Perception, attention, and magic

What did you notice about the video above? Were you able to predict whether the coin landed on heads or tails? Or more importantly, did you notice that the coin itself was switched halfway through?

This is an exercise conducted by the University of South Carolina focusing on human processing of attended and unattended information, and how our brains can be tricked into filtering out information that is actually relevant.

This phenomenon is called ‘change blindness’ and, for better or worse, is the reason magicians exist.