Confabulation

As amazing of a processing machine as our brains are, they are not quick enough to catch everything. With the enormous number of stimuli bombarding our senses at every moment there are bound to be gaps in what we perceive. To address these gaps the brain creates its best guess to fill in the missing pieces. When we reach an outcome, or result of some sort, our brain creates the necessary backstory to support that outcome regardless of if it is true or not. This is called confabulation.

For our purposes, this is what the audience does while watching a fight. The axiom “the hand is quicker than the eye” is misleading. If we put our focus on the hand we can follow its every movement no matter how fast it goes. Think about tracking a car on the road. You can keep a car focused or even catch it and track it as it speeds by at 55+ miles per hour without difficulty. What you can’t do is focus on an object on the side of the road and track the car at the same time, our perceptual focus has limits. This is why the hand seems so fast. It only sneaks up on us when we are focused somewhere else.

That fact is important because its how we hide our main illusions of sound and impact. The audience misses the knap but clearly hears a sound and sees a reaction that says that something must have happened. Having the result but missing the process, the brain takes over and decides that impact must have occurred. The story is so fleshed out in the mind that some will swear to seeing things that did not exist!

This is also why stage fighting must be slower than film fighting. Film can narrowly focus the audiences attention to pull of the “magic.” The sacrifice is that they have to move faster because the audience can now apply more resources to evaluating the trick. Stage fights compete with a wide variety of stimuli to guide the audiences focus. We must have clear cues to attract the audiences attention and set them up for the action. Knaps and vocals must be present and believable (even though knaps sound nothing like real impact the audience truly believes that the clapping noise is accurate, more so than when compared to the real thing) so the audience can have a clear result and fill in the gap. If the result is junk the brain will fill the missing piece with junk.

Knowing how the audience processes what we do allows us to more efficiently focus our attention and energy into the areas most important to pulling off the technique. You can’t prevent confabulation even with slow motion. The audience still misses pieces while they watch your face or feet or muscle movement or get distracted. So its best to work with the natural process honed over thousands of years of evolution, that every audience member is so inherently good at, to our advantage.