Can your thoughts be influenced? Take the test!

Are your thoughts strong enough to resist influence from external factors? By doing this test you will experience how your mind can be influenced!
For starters, you will have to stare into this magic eye for 10 seconds, which will steer your thoughts towards a fixed choice. Stare closely for 10 seconds into the centre of the eye and make sure your head is completely empty, to be more sensitive to the influence of the eye.
   
Now that you have stared into the magic eye you can look at the next picture. In the picture are five playing cards. Pick one of the cards and keep the card in mind. You may even say the card out loud to make sure you will not forget it.
   
Done? Scroll all the way down and discover if the magic eye has influenced your choice! Skip the following part of the text!



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In the following paragraph, we will explain the mechanism behind the magic eye. Your choice has not been influenced by the magic eye, obviously, since it is just a drawing of an eye. But how come it did look like it did influence your choice? The phenomenon you just witnessed is something called “change blindness”. This change blindness shows that we do not remember the information that is gathered by our eyes very well. Because of this change blindness, we are unable to detect small changes in our environment. You probably remember your own playing card. But do you remember the other ones as well? Compare both sets of cards and look at the differences.
As you can see, all cards have been changed into different cards. But there is a big chance you did not notice this change. The question is: why not? You (probably) did not notice because you were given a specific task. Because of this, you focused all your attention on that one specific card and less attention was available for the other cards. When looking at the second set of cards you were not able to find your own card, leaving the only “logical” conclusion that your card must have vanished.
Change blindness is a phenomenon that especially works well when we have a specific task. Change blindness is a commonly used method in illusions or magic tricks.



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Read further from here
If done correctly, you are currently focussing on the playing card of your choice. This may have looked like your own choice, but the magic eye indeed tried to influence it. On the next picture, one of the five playing cards has been removed and if the experiment succeeded it will be your card.
   
And? Did your card disappear? It probably did. Strange isn’t it? Since you had the free choice of picking any card. Did the magic eye influence your choice? Or is something else going on? If you want to know how the eye influenced your decision, scroll back up to read the explanation.