How pickpockets trick your mind

Pickpockets use much more than sleight of hand, says Caroline Williams, they hack your brain’s weaknesses.

My mother has eyes in the back of her head. She also taught me from an early age to be suspicious of strange men, especially when they give you presents. Which makes it all the more surprising that a “nice man” bearing flowers managed to swipe 20 euros from her purse, while she was holding it in her hands and looking straight at it.

“He said he was collecting for a church charity so I pulled out a euro,” she explains. “He said “no, no, that’s too much” and offered to look in my purse to find a smaller coin. He must have slid out the 20 euro note at the same time. I didn’t even notice until an hour later. I felt so stupid.”

But she needn’t feel bad. According to neuroscientists our brains come pretty much hard-wired to be tricked, thanks to the vagaries of our attention and perception systems. In fact, the key requirement for a successful pickpocket isn’t having nifty fingers, it’s having a working knowledge of the loopholes in our brains. Some are so good at it that researchers are working with them to get an insight into the way our minds work.

The most important of these loopholes is the fact that our brains are not set up to multi-task. Most of the time that is a good thing – it allows us to filter out all but the most important features of the world around us. But neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde, the author of the book Sleights of Mind, says that a good trickster can use it against you. She should know: as a researcher at the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience in Arizona, she has studied how Las Vegas stage pickpocket Apollo Robbins performs his tricks.

“When Apollo gets someone on stage,” she says, “he is making them look at things, he is talking to them, he is touching their body, he is coming very close to them and producing an emotional response as he is entering their personal space… It’s complete attentional overload.”

So while sleight of hand helps, it’s as much about capturing all of somebody’s attention with other movements. Street pickpockets also use this effect to their advantage by manufacturing a situation that can’t help but overload your attention system. A classic trick is the ‘stall’, used by pickpocketing gangs all over the world. First, a ‘blocker’, walks in front of the victim (or ‘mark’) and suddenly stops so that the mark bumps into them. Another gang member will be close behind and will bump into both of them and then start a staged argument with the blocker. Amid the confusion one or both of them steal what they can and pass it to a third member of the gang, who quickly makes off with the loot.

“People think it’s about distracting someone by making them look away but it’s actually about directing the mind towards something,” says James Brown, a stage pickpocket and hypnotist based in the UK. “If I wanted you to stop looking at something on the table it’s much easier for me to give you a good reason to look at something else. If I give you two or three things to focus on and the one I want you to avoid isn’t one of them, then that’s even better because now you have the illusion of choice.”

Other tactics are more psychological. Pickpockets tend to hang out near ‘beware of pickpockets’ signs, because the first thing people do when they read it is check they still have their valuables, helpfully giving away where they are. And in my mother’s case, the thief’s best trick was not coming across like a pickpocket. “He was a very nice guy and very personable. Not someone that would cause you to suspect,” she says.

(BBC News)

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