88 Uncanny Mind Tricks People Share That Secretly Give You The Upper Hand

There’s a reason we’re so captivated by things that seem to mess with our minds. Just think of a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat, sawing his assistant in half, or pulling a coin from behind your ear. You likely know there’s a trick involved, and yet, for at least that moment, it feels completely real. Why do we fall for it?

As Avery Hurt explains in Discover Magazine, there might be props involved, but those aren’t necessarily what make an illusion work. “The real magic,” she explains, “is in the minds of the audience.” That’s because, behind all the smoke and mirrors, there’s neuroscience at work.

As neuroscientist Eric Haseltine, author of Brain Safari, puts it, “All magicians know some brain science.” They can take advantage of the way our brains direct attention and interpret what we see. One famous example Hurt mentions is the “invisible gorilla” experiment, in which participants watched a video of people passing a basketball and were asked to count the passes. Roughly half failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking right across the middle of the scene.

It’s a memorable illustration of how our attention can be selective, allowing us to focus on what we expect to be important while overlooking something else entirely. As Haseltine puts it, “Magic works because your brain oversimplifies the world, seeing what it expects while blinding itself to what it doesn’t expect.”

But magicians aren’t the only people who can take advantage of the quirks of the human mind. Part of what makes psychological tricks so fascinating is the possibility that those same blind spots, expectations and assumptions can be exploited in our everyday interactions. And that can be pretty humbling.

We tend to think our perceptions are an accurate reflection of the world around us, so discovering that our attention can be redirected—or that we can overlook something happening right in front of us, even a whole gorilla—can feel a little like a revelation. Sometimes the most interesting part of a trick isn’t the trick itself, but realizing that our own minds made it possible.

Maybe that’s why learning about psychological tricks is so appealing: not because we necessarily want to become better at manipulating other people, but because we want that little bit of awareness—to recognize when someone might be messing with us and understand why a tactic works when we encounter it. After all, as Haseltine notes, the cognitive biases that make magic possible can have a more serious side, too. For instance, he explains, “con artists also know how to exploit your expectations (and desires) to lead your brain down a garden path.”

When someone deliberately uses the quirks of the mind to steer, unsettle, or manipulate another person, that’s where things start to feel a little darker. So as you go through this list, it’s perhaps worth asking: Is this something clever, something a little concerning, or maybe something you’ve already experienced without realizing? Chances are, you’ll find examples of all three—and that ambiguity might be where the real magic lies.