The Conjurer by medieval artist Hieronymus Bosch.
Brain scientists have turned to a group of magicians to learn more about how the brain constructs our everyday reality. In doing so, they’ve learned how magicians for centuries have exploited the brain’s tendency to create reality moment to moment.
In the current issue of Nature Reviews: Neuroscience, they explained that our brains construct our individual reality from sensory data, compiling it and then sorting it based on our experience and the context in which the data is received. Magic tricks successfully exploit this process by using maneuvers that are outside the context of what our senses perceive at any given moment. In other words, by operating in the area outside of where our attention is focused, and therefore outside of our reality for the moment.
For example, the sudden disappearance of an object creates an “after-discharge,” an image that lingers in the brain momentarily even though the object is no longer in view. In an illusion created by The Great Tomsoni, his assistant comes on stage in a white dress. He tells the audience he’ll magically change her dress from white to red. He then shines a red light on her, cracks some jokes, and then the house lights suddenly come on and the assistant is seen to be wearing a red dress.
For example, the sudden disappearance of an object creates an “after-discharge,” an image that lingers in the brain momentarily even though the object is no longer in view. In an illusion created by The Great Tomsoni, his assistant comes on stage in a white dress. He tells the audience he’ll magically change her dress from white to red. He then shines a red light on her, cracks some jokes, and then the house lights suddenly come on and the assistant is seen to be wearing a red dress.
The real trick is that when he turns off the red light that had been shining on her white dress, the image of the red light lingers in the audience’s brain for 100 milliseconds, during which the assistant’s white dress is quickly stripped away to reveal a red dress beneath it. The audience fails to register the stripping away of the outer, white dress. In their minds, the assistant’s dress has turned from white to red as if by magic.
This fun 3-minute video cited in the article clearly shows how our brains can fail to register events while they’re focused on a particular event.
The scientists and magicians explained how the brain focuses on one thing at a time, at the expense of other activities. Plus, they said the brain suppresses activity in surrounding visual areas while it's concentrating on one thing. Skilled magicians have long known how to deflect a viewer’s attention through sleights of hands, direct eye contact, joking and other distractions.
This fun 3-minute video cited in the article clearly shows how our brains can fail to register events while they’re focused on a particular event.
The scientists and magicians explained how the brain focuses on one thing at a time, at the expense of other activities. Plus, they said the brain suppresses activity in surrounding visual areas while it's concentrating on one thing. Skilled magicians have long known how to deflect a viewer’s attention through sleights of hands, direct eye contact, joking and other distractions.
Click here for the full Nature Reviews article.
Click here for a New York Times article on the findings.
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