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.

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