It is hard not to pay attention to optical illusions, and wonder how can it be that one line is not really longer than the other or one circle is not really darker than the other or all the other varieties that tell us our eyes lie to us. It was only a few decades ago that neuroscientists realized that the mistakes in visual processing were tools to examine how the eyes and brain process information. (It was also a reminder of the wonderful and mysterious lesson that our brains do not make perfect inner models of reality, but only use the tricks and shortcuts descended from their evolution to make useful, rather than exact, models.) In a way, magicians perform optical illusions and even behavioral illusions. You enjoy a magician’s performance because although it looks as if he makes coins manifest from the air or makes a ball vanish when he throws it up, you know that such things cannot really be and yet you cannot figure out how the impression the magician makes is so strong. If we can get neurological understanding of the visual system from optical illusions, perhaps the illusions performed by magicians would offer an even broader range of tools to evaluate brain function. This was the insight of Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde. They are both directors of neuroscience labs and they are married. Because they had done research on visual illusions, they hosted a conference in 2005 in Las Vegas, and were reminded that it was headquarters for some of the best magicians in the world. They got the insight that magic could be studied to gain understanding of perception and even consciousness. They even became certified magicians. You might not be able to get through any of their scientific papers on the subject, but here (written with Sandra Blakeslee) is “Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions” (Henry Holt), a delightful and illuminating book about how magicians in many ways take advantage of our brains’ imperfect modeling of reality and what this tells us about how the brains work.
The immediate attraction to this book for many people will be that it gives magic secrets away. This is, of course, necessary to explain how what the brain perceives is different from what is presented to it, but it might be seen as a violation of “The Magicians’ Code” to tell such secrets. The authors have conscientiously marked all such explanations with a “Spoiler Alert,” so that if you still want to be baffled you can skip the explanation. Of course you will be missing all the fun and insight, and it is hard to imagine anyone that would resist looking at the spoilers. (There will be no spoilers in this review.) Even more important is that knowing the trick doesn’t make it any less of a trick; the authors still go to magic shows and still are fooled. “We like some shows so much that we go to them over and over and never come away disappointed.” Of course, a magician has secret methods to work magical effects, but the trick (hardware, palming, hidden moves, mirrors, and so on) isn’t where the real secret lies. The real secret is that the trick is within the brain itself, and the explanations can’t spoil such effects. The authors feel that it is not a matter of the brain getting things wrong or making mistaken judgments. Illusions “are adaptive shortcuts that your brain makes to speed up such processing, or reduce the amount of processing necessary to provide you with the information you need to survive and to thrive, even if the information isn’t technically accurate.”
The hardwired processes of paying attention cannot be overcome, but they can be hacked, and this is what magicians do. Among the many techniques described here are those which control the attention of an audience. Everyone knows that if you stare at something, people around you will want to take a look to see what you are paying attention to. Magicians do this all the time, but it is not usually so simple. A magician who produces a live dove, for instance, knows that you cannot help but pay attention to the flapping of the dove. While the spotlight of that attention is on the dove, who knows what might be manipulated outside the spotlight? Among the many magicians who have contributed to the research here are Penn and Teller, who do a cups and balls trick during which Penn juggles some balls. “This is not juggling,” Penn says as he juggles, “This is misdirection.” It’s P & T’s trademark, giving away a trick’s secret but actually giving away nothing; you cannot help watching Penn juggle as the sly Teller does a secret move. It can’t always work; you have to be able to pay attention to pay attention to the wrong thing. The authors describe Martinez-Conde’s going to a magic show given for magicians and being amazed at how sloppy the performance was, since she could see how a particular trick was done. The problem was that she was pregnant and was so busy fretting about not throwing up that she had a deficit of attention; everyone else paid attention where the magician directed and was fooled. People with autism have trouble paying attention the way most people do; the authors have a grant proposal to see if failure to be fooled by magic tricks might be a novel way to diagnose or better understand autism.
The authors describe with good humor and charm their attempts to become full-fledged performing magicians, and the difficulties involved. Skill with the hands is important, but not as important as you might think. “Pulling off these simple sleights requires about as much dexterity as you need when learning how to shuffle a deck of cards for the first time.” It is using the eyes and body for misdirection that is hard, as is not paying attention to the work of your own hands which would make people realize what you are doing. Accomplished magicians practice enough that tricky movements come as second nature and require no attention. If the magician stops to think, “Here’s where I must be careful in doing the trick,” the audience is handed a higher likelihood of being able to tell what is going on. It’s a lesson we know in real life: “If you have something to hide from your business partner, spouse, or a law enforcement agent, you will do best not to think about it while in their presence, lest your voice, gaze, or posture give you away.”
There are other real-life lessons here, too. The reason that a magician can so easily take your attention away from the mechanics of the trick is that we are so bad at multitasking. There has been a decade of research on multitasking, long before the authors got interested in magic. Multitaskers just don’t get all the tasks done as well as those who are doing one thing at a time. Those who couple the task of driving with the task of talking on a cell phone, even if the phone is hands-free, are able to pay as little attention to the road as drunks do. There are wonderful examples in the book of magicians (or psychologists doing experiments) who do such things as literally riding around on a unicycle in a clown suit without being noticed because attention is elsewhere. Remember, too, that a good patter is not just the mark of a smooth performance; the magician who tells jokes, witty or corny, is counting on your mind to be occupied with the humor so that it can’t do much else.
The authors have no concern that pushing scientific investigation of magical feats will make them any less magical, any more than Copernicus diminished the beauties of sunsets. In fact, they are doing what magicians have been doing all along: “Magicians basically do cognitive science experiments for audiences all night long, and they may be even more effective than we scientists are in the lab.” And it may well be that armed with better understanding of how magic works, the authors can improve the effectiveness of their own tricks and those of other magicians. Their book reads well as a summary of a personal quest for
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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