Brain Games returns to the air next Monday, April 22, with the episode “Focus Pocus.” In the episode, TEDGlobal 2013 speaker Apollo Robbins, the “gentleman thief,” joins Silva and psychologist Brian Scholl, director of Yale University’s Perception and Cognition Lab, for a look at how the brain focuses on important details – or at least, those it thinks are important.
Below, watch Silva talk about how we focus — and over-extend our focus — in today’s media landscape:
And Robbins describes how he uses the brain’s tools of focus for sleight-of-hand and, in the process, makes a pen disappear: