The Misdirection Taxonomy

9 posts in this series

Reading Order

1 of 9 — 8 min read

Three Kinds of Misdirection: Perceptual, Memory, and Reasoning

Gustav Kuhn's taxonomy breaks misdirection into three distinct categories. Understanding which type you're using changes how you design every moment.

2 of 9 — 8 min read

Focus, Timing, and Resources: The Three Dimensions of Attentional Misdirection

Attentional misdirection isn't just about where they look. It operates on three dimensions: spatial focus, temporal timing, and cognitive resource allocation.

3 of 9 — 8 min read

External Triggers Are Harder to Resist: Why Automatic Cues Beat Instructions

Research shows that bottom-up attention capture (movement, sound, novelty) is far harder to resist than top-down instructions. This explains why natural misdirection outperforms telling the audience where to look.

4 of 9 — 8 min read

Misdirection That Works Even When They're Watching: Non-Attentional Techniques

Some of the most powerful misdirection techniques work even when the audience is looking directly at the secret action. Memory and reasoning misdirection operate on completely different channels than attention.

5 of 9 — 8 min read

Memory Misdirection: Making Your Method Forgettable

Some misdirection works not by preventing perception but by ensuring the audience forgets what they saw. Memory misdirection operates after the fact, editing the spectator's reconstruction of what happened.

6 of 9 — 8 min read

Reasoning Misdirection: How False Solutions Prevent Real Ones

Once the audience has a plausible (but wrong) explanation, they stop looking for the real one. Reasoning misdirection exploits cognitive satisfaction -- the brain's tendency to stop searching once it finds an answer that fits.

7 of 9 — 8 min read

A Fake Explanation Cuts Correct Detection by Thirty Percent

Research shows that providing a false explanation for an effect significantly reduces the audience's ability to detect the real method. The numbers are striking and have immediate practical implications for every performer.

8 of 9 — 8 min read

Dissolution, Attraction, Deviation: Ascanio's Three Grades of Misdirection

Arturo de Ascanio developed a framework for misdirection decades before cognitive science caught up. His three grades -- dissolution, attraction, and deviation -- describe increasing levels of misdirective power, and they align remarkably with what researchers have since confirmed in the lab.

9 of 9 — 8 min read

Believing It and Disbelieving It at the Same Time: Magic as Cognitive Conflict

Magic creates a unique psychological state where you simultaneously believe what you saw and know it cannot be true. This cognitive conflict is the same mechanism that powers jokes -- both exploit the gap between the story your brain builds and the reality that shatters it.