TED Community » Stuart Nolan

About Me

Stuart was thrown out of school for reading too much and spent his youth involved in a range of nefarious activities including time as a pitchman, a fake psychic, a 3-card monte thrower, and a stand-up poet. When he grew up he spent 17 years developing for Interactive TV, Web, mobile devices, games platforms, and museum displays. In 2002, a NESTA Fellowship gave him the opportunity to travel the world studying with experts in traditional techniques of deception and attention control. Refining these techniques using current research in psychology and neuroscience he developed his expertise in sleight-of hand magic, hypnosis, cold reading, and psychological illusion.

Stuart has applied these techniques to new areas, researching how teenagers respond to the mysterious in new technologies, how organisations are regularly deceived by the language of strategy documents, and how the art of attention control can be used in design, media production and sport coaching. He has run his unique workshops with architects in Manchester, technologists in Lima, film editors in Paris, journalists in Sofia, museum directors in Norwich, artists in Madrid, Internet entrepreneurs in Kuala Lumpur, TV executives in Helsinki, game designers in Alicante, scriptwriters in Amsterdam, futurologists in Brussels, Rugby players in Yorkshire, and teenage inventors at the BBC.

Stuart has spoken at TEDxSalford and TEDxHuddersfield.