Everything I have written about misdirection in the last few posts has been building toward this one uncomfortable truth: some of the most powerful misdirection in magic does not require the audience to look away. It works when they are staring right at you. It works when they are paying full attention. It works when they are actively trying to figure out how you did it.
This seems paradoxical. Misdirection, by definition, should mean directing attention away from something. If the audience is looking directly at the secret action, how can they possibly be misdirected?
The answer is that “misdirection” is a misleading name for what actually happens. The word suggests that direction — spatial redirection of attention — is the core mechanism. But as I discussed in my post on the three categories of misdirection, only one category (perceptual) deals with what the audience sees. The other two — memory and reasoning — deal with what the audience remembers and how they interpret what they saw. These non-attentional forms of misdirection operate on completely different channels, and they are in many ways more powerful than attentional misdirection precisely because they work even under conditions of full observation.
I want to explore these non-attentional techniques in depth, because they changed how I design performances.
The Moment That Changed My Thinking
The moment came during a performance at a corporate retreat in Klagenfurt. I was performing a mentalism piece — one that I knew was well-constructed, with multiple layers of deception. The routine had a moment where a specific action needed to happen in full view of the audience. There was no way to hide it. No angle to exploit. No timing window to use. The action was going to be visible.
In practice, I had worried about this moment endlessly. It seemed like an exposed weakness — a moment where the method was, in some sense, visible. But every time I performed it, no one caught it. Not once. Audiences of forty, sixty, eighty people, some of them quite analytically minded, and not a single person identified the critical action.
Why?
Not because they were not looking. They were looking. Eye-tracking studies on similar effects show that spectators often look directly at the critical action and still do not register it as significant. The looking was not the issue. The processing was.
This is where Gustav Kuhn’s research illuminated something I had felt intuitively but could not articulate. Looking and seeing are different things. The audience was looking at the action. But they were not seeing it as significant, because their memory and reasoning systems were being managed independently of their visual attention.
Memory Misdirection in Practice
Memory misdirection does not prevent the audience from seeing something. It prevents them from remembering it accurately — or from encoding it as important in the first place.
The most practical application I have found is the principle of motivation. The audience’s memory system automatically categorizes actions by their perceived importance. Important actions are encoded strongly. Unimportant actions are barely encoded at all. And the classification of “important” versus “unimportant” depends on the perceived motivation behind the action.
If an action appears to have a clear, mundane motivation — putting something down to free your hands, adjusting a prop’s position, organizing materials — the audience classifies it as unimportant and barely encodes it. The action is seen in the moment but not stored in memory. Ten seconds later, if you asked the audience what just happened, they would struggle to recall the action because it was filed under “irrelevant.”
Darwin Ortiz describes this as psychological invisibility — “anything the eye sees but the mind does not register.” He references Al Baker’s observation that “actions that appear necessary but unimportant are only half-noticed and soon forgotten.” The key word is necessary. The action must appear to have a reason. An action without any apparent reason triggers suspicion: why did he do that? But an action with a mundane reason triggers dismissal: he did that because he needed to.
I restructured several of my routines around this principle. For critical actions that needed to happen in full view, I stopped trying to hide them and started trying to motivate them. Instead of timing the action to a moment when the audience might not be looking, I performed the action openly but embedded it within a larger motivated sequence. The action became one step in a chain of apparently ordinary behavior. The audience saw it, understood it (or believed they understood it), filed it as unimportant, and forgot it.
The effect was remarkable. Actions I had previously considered dangerous — moments where the method was technically visible — became completely safe. Not because the audience could not see them. Because the audience’s memory system discarded them as irrelevant.
The Time Decay Strategy
A second form of memory misdirection exploits the simple fact that memory degrades over time. Working memory holds approximately seven items. Information that is not actively rehearsed begins to fade within seconds. And the more new information that enters working memory, the faster old information is displaced.
In practice, this means that introducing a significant time delay between a critical action and the moment the audience needs to recall it can render the action effectively invisible — not to the eyes, but to memory. The action was seen, but by the time it becomes relevant, the memory of it has degraded past the point of useful recall.
I use this most deliberately in multi-phase routines. In a routine with three or four phases, the actions taken in phase one are separated from the climax in phase four by several minutes of additional information — instructions, spectator interactions, additional phases, scripted dialogue. By the time the audience tries to reconstruct what happened in phase one, their memory of the specific actions is unreliable. They remember the outcome of phase one. They remember the emotional experience. But the precise sequence of actions? The specific moment when something changed? That is lost to time and displacement.
Kuhn’s research confirms this mechanism. The misinformation effect — the finding that post-event information can alter memory of the original event — means that everything that happens after a critical action potentially reshapes the audience’s memory of that action. The later phases of a routine are not just entertainment. They are memory interference, overwriting and displacing the details that the audience would need to reconstruct the method.
Post-Event Suggestion
Perhaps the most powerful non-attentional technique I have encountered is post-event suggestion — the deliberate use of language after the effect to shape the audience’s memory of what happened during the effect.
The research on this is striking. When participants are exposed to misleading information after witnessing an event, their memory of the original event shifts to incorporate the misleading information. This is not about confusion or uncertainty. It is about genuine memory alteration. The participants genuinely believe their altered memory is accurate. Elizabeth Loftus’s work on this is foundational — her analogy of memory as a Wikipedia page that anyone can edit is the best description I have encountered.
For performers, post-event suggestion means that what you say after the trick is as important as what you do during the trick. If you describe the conditions in slightly different terms than what actually occurred — emphasizing certain elements, omitting others, characterizing actions in ways that support the impossibility — the audience’s memory will shift to align with your description.
I want to be clear about the ethics here. This is not about lying to the audience. It is about understanding that their memory of the performance is already a reconstruction, already imperfect, already shaped by their expectations and biases. The performer’s post-effect framing simply influences a process that is happening anyway. You are not creating a false memory. You are guiding the reconstruction.
In my corporate work, I use this principle in a specific way. After a mentalism routine, I briefly recap what happened — not as a review, but as a casual comment or callback. “You chose that card completely freely. You wrote down that word before I said anything. You could have thought of any number.” Each of these statements reinforces specific aspects of the conditions and gently shapes the audience’s memory of those conditions. The recap feels natural — just a performer acknowledging what happened. But it is doing memory work, encoding the conditions in the specific frame that maximizes the impossibility of the effect.
Reasoning Misdirection: The Invisible Wall
The third category of non-attentional misdirection — reasoning misdirection — is the one I find most elegant. It does not prevent the audience from seeing. It does not prevent them from remembering. It prevents them from reaching the correct conclusion.
The most common form is the false solution — leading the audience toward an incorrect explanation for the effect. When a spectator arrives at a false solution, something remarkable happens: they stop looking. Not visually. Mentally. The search for an explanation is driven by cognitive dissonance — the uncomfortable feeling of witnessing something impossible. When a plausible explanation presents itself, the dissonance resolves, and the search stops.
The false solution does not need to be correct. It needs to be satisfying. The audience’s reasoning system is not looking for truth. It is looking for relief from the dissonance. Any plausible explanation provides that relief.
I observed this at a dinner event in Vienna. After a mentalism routine, I overheard two spectators discussing the performance. One offered an explanation — completely wrong, but internally consistent. The other immediately accepted it. Neither spectator continued to analyze the routine. The false solution had closed the loop. Their reasoning minds had found an answer and moved on.
The deeper form of reasoning misdirection is the exploitation of wrong assumptions. The audience brings assumptions into every performance — assumptions about the nature of the objects, the sequence of events, the range of possible methods. These assumptions are so deeply held that they are not examined. They function as invisible walls that constrain the audience’s reasoning.
When the actual method lies on the other side of one of these walls, the audience will never find it — not because they cannot see it, but because they never look in that direction. Their assumptions exclude that territory from the search space entirely.
Ortiz calls this the false frame of reference: “If you can get them to ask the wrong question, you’ll guarantee that they’ll never arrive at the right answer.” The audience is not being prevented from thinking. They are thinking actively, intensely, analytically. But they are thinking within a frame that excludes the correct answer. The frame itself is the misdirection.
Combining All Channels
The most robust performances — the ones that resist reconstruction from every angle — combine attentional, memory, and reasoning misdirection simultaneously.
Consider a single critical moment in a routine. The audience is looking at the right place (attentional cover). But even if someone happens to notice the action, it appears mundane and motivated (memory misdirection — it will not be encoded as important). And even if someone remembers it, the overall frame of reference directs their reasoning away from the correct interpretation (reasoning misdirection — they will not connect it to the effect).
Three independent channels. Three independent defenses. Each one sufficient for most spectators. Combined, sufficient for virtually all spectators.
This is not theoretical. This is how I now design every routine. For each critical moment, I map the coverage across all three channels:
Attentional: Where are they looking? What bottom-up trigger am I using to capture attention away from the action?
Memory: Even if they see it, will they remember it? Is the action motivated? Is it embedded in a mundane sequence? Is there sufficient time delay before they need to recall it?
Reasoning: Even if they remember it, will they connect it to the method? Does the overall frame of reference exclude the correct interpretation? Is there a false solution available that will satisfy their analytical impulse?
When all three channels are covered, I perform with genuine confidence — not the false confidence of hoping nobody looks at the wrong moment, but the real confidence of knowing that the design accounts for full observation. The routine works even when they are watching. Even when they are paying attention. Even when they are trying to figure it out.
That is the promise of non-attentional misdirection. It turns the audience’s full engagement from a threat into an asset. Let them watch. Let them pay attention. Let them analyze. The misdirection is not fighting their attention. It is operating on different channels entirely — channels that attention cannot protect, channels that vigilance cannot monitor, channels that the audience does not even know exist.
The audience thinks misdirection means looking the wrong way. The performer who understands non-attentional techniques knows that the most powerful misdirection happens in full view, in full daylight, with every eye in the room pointed directly at you.
They are watching. They are remembering. They are reasoning. And on every channel, they are misdirected.