Unseen

About the Book

Can we believe our eyes? Most of us are confident that we can, but we shouldn't be so sure.

We miss things in plain sight. We overlook changes happening right in front of us. We fall for illusions and never notice we've done it. The cause is a set of blind spots wired into the way human perception works, and they are far from harmless. The very same gaps that make a magic trick land are behind misread instruments, mistaken diagnoses, unreliable eyewitness testimony and expensive choices about what we buy and how we invest.

In Unseen, neuropsychologist David Lewis and illusionist Keelan Leyser take these blind spots apart: where they come from, why evolution left them in place, how they can be turned against us, and what it takes to see around them.

From the invisible gorilla to deepfakes, from the shopping aisle to the boardroom, from the witness stand to the magic stage, the book reveals how misdirection, priming and 'illusioneering' are used every day to steer what we notice, what we trust and what we choose — and what we can do to take back control.

The result is a book that draws on both the psychology lab and the magician's stage to explain the mind's blind spots in a way no other book quite does.

What have you been missing?

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Inside the Book

Twelve Chapters on How Perception Fails

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