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<p><strong>The Amazing Colour Changing Card Trick</strong></p><p>To start off, I need you to do a quick exercise. Don't worry, it's not difficult, and I promise you're going to love this. </p><p><br></p><p><strong>A Quick Test About Playing Cards</strong></p><p>To illustrate the same phenomenon, let's quickly test your knowledge about <a href="https://www.wjplayingcards.com/product" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>playing cards</strong></a>. If you're reading this, chances are you have used playing cards a lot. Perhaps you use them for playing card games, for performing card magic, for cardistry, or you're just a collector. Either way, you've probably shuffled a deck hundreds if not thousands of times. </p><p><br></p><p>1. Including black as a colour, how many different print colours do regular court cards have?</p><p>2. How many of the twelve court cards are looking to the left?</p><p>3. How many court cards are shown with a side view of the face rather than a front view?</p><p>4. Which Queen is holding something besides a flower?</p><p>5. Which King is not holding a sword?</p><p>6. Which Jack is holding a paddle/mirror?</p><p>7. Which Jacks have a fancy moustache?</p><p>8. Which Kings do not have a moustache?</p><p>9. What is the only suit where the Jack and Queen are not looking in the same direction?</p><p>10. How many of the 52 cards in a regular deck have an asymmetrical (one-way) design?</p><p><br></p><p>You might notice some details on those <a href="https://www.wjplayingcards.com/poker-cards" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>poker cards</strong></a> that you've never noticed before. If you get a passing mark of more than five right, I'll be very impressed. And if you did find that test too difficult, try this slightly easier online pop quiz about playing cards which will instantly give you a score out of ten.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Inattentional Blindness</strong></p><p>Going through these questions has likely made you realize how little you've noticed about the playing cards that you've seen many, many times. Strange isn't it?! How can it be possible that you have handled a regular deck of playing cards so often, and yet not know the answers to basic questions like these?</p><p><br></p><p>This simple test to illustrate a phenomenon that psychologists call inattentional blindness, or change blindness. The idea of this is that when our attention is focused on something specific, it is possible for something else that happens right in front of our eyes not to register at all.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>The Princess Card Trick</strong></p><p>Inattentional blindness means that something quite significant can happen right in front of your eyes, and yet you can completely fail to register it. If we can miss a chest-thumping gorilla, then how many other things do we completely miss? Magicians have been using this principle to help them in card magic for a long time. One of the most well known examples is "The Princess Card Trick". </p><p><br></p><p>But first, try it for yourself here. Typically the online version works something like this. You are shown six playing cards, and you choose and remember one of them. When you click on the screen, one of the six playing cards has been removed - and it is exactly the one that you chose!</p><p><br></p><p>This can create gasps of amazement, but the secret is very simple. While you were focusing on remembering the playing card you chose, you tend to ignore the exact identity of the other cards are. So in actual fact all five cards shown afterwards are different from the original ones (if you didn't quite follow this, see a detailed explanation here). This trick can be made convincing by selecting a mix of cards with similar values and suits, but subtly switching some of the suits so that the change isn't as obvious. It's a little harder to perform a trick like this in the real world, but with a good presentation and some sleight of hand.</p><p><br></p><p>The Princess Card Trick is another good example of inattentional blindness. Research has shown that what we actually see is often very different from what we think we see. We can't absorb everything, so our mind has to be selective, and it focuses on specific things, and eliminates other things that it considers to be distractions at that moment, effectively making us "blind" to certain details.</p><p><br></p>
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