he writes, is one of the most ingrained human reflexes. You cannot choose not to follow a moving object. You can redirect your attention afterward, but the initial capture is beyond your control.
The Sound Advantage
Of all the bottom-up triggers, sound deserves special attention because it has a unique property: it captures attention independently of gaze direction.
Visual bottom-up triggers — movement, contrast, novelty — only work if the stimulus is within the audience’s visual field. If the movement happens behind them, they will not see it. But sound operates omnidirectionally. A sound from any direction captures attention. It also triggers an orienting response — the reflexive head turn toward the source of the sound — which adds a spatial component. First the audience’s attention shifts to the sound, then their gaze follows.
I have found sound to be the single most reliable misdirection trigger in my performing work. Not dramatic sounds. Not loud bangs or crashes. Subtle, natural sounds — a tap, a click, the sound of an object being placed on a surface. These small sounds capture attention just as effectively as dramatic ones, and they have the advantage of appearing natural. A dramatic sound might alert the audience that something is happening. A natural sound simply redirects their attention without triggering suspicion.
One of my most reliable misdirection moments involves nothing more than placing an object on a hard surface. The slight click of the object touching the table creates a bottom-up sound trigger that captures attention. The audience’s gaze moves to the object. The moment lasts perhaps half a second. That is enough.
The Gaze Effect
Social cues occupy an interesting middle ground between top-down and bottom-up attention. When someone looks in a specific direction, observers reflexively follow their gaze. This is called the gaze-cuing effect, and it is one of the most robust findings in social attention research.
Gaze following is partially bottom-up — it happens rapidly and somewhat involuntarily, especially when the gazer is someone you are watching closely (like a performer). But it also has a top-down component — it can be resisted with effort, especially if you are aware that the gazer might be trying to misdirect you.
For performers, this means that gaze direction is more reliable than verbal instruction but less reliable than pure bottom-up triggers like movement and sound. It is a powerful tool, but it should be combined with other triggers rather than relied upon alone.
The research on the Vanishing Ball Illusion demonstrated this clearly. When the performer mimed a throwing motion while following the imaginary trajectory with his eyes, nearly two-thirds of participants reported seeing a ball that was not there. The gaze cue was powerful enough to override what the visual system actually registered. But when the performer looked at his hand instead of following the trajectory, the illusion collapsed. The gaze direction was essential to making the bottom-up visual prediction work.
Designing for Involuntary Compliance
The lesson I draw from all of this is a design principle: whenever possible, design misdirection around bottom-up triggers rather than top-down instructions.
This does not mean you should never use verbal cues. Verbal cues have their place — they can set up expectations, frame what the audience should pay attention to, and create narrative context. But when the stakes are highest — when the critical moment requires reliable attentional cover — the cover should come from triggers that the audience cannot resist.
Movement. Sound. Contrast. Novelty. These are the tools that bypass conscious control. These are the triggers that work on the skeptic and the believer alike. These are the mechanisms that have been capturing human attention since before humans were human.
I restructured several routines after understanding this distinction. In each case, I replaced top-down instructions (“watch this”) with bottom-up triggers (a movement, a sound, a visual contrast). In each case, the reliability of the misdirection increased. Not marginally. Substantially. The moments that had occasionally failed — the moments where one or two spectators resisted the instruction — stopped failing. Because you cannot resist a reflex.
There is a hierarchy of misdirection reliability, and it maps directly onto the top-down/bottom-up distinction:
At the bottom: verbal instructions. “Look at this.” Reliable for most people most of the time, but vulnerable to resistance, suspicion, and deliberate noncompliance.
In the middle: social cues. Gaze direction, body orientation, facial expression. More reliable than verbal instructions because they activate faster and more reflexively, but still partially resistible.
At the top: bottom-up triggers. Movement, sound, contrast, novelty. Reliable for nearly everyone nearly all of the time, because they operate on reflexes that are older than language, older than culture, older than conscious thought.
Design your critical moments for the top of the hierarchy. Use the bottom and middle for texture, for framing, for context. But when you need the audience to be looking somewhere specific at a specific instant — when the performance depends on it — use a trigger they cannot resist.
The audience in Innsbruck who did not follow my verbal instruction taught me something I could not have learned from the audience in Graz who did follow the sound trigger. The Innsbruck failure showed me the limits of top-down direction. The Graz success showed me the power of bottom-up capture. Together, they taught me to design for involuntary compliance — to build misdirection not on what the audience chooses to do, but on what they cannot help doing.
That is the design principle. Build your misdirection on reflexes, not on requests. The audience’s cooperation is nice. Their reflexes are reliable.