~ The Unexamined ~

Okay, enough of the mushy gushy, how do we find the Whats that are often overlooked by us in everyday life? If we can’t answer that, then we’ll be no better off than a blind man in a staring contest. Even if we won, we’d never know it. Embracing the unexamined empowers everyone with the ability to protect the progress and potential of everyone around them, those whom they care for, and those who care for them. This chapter, is about how to identify the unexamined, as a way to be better able to embrace them, and gain the knowledge that you need, to make intelligent, wise, and memorable decisions. These decisions will not only earn you acceptance, or appreciation, but also comfort and protection, because no one else will be able to do what you do. At least, not without your help. For starters, we need to realize what captures our attention, and what doesn’t. There are five major catalysts for attention-grabbing: Activity, Intensity, Contrast, Novelty, and Humor (Cite Public Speaking Class). 

Activity, is quite simply, the presence of motion and transformation. If a man decides to wriggle at his suit and tie a bit, you’ll be almost certain to notice. Try this exercise if you’d like. Next time someone reaches out to give you a handshake, try to stop yourself from grabbing their hand to continue that shake. It’ll either feel very weird, or you’ll fail to do it at all. You'll probably just end up grabbing their hand before even realizing it. The very motion of someone raising their hand to you like that, immediately grabs your attention. All other thoughts turn off. For a moment, it’s just you, your hand, and their hand. (I don’t know why, but that sounded oddly sexual to me while writing this.) At the end of the day, activity grabs your attention, so much so that, on occasion, you forget about everything else. Oh! and this also applies to when you’re doing something as well. If you’re focused on your own activity, you may have given so much attention to what you’re doing, that you forget about everything else. As a magician, this is one of my favorite forms of misdirection because my hands stay clean. If I give you a task, even a small one, and it distracts you? Well then, I’m not the one distracting you. You are!

Intensity can be categorized as the heightened form of the power that a sense, like sight, has on one’s mental, physical, or emotional state. By bringing the visuals, audio, textures, and so much more, to the extreme, things'll be better able to grab your attention. For example, a really loud fart is bound to catch people’s attention, just like a bright light or sudden darkness. This is why romance movies can seem so… far fetched? It doesn’t have to be realistic to grab your attention, and movie creation is all about attention. Of course, that means that they use intensity a lot. (*Cough* Overdone CGI and unnecessary drama *Cough*) This leads to our next attention grabber: Contrast.

Since I am, on occasion, an asshole, when I really want to make a point against an adversary. I beat that person at something they find rather important to their status or self worth, and quickly leave as soon as possible, saying as few words as can be, before disappearing into the great unknown that is our world. Afterwards, when we next meet, you can almost see it on their face, that they expect me to brag, as, again, I am a rather arrogant fellow. At such times… I don’t. This leads to them focusing all of their attention on how I didn’t say something. In such, the absence of my words will haunt them for far longer than if I had said anything at all. Another great example of this is an absence of punishment. Have you ever done something so wrong that you feel you need to be punished, only to have the executioner say “But wouldn’t it be worse if I didn’t hurt you?” Oh damn! That hurts. Believe me. That. Hurts. And THAT, is the power of contrast. Contrast is a surprise based on previous expectations. Intensity is powerful because it takes your expectations, and then exceeds them to a rather distinct degree. It is the change in size from our expectations that empowers intensity’s grip on your attention, but it is the denial of an expectations, that empowers contrast.

Another form of attention hog is called “Novelty”. Novelty is different to contrast. Contrast is something different from your expectations, but with novelty, there were no expectations to begin with. It’s a display of something that you’ve been missing in life, and your brain, always on alert for possibly new survival tools, will take a keen interest in such things. 

Think of it this way, a 4 year old wouldn’t go asking you for the definition of sex, because he doesn’t even know that sex exists. He can’t have expectations, and can't even go looking for the definition of a concept that he doesn’t know exists. In such, when the time is right, sex will become a “Novelty” towards him. If you told him that babies came from factories or whatever, there will also be a bit of contrast to, making him focus all the more attention on this new subject. You can use multiple attention grabbers at once. In fact, the more of them you blend together, the more attention you can draw from others, or the more attention the world may draw from you. The latter is what we’re looking to avoid.

Finally, there is another form of attention grabber: Humor. By now you may have noticed that all five attention grabbers are based on the art of surprising your brain, even a little bit, and the fact that that leads to a focused attention on the surprise itself.

Attention is most likely there to keep you alive. Any surprise you face likely has some element in it that you haven’t come to expect yet. You need to be able to expect the worst in order to avoid it, and so it seems important to you. In such, attention must be given to it. This is the foundation of misdirection for us magicians. If the magician is acting like something is important to him, or the trick, it isn’t. If something seems improvised or unimportant to him, it’s probably the most important piece of all. What you think is important is what you pay attention to. So a magician looking at his watch will make you think that it has something to do with the trick, but it works the other way around as well. Whatever we pay attention to, we assume is more important than all the other  things we don’t pay attention to. Hence why we magicians misdirect your attention. If that’s all you’ve seen, then that’s all you know, and if you saw nothing, then no matter how many times you play it back in your mind, no secrets will be revealed, even if you think that you saw something important.

Humor is a classic art form based in surprise. It is often achieved by creating an outcome that was unexpected, but still related to the origins of it’s own creation. For example, I love returning people’s insults with witty comebacks. I, myself, tend to talk really fast, as a performer, and I’ve often been heckled and teased for that. One day, while I was in high school, a student told me to “calm down”, and when I asked him what he meant he said, “Dude, you’re talking way too fast.”

So I simply responded “Oh. I’m too fast? I thought you were just slow.”

My point, dear readers, is that my joke didn’t just spawn out of nowhere. It took a simple piece of what he was saying, and turned it on it’s head. He made a comparison, using the measurement of speed, assuming that it was bad for me. I played by his rules, and then flipped that measurement, so that it was actually terrible, for him. Most humor will do the same. The truth is that you can learn a lot about what you assume in everyday life by seeing what makes you laugh. That may be why humor captivates our attention so well. It does, in fact, help us adapt ourselves in the search of a brighter tomorrow.

Please, keep in mind, that through all these entertaining examples (or at least… I hope they were…) there is an actual theme here. You are still supposed to be learning. If all the Whats you have ever listed to yourself, were brought to you through Activity, Intensity, Contrast, Novelty, and Humor, and ONLY those, then chances are that you haven’t found anywhere NEAR enough Whats to know what's actually going on. You must find all the Whats first. Only then, can you focus on the Hows.