> The brain wasn’t brightening the light on stimuli of interest; it was lowering the lights on everything else. An outstanding demonstration of this process is

> The brain wasn’t brightening the light on stimuli of interest; it was lowering the lights on everything else. An outstanding demonstration of this process is Apollo Robbins' "pick-pocket" act[1]. You can clearly see how he gives his subject a bunch of things to think about - his hand movements, what he's talking about, sounds, touch, etc - until it fills up the subjects attention capacity and they suddenly stop noticing everything else going on right in front of them. He basically performs a denial-of-service attack on someone's attention system until they cannot notice him take their wristwatch off. All done with a flourish for the camera, of course, which works because he's not DOSing the audience's attention. A particularly good example is from his talk[2] at defcon (the entire talk is worth watching). Right when he asks "When you walked past me, did you check to see where your wallet was?" you can see the volunteer suddenly put all of his attention on that question and not his wristwatch. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoUSO_Mj1TQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoUSO_Mj1TQ [2] (demo starts at 31:22) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kkOKvPrdZ4&feature=youtu.be&t=1882 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kkOKvPrdZ4&feature=youtu.be...