Speaker 1: We're the first people to discover things about the human brain,
Speaker 1: neuroscientists or magicians. How do magicians steer your attention? Why
Speaker 1: can't you see what they're doing when they do something
Speaker 1: right in front of you? And how can someone appear
Speaker 1: to read your mind? Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me
Speaker 1: David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford
Speaker 1: and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three
Speaker 1: pound universe to understand why and how our lives look
Speaker 1: the way they do. Today's episode dives deep into the
Speaker 1: world of magic tricks. Why do magic tricks work? I'm
Speaker 1: not talking about the mechanics of how a card trick,
Speaker 1: or how a magician saws a box in half and
Speaker 1: it's actually two ladies and two boxes, or how a
Speaker 1: magician pulls off a trick with mirrors. I'm not talking
Speaker 1: about that. I want to talk about the way the
Speaker 1: human brain works and how that opens the door to
Speaker 1: us getting fooled. And so I'm going to start with
Speaker 1: an assertion if brains worked in a totally different way,
Speaker 1: presumably we would have different sorts of magic tricks. Other
Speaker 1: things would work for us. So, for example, if we
Speaker 1: ever discover life on other planets, we might find that
Speaker 1: the aliens visual systems or attentional systems work differently, and
Speaker 1: therefore an alien magician stands on stage in front of
Speaker 1: its alien audience and does things that would seem patently
Speaker 1: obvious to us, and all the aliens would put their
Speaker 1: green hands over their mouths and gasp, wow, how did
Speaker 1: she do that? In other words, if they have some
Speaker 1: sort of flaw in their understanding of the reality of
Speaker 1: the world out there, then their magicians could take advantage
Speaker 1: of that and they would be flummixed. So in today's episode,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take the opposite view. We're going to pretend
Speaker 1: we're the aliens looking at the humans, and we'll get
Speaker 1: to see the flaws in the human brain that way
Speaker 1: that cause us to misperceive reality, which gives rise to
Speaker 1: a class of people known as magicians, who exploit these
Speaker 1: neural deficits, either for profit or entertainment. And what's fascinating
Speaker 1: is that even though we've figured out a lot about
Speaker 1: the brain, there's a sense in which neuroscientists are always
Speaker 1: playing catch up to those people who have mastered the
Speaker 1: art of perception. This can be the stage magician or
Speaker 1: the mentalist, or the person running a seance, or the
Speaker 1: guy run the shell game on a street corner, or
Speaker 1: the professional pickpocket. These people have mastered manipulation through a
Speaker 1: lot of trial and error. And now we're at a
Speaker 1: fascinating point where there's a collaboration going on between these
Speaker 1: two fields, where neuroscientists try to figure out the science
Speaker 1: of what magicians already figured out works. In other words,
Speaker 1: neuroscience is following the scent trails of the magicians to
Speaker 1: figure out what makes these tricks and sleight of hand
Speaker 1: and illusions full our neural networks. Now, if you've been
Speaker 1: listening to this podcast, you'll know that the brain lives
Speaker 1: in silence and darkness, and it's always trying to construct
Speaker 1: an internal model of the outside world. The critical point
Speaker 1: for today is that there is not a perfect mapping
Speaker 1: from the outside to the inside. In other words, it's
Speaker 1: not as though something happens in the outside world and
Speaker 1: we have a perfect record of that on the inside. Instead,
Speaker 1: if something happens outside the spotlight of where you're paying attention,
Speaker 1: you just don't see it at all. But the brain's
Speaker 1: job is to put together a story of what the
Speaker 1: heck is happening in the world out there, and so
Speaker 1: it will do so even if it has missed that event,
Speaker 1: even if its story is totally wrong. Its job is
Speaker 1: to narrate what is going on in the world given
Speaker 1: its best understanding. So that means if you don't see
Speaker 1: some sleight of hand, your brain will nonetheless cook up
Speaker 1: a story like the coin must have disappeared into thin
Speaker 1: air and then it later appeared in my pocket. Now
Speaker 1: let's say those aliens don't have an attentional spotlight like
Speaker 1: we do, so they can see everything happening in the scene.
Speaker 1: They would be totally amused that you fell for that.
Speaker 1: To them, you're like a dog falling for a simple trick,
Speaker 1: like when you pretend to throw a ball and you
Speaker 1: hide it behind your back and the dog gets fooled.
Speaker 1: So today we're going to explore the science behind the magic,
Speaker 1: and we're going to get there with the help of
Speaker 1: two interviews. First, we're going to talk with a magician
Speaker 1: and then with two neuroscientists who study why magic works.
Speaker 1: So first I called up my friend Robert Strong, a
Speaker 1: professional magician, and asked him about his experience with manipulating attention.
Speaker 1: So Robert tell us about what magicians need to understand
Speaker 1: about the brain in order to do what you do.
Speaker 2: So magicians have spent five thousand years abe testing tricks
Speaker 2: on humans to find the moments where the attention, where
Speaker 2: the gaze is upon you, but the attention is not
Speaker 2: on you, so that the eyes may see them, but
Speaker 2: the brain doesn't record it. And what we do is
Speaker 2: we pay really close attention to people for those moments
Speaker 2: where the attention is somewhere else. And sometimes it happens naturally,
Speaker 2: but mostly we manufacture it where the attention is internal.
Speaker 1: What's an example of how you would manufacture where someone's
Speaker 1: attention is.
Speaker 2: So the three that I use the most. The first
Speaker 2: is where I'm interested, is where they're interested. So I
Speaker 2: show no interest in the method or the secret, but
Speaker 2: I bring all my folks and attention and my gaze
Speaker 2: to where the secret isn't that's the classical misdirection.
Speaker 1: So can you unpack that with an example?
Speaker 2: So if I were to hold up a dollar bill
Speaker 2: and I bring my attention and focus to the dollar bill,
Speaker 2: that's where I want them to be. But if I
Speaker 2: want to sneak something into the dollar bill, if I'm
Speaker 2: going to fold a bill around like a coin or
Speaker 2: something to make a prop that I'm going to use later.
Speaker 2: What I'll do is I'll show it intron in the subject.
Speaker 2: So where are you from? Have you ever done a
Speaker 2: magic trick before? Is this your first time being magical?
Speaker 2: And so I take my focus intention interest over there.
Speaker 2: The other thing I could do is I might have
Speaker 2: a red herring for this. I need a pen or pencil.
Speaker 2: Do you have one? Let's look. While they're looking, I'm
Speaker 2: putting the coin in the door, right in.
Speaker 3: Front of them.
Speaker 2: Their eyes could record it, but it just doesn't no pen,
Speaker 2: That's okay. I'll use the bill as a magic wand
Speaker 2: so it's a red herring.
Speaker 1: And did you say there were three ways you do it?
Speaker 2: There's probably a dozen, but there's three that I use
Speaker 2: the most. The one that I focus on probably the
Speaker 2: most is humor. Just a little joke. And when you
Speaker 2: give a little joke, they laugh for just a moment.
Speaker 2: Their gaze is on you, but they don't record what
Speaker 2: they're seeing. So if they were actually watching a video
Speaker 2: of it, they can rewind it, slow it down, and
Speaker 2: they can see me do the secret move. They didn't move,
Speaker 2: but in real time, they just don't record it, okay,
Speaker 2: And what's the third The third one that I use
Speaker 2: the most is either the trick is over or I
Speaker 2: apparently fail. So if you chose the King of Hearts
Speaker 2: and I pull out the Two of Hearts, you go, Nope,
Speaker 2: that's not it. I go, oh, that just didn't work.
Speaker 2: I dropped my shoulders, I bring my gaze and attention,
Speaker 2: like darn, that didn't work. And when they go, oh,
Speaker 2: the trick's over or he failed, then I could do
Speaker 2: the secret move right in front of them and the
Speaker 2: brain doesn't record it. I go, We'll give me one
Speaker 2: more chance, or tell me what your card is, and
Speaker 2: then their card is in a magical place like inside
Speaker 2: a box they've been holding the whole time. A lot
Speaker 2: of magicians that do really good sleide of hand do
Speaker 2: a lot of overwhelming them with cues. Can you hold
Speaker 2: that a little lower? Can you bring that a little
Speaker 2: bit closer? Can you make sure everybody can see?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 2: And just giving them a set of cues one after another,
Speaker 2: they stop recording the secret move that's right in front
Speaker 2: of them because they don't want to get it wrong.
Speaker 2: So if you are an assistant on stage in front
Speaker 2: of two people or ten thousand people, and I give
Speaker 2: you a set of instructions, and I just hit you
Speaker 2: with three or four instructions, especially if number one slightly
Speaker 2: contradicts number four. All of a sudden, you're looking right
Speaker 2: at me, but you're not recording the secret move. So
Speaker 2: if I say, can you hold that a little bit lower?
Speaker 2: Can you hold a little bit closer, no closer to
Speaker 2: your body a little higher?
Speaker 3: Please?
Speaker 2: And now they're thinking that was he said lower to
Speaker 2: a Hi. I don't want to get that wrong, And
Speaker 2: they're trying to split the difference. They're looking right at you,
Speaker 2: but the brain doesn't record a secret move that happens
Speaker 2: right in front of them. Another great one is what
Speaker 2: you do use is called bottom up. Something that just
Speaker 2: comes from nowhere. So a piece of flash paper, a
Speaker 2: flash of light, a sound on a sudden movement, an
Speaker 2: assistant comes on stage, something shiny and bright that just distracts,
Speaker 2: like the cartoon squirrel. You give them something that just
Speaker 2: takes their gaze off for just a moment, and that
Speaker 2: gives you enough time to sneak an elephant to the room.
Speaker 1: Oh excellent. Yeah. In neuroscience we talk about exogenous and
Speaker 1: endogenous attention, meaning you know, exogerous attention is something happens
Speaker 1: the snap, debang, the flash, and it causes you to look.
Speaker 1: It grabs your attention over there, whereas endogenous attention is
Speaker 1: where I'm choosing to put my attention or where I
Speaker 1: think I'm choosing to put it. And that's all the
Speaker 1: first things you mentioned. We're taking people's in dodgenous attention,
Speaker 1: but the sudden effect is what grabs their attention. Then
Speaker 1: you can do lots of things right under their nose.
Speaker 2: The terms the magicians use are bottom up top down.
Speaker 2: So if I'm holding a lighter and a piece of
Speaker 2: flash paper. For a bottom up, I light the flash paper,
Speaker 2: it makes a big flash in the air of all
Speaker 2: the eyes and gaze goes up while they handholding the
Speaker 2: lighter dumps it into a secret pocket, brings him back
Speaker 2: to the previous position, and when the eyes come down,
Speaker 2: the letter is now apparently vanished. But for top down,
Speaker 2: I might say watch this piece of paper closely, bring
Speaker 2: your gaze in close, watch really closely, and when they're
Speaker 2: following the instructions, probably by force perspective, I can toss
Speaker 2: that piece of paper over their head. Outside of their view,
Speaker 2: all they see is the back of my hand. And
Speaker 2: when I come back down, apparently holding the paper and
Speaker 2: balling up into my other hand, the volunteer sees the
Speaker 2: ball in their mind. When I say sees that, they
Speaker 2: see their mind's eye go into the hand. And because
Speaker 2: I am directing them and keeping them really focused in
Speaker 2: my place, they're not seeing the places I don't want
Speaker 2: them to see. And then I can apparently make it
Speaker 2: vanish and had already been gone for a few seconds.
Speaker 1: Tell us about other types of misdirection that you exploit.
Speaker 2: One very powerful type of misdirection that I use all
Speaker 2: the time is something called time misdirection. I'm not a neuroscientist,
Speaker 2: but my understanding is that the brain has really good
Speaker 2: instant recall. So in my being out there in the
Speaker 2: field and doing magic tricks for people, if I do
Speaker 2: the secret move and then the reveal immediately after that,
Speaker 2: the brain is really good at rewinding a set or
Speaker 2: two and going, something just happened, and I know that's
Speaker 2: when the magic happened. Maybe I don't understand what the
Speaker 2: secret move was. So magicians try to create a lot
Speaker 2: of time distance between a secret move and the reveal
Speaker 2: of the magic trick where the magical moment happens. So
Speaker 2: a really good example of time as direction is a
Speaker 2: magic trick that every magician learns at the beginning of
Speaker 2: their career, and it's in every kid's book. It's forcing
Speaker 2: a playing card, giving the illusion of a free choice.
Speaker 2: So if I show I've got a deck of cards
Speaker 2: where the cards are all different, and I peek at
Speaker 2: the bottom card and I secretly know that it is
Speaker 2: the Queen of Hearts, I ask you to cut the
Speaker 2: cards into two piles. So you take the top half
Speaker 2: and place it on the table, and I take the
Speaker 2: bottom half and I criss crossed it across the top
Speaker 2: of the cards.
Speaker 3: Like, so, now I talk to you, I say you
Speaker 3: had a free choice. There's fifty two cards.
Speaker 2: It would be a small miracle if I can tell
Speaker 2: you that you cut to the Queen of Hearts before
Speaker 2: you look at the card you cut to. I just
Speaker 2: want to make sure you know that I didn't even
Speaker 2: touch the car cards. And then I go and I
Speaker 2: pick up the pile of the cards, and I show
Speaker 2: you that the card that you cut to was indeed
Speaker 2: the Queen of Hearts. It was simply the bottom card.
Speaker 2: But enough timeness direction, the audience loses track of which
Speaker 2: is the top and which is the bottom.
Speaker 1: Excellent, So tell us how you, as a magician exploit assumptions.
Speaker 3: That's a great question.
Speaker 2: I think everything we do as we exploit assumption is
Speaker 2: because the human brain lives in the future, is predicting
Speaker 2: what's coming next. And if we take them down that
Speaker 2: road of giving them all the supporting evidence that everything
Speaker 2: they believe to be is true is true, and then
Speaker 2: we pull back the curtain and we show them a
Speaker 2: new reveal, something that's unexpected, that's the magical moment. So
Speaker 2: we understand that people believe that if I'm holding a
Speaker 2: rubber band and I make a very specific sound like this,
Speaker 2: that the rubber band is now broken. And I gave
Speaker 2: you supporting visual evidence by giving the illusion that the
Speaker 2: rubber band's broken. But the rubber band never broke. All
Speaker 2: I did was pluck it like a musical instrument at
Speaker 2: the right time. The eyes could see that I didn't
Speaker 2: break it. But because you hear the sound, the brain goes, oh,
Speaker 2: that's super familiar. I know that sound. And then they
Speaker 2: see what looks like a broken rubber band. They jumped
Speaker 2: to the wrong conclusion for the right reasons. Oh, for
Speaker 2: the audience that's listening. Here's what I did was I
Speaker 2: took a rubber band and I put my index fingers
Speaker 2: and I'm making a long oval.
Speaker 3: And I took that long oval, and I.
Speaker 2: Collapsed the top band down to the bottom band to
Speaker 2: make the two lines, so it looks like a single band.
Speaker 3: And I stretched it out and made a new circle.
Speaker 2: And now to complete the circle, I took my finger
Speaker 2: out of the oval, and now I've got this little
Speaker 2: nub here I can pluck, and it looks like a
Speaker 2: new circle or a new rubber band, but in reality,
Speaker 2: it's a stretched out rubber band. And that plucking sound
Speaker 2: completes the illusion in the brain that the rubber band
Speaker 2: is broken. And then all I have to do is
Speaker 2: open up the oval and show that it was never
Speaker 2: actually broken, or that it's magically restored.
Speaker 1: So for the audio audience, it looks like Robert breaks
Speaker 1: a rubber band. It looks like he's got a single
Speaker 1: stretch of rubber and he pulls it and you hear
Speaker 1: the sound and you think, oh, I see he has
Speaker 1: just snapped the rubber band. And then a moment later
Speaker 1: he shows you bunk. Here is the complete rubber band again.
Speaker 1: But Robert, you're saying a big part of that is
Speaker 1: the sound of seeing it and the assumption of what
Speaker 1: that translates to.
Speaker 2: So that specifically as sound synchronization. But we do give
Speaker 2: an all magic supporting evidence of the illusion, so that
Speaker 2: way all thoughts of hey, there's something funny going on
Speaker 2: or this isn't real goes away and you believe in
Speaker 2: the reality that we're creating terrific.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all of us, of course live in our own head.
Speaker 1: We've got our internal models running. We interpret reality, and
Speaker 1: your job as a magician is simply to navigate what
Speaker 1: we think is the reality going on. I know you
Speaker 1: think about forced perspectives like this to tell us about that.
Speaker 2: So a lot of times magicians just simply understand your
Speaker 2: point of view literally. So we'll practice in front of
Speaker 2: a mirror or a camera, and if we get the
Speaker 2: angles right, we can create allusion that something appears, disappears,
Speaker 2: or even levitates. And this is one that's pretty easy
Speaker 2: to explain. But from your point of view, you see
Speaker 2: a silver ball that is apparently floating, Yes, But from
Speaker 2: another point of view or another angle, when I turn
Speaker 2: the sideway, so you can see it's a silver soup ladle,
Speaker 2: and you were just seeing the bowl of it and
Speaker 2: weren't seeing the handle, and the handle was simply under
Speaker 2: my armpit, which creates a beautiful illusion in the kitchen
Speaker 2: at soup time.
Speaker 1: Okay, So just for the audio audience, he put the
Speaker 1: soup ladle under his arm so the bottom of it
Speaker 1: is sticking out towards us, and it looks like a
Speaker 1: floating silver ball. And then he takes his hands off
Speaker 1: of the silver ball and it makes it look like
Speaker 1: he's levitating it with his hands. It's so simple and
Speaker 1: so good and so compelling. Check out the video if
Speaker 1: you're just listening to this on audio. Okay, So that's
Speaker 1: an example of forced perspective, as in, you know exactly
Speaker 1: where I am in the case of zoom COVID pandemic.
Speaker 1: Must have been cool for you in certain ways because
Speaker 1: you got to do all kinds of zoom magic tricks
Speaker 1: where you know precisely what the perspective is. But when
Speaker 1: you're doing this in an audience and live audience with
Speaker 1: lots of people, what kind of things can you do
Speaker 1: there in person?
Speaker 2: Combining everything we've talked about, you can create a series
Speaker 2: of illusions that happen back to back to back to back.
Speaker 2: So it's just bombarded with magic. Because one of the
Speaker 2: things I like to create is just a bombardment of
Speaker 2: magic all coming out to your senses, all wines and together.
Speaker 2: It's a cumulative effect and it feels super magical.
Speaker 1: That's great. And people, even if they're sniffing out some
Speaker 1: particular part of it, you're hitting them with lots of
Speaker 1: different things, and so they're not going to pick up
Speaker 1: on what's going on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they focus on the one that fools them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. So Robert, how do you make sure
Speaker 1: that you understand what it is like to be in
Speaker 1: the audience's shoes looking at you.
Speaker 2: So magicians have to have a lot of empathy. We're
Speaker 2: creating moments of delight and joy for other people, so
Speaker 2: we have to literally see it from their perspective, like
Speaker 2: physically for the magic to work.
Speaker 3: But we also have to know.
Speaker 2: What's their life experience and what's their expectations, what's their assumptions,
Speaker 2: and kind of put ourselves in their shoes to create
Speaker 2: moments of joy. And I was wanting to asked, what
Speaker 2: is the best magic trick. My answer was the ham
Speaker 2: sandwich heading. Gnulms, a Baltimore magician I think in the fifties,
Speaker 2: wrote a book and it's just a little paragraph in there.
Speaker 2: And the way it explains how you get to the
Speaker 2: best magic trick in the world is if you and
Speaker 2: I were walking down the street and you said, do
Speaker 2: a magic trick, and I reached the right packet, I
Speaker 2: pull out a ham sandwich.
Speaker 1: You like, that's weird.
Speaker 2: But if it were lunchtimer walking down the street and
Speaker 2: you say do magic trick and I pull out ham sandwich,
Speaker 2: You're like, well, that's convenient timing. But if you had
Speaker 2: just explained to me a ham sandwich that you had
Speaker 2: been thinking about all day long, it was from your childhood,
Speaker 2: you could even get it here. And then you say
Speaker 2: do a magic trick and I pull up that ham sandwich.
Speaker 2: It's a freaking miracle. So when I say magicians have empathy,
Speaker 2: they really good magicians really take the time to think
Speaker 2: about where are they physically? Who are they? Are they engineers?
Speaker 2: Are they scientists? What's going on? Do they just get funding,
Speaker 2: do they just get FDA approval?
Speaker 3: What's the space they're in there?
Speaker 2: There's a fountain there, and there's or they're on a
Speaker 2: ship in the bay or something like that, and then
Speaker 2: you take the lot all together and you create an
Speaker 2: illusion that is a freaking experience that they'll remember for
Speaker 2: the rest of their lives.
Speaker 1: That was Robert Strong, a professional magician. It's wonderful to
Speaker 1: watch his performances, and I'm linking some of his videos
Speaker 1: in the show notes. And next I called up two
Speaker 1: colleagues of mine, Stephen Macknick and Susannah Martinez Conde. They're
Speaker 1: both neuroscience professors and researchers at State University of New
Speaker 1: York Downtown Medical Center. They've been studying the intersection of
Speaker 1: magic with neuroscience for years, so I wanted to dive
Speaker 1: in with them. So you've asserted that magicians have been
Speaker 1: testing and exploiting the limits of attention and cognition for
Speaker 1: hundreds of years, and neurosciences just beginning to catch up
Speaker 1: with that. So tell us about that.
Speaker 4: We have been studying the neuroscience of magic for I
Speaker 4: guess about the almost twenty years now, and something that
Speaker 4: we realize early on is that as neuroscientists, we have
Speaker 4: sometimes been reinventing the wheel and arrive into conclusions and
Speaker 4: finding things about the mind and the brain that the
Speaker 4: magicians know for centuries, if not longer. So I have
Speaker 4: an example causes such as change blindness and in attentional blindness.
Speaker 4: These are cognitive neuroscience concepts that basically refer to the
Speaker 4: way that our brain prioritizes attention. So change blindness refers
Speaker 4: to when something changes but you don't realize, you don't
Speaker 4: notice the change because you have not been paying attention,
Speaker 4: sometimes during a gamma change, and we have continuity errors
Speaker 4: in movies and that sort of situation. And in attentional
Speaker 4: blindness simply refers to the fact that we cannot attend
Speaker 4: to a million things at once. We can, in fact,
Speaker 4: to attend to one thing at once, and so whatever
Speaker 4: you're not attending to, you are going to ignore. And
Speaker 4: you could say that you're blind to those events you're
Speaker 4: not attended.
Speaker 1: To, and so magicians take advantage of this.
Speaker 5: What Susanna was saying with inattentional blindness has to do
Speaker 5: with when we are paying attention to something, we are
Speaker 5: not able to pay attention to other things. And this
Speaker 5: implies both a time that we're paying attention but also
Speaker 5: a space that we're paying attention. So attention also has
Speaker 5: a spatial component. So that is something that magicians learned
Speaker 5: a long time ago, that there was a spotlight of attention.
Speaker 5: And this is something that neuroscientists, cognitive neuroscience also discovered
Speaker 5: independently from magicians, and in fact, the evolution here of
Speaker 5: both concepts is so convergent that we came across the
Speaker 5: same terminology. Both scientists and magicians called this is spotlight
Speaker 5: of attention and independently of each other. And so this
Speaker 5: is where when you're paying attention to something, there is
Speaker 5: actually a point in your visual system that's a relatively
Speaker 5: small point where you're paying attention. It can be in
Speaker 5: the center of your vision or outside the center of
Speaker 5: your vision, and this area is where you actually can
Speaker 5: perform tasks that require attention. And outside that area we
Speaker 5: now know to some extent because of research that Susanna
Speaker 5: and I helped conduct, that you actually suppress everything else. Okay,
Speaker 5: so that's how the spotlight seems to be working in
Speaker 5: the brain and what neuroscience brought to the table. But
Speaker 5: magicians knew about the spotlight of attention from their own
Speaker 5: research in performing before anybody else.
Speaker 1: So The magician's task is to draw your spotlight of
Speaker 1: attention to something they want you to look at while
Speaker 1: they're doing something else outside of that spotlight that you
Speaker 1: can't see. So give me an example.
Speaker 4: Of that example is in terms of attentional management magicians,
Speaker 4: one term is a misdirection, but it's basically attentional management.
Speaker 4: And I'm thinking about the magic tree, the cups and balls.
Speaker 4: This cos back to the Roman Empire. It's still performed today.
Speaker 4: But when we say the magicians have known some of
Speaker 4: these things for a long time, it's a really long time.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 4: In the Cups and Balls track, you typically performed with
Speaker 4: three upside down cups, and balls appear and disappear below
Speaker 4: the cups, and what they do is divide your attention.
Speaker 4: There's a minimum of three locations with the three cups, and.
Speaker 6: They're moving them around.
Speaker 4: And not only you're dividing your attention on three special occasions,
Speaker 4: but the magicians will be talking at the same time,
Speaker 4: tell them.
Speaker 6: Some sort of story.
Speaker 4: They call it pattern And so what that forces spectators
Speaker 4: is to divide their attention. And so in multiple locations,
Speaker 4: cross multiple sensory systems, and as we explained before, we
Speaker 4: do not have the wiring to do that. We can
Speaker 4: really only pay attention to one thing, and so magicians
Speaker 4: are masters of the divide and conquered approach of attention.
Speaker 1: So how does the cups and balls trick work? I mean,
Speaker 1: aside from dividing your attention, what are they actually doing there?
Speaker 5: So in the cups and balls, so you have three
Speaker 5: cups and you have three or more balls, and what
Speaker 5: they'll do is they'll show you under a cup that
Speaker 5: there's nothing there, and then they put down the cup
Speaker 5: and they show you another cup and there is a
Speaker 5: ball there. And then they move the cups around and
Speaker 5: you can follow. It's not very fast, you can see
Speaker 5: which cup is going where. And then when they move
Speaker 5: the cup around, they pull up the cup with the
Speaker 5: ball and earth the ball's gone. And then they opened
Speaker 5: another cup and the ball's there, and you know that
Speaker 5: that was what was empty. And they're doing this with
Speaker 5: slight of hand.
Speaker 4: So there's sleight of hand involved that we should not
Speaker 4: really disclose because we have been sworn to secrecy by
Speaker 4: various magic societies. But the main thing from a neuroscience
Speaker 4: perspective is that you are dividing your attention arguably and
Speaker 4: I do not believe the experiment has been done. But
Speaker 4: one experiment I would like to do is to have
Speaker 4: people and that track their say, their eye movements, and
Speaker 4: have them observed just one special location at once, one
Speaker 4: one cup, one ball. My prediction would be that they
Speaker 4: might have a much better chance at figuring this out
Speaker 4: just staying still with their attentional allocation than as we
Speaker 4: watch the trick naturally.
Speaker 6: But that, of course is not what we tend to do.
Speaker 5: So we wrote a paper about the Cups and Balls
Speaker 5: using Taelor the magician from Pen and Teller, and he
Speaker 5: actually performed it on camera in multiple different ways that
Speaker 5: we would consider to be a stimulu of different conditions
Speaker 5: for our experimental paradigm. And then we showed subjects these
Speaker 5: different videos with different conditions and we were able to
Speaker 5: learn a few things about how the Cups and Balls
Speaker 5: has done.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 5: First off, the general zeitgeist in magic is that you're
Speaker 5: drawing people's attention by moving your hands in a certain
Speaker 5: way and moving the cups in a certain way, and
Speaker 5: while you're making a big move over here, they don't
Speaker 5: notice a small move over there. That's an axiom of magic.
Speaker 5: A big move covers a small move, and the small
Speaker 5: move would be, of course, we're manipulating the balls, and
Speaker 5: the big move would be to draw your attention. And
Speaker 5: that can either draw your eye position as the spectator,
Speaker 5: or it can just draw your attention without moving your eyes. Now,
Speaker 5: Teller had a theory going into this study, and the
Speaker 5: theory was that certain kinds of motions were more attention
Speaker 5: grabbing than others. And in fact, he specifically thought that
Speaker 5: there was one type of motion that he and pen
Speaker 5: had actually developed and was so strong that it was
Speaker 5: perhaps the strongest form of stimulus that would draw humans attention.
Speaker 5: And they developed this while they were developing their famous
Speaker 5: cups and balls trick from Pennineller. That trick is famous
Speaker 5: because they actually do it and then they do it
Speaker 5: again with transparent cups, and the transparent cups still work.
Speaker 5: And so this was a huge shock, and it also
Speaker 5: violates all sorts of magical rules or magical ideas, because
Speaker 5: first off, you're not supposed to do the same trick twice.
Speaker 5: That's another axiom in magic, because there's a chance that
Speaker 5: the audience will figure out that trick.
Speaker 1: But cups and.
Speaker 5: Balls are so strong, it's so robust of a trick,
Speaker 5: and they're so good at performing it that they actually
Speaker 5: can do it twice in front of an audience without
Speaker 5: any risk of the audience figuring out the trick. But secondly,
Speaker 5: there's definitely not supposed to do it with transparent cups
Speaker 5: because it is literally possible to see the slag of
Speaker 5: hand in this case. It's much easier anyway to see
Speaker 5: the slight of hand in this case. But it still
Speaker 5: works because the attentional management is so strong, and he
Speaker 5: feels one of the ways they get away with some
Speaker 5: of their biggest moves in the cups and balls is
Speaker 5: with this one thing that he feels was really important,
Speaker 5: which is that if you do something where the ball drops,
Speaker 5: that is, the gravity actually accelerates the ball at nine
Speaker 5: point eight meters per second square down. That that is
Speaker 5: perhaps the strongest thing he thought to draw a human's attention.
Speaker 5: That there's something about things dropping in the gravity, well,
Speaker 5: that will draw a human being's attention very strongly. And
Speaker 5: they were able to do certain things in their act.
Speaker 5: Again we can't talk about the details, but certain things
Speaker 5: in their act were drawn because of dropping the ball.
Speaker 5: So they would have a ball on top of the
Speaker 5: upside down cup and he poured the ball off into
Speaker 5: his hand and while the ball was dropping, he could
Speaker 5: get away with magical murder. Okay, that's what his theory was.
Speaker 5: And so we did an experiment where we actually did
Speaker 5: a bunch of different conditions, including the ball dropping and
Speaker 5: including him moving the ball with his hands and other
Speaker 5: things to test what was the strongest draw for attention.
Speaker 5: And what we found was that dropping the ball in
Speaker 5: the gravity well was indeed very strong, but there was
Speaker 5: actually something that was a little bit stronger, which he'd
Speaker 5: never done before because it's not a very good magical technique,
Speaker 5: but he discovered that it actually worked really well, in
Speaker 5: fact stronger than pouring the ball in the graviol which
Speaker 5: is we asked him to just pick up the ball
Speaker 5: with his hand and put it down on the table,
Speaker 5: which is not part of the general set of movements
Speaker 5: that a magician would do, and that actually drew the
Speaker 5: eyes of the audience even better and it allowed him
Speaker 5: with his other hand to potentially do more trickery. So
Speaker 5: we were really thrilled by the outcome because we discovered
Speaker 5: something that not only advanced science did, it also advanced magic.
Speaker 1: That's terrific because It implies that we care about the
Speaker 1: social aspect too, not just the physics. But our attention
Speaker 1: is drawn by a human is doing something and I'm
Speaker 1: going to watch that. By the way, as a side note,
Speaker 1: I did some experiments a while ago that showed that
Speaker 1: something that grabs attention even more than let's say a
Speaker 1: ball dropping in gravity is when it violates the nine
Speaker 1: point eight meters per second square, when it's actually dropping
Speaker 1: faster or slower. That is a huge attention grab. I
Speaker 1: don't know how you pull it off on stage, but
Speaker 1: for example, one of the reasons that it's so compelling
Speaker 1: when we watch The Matrix or the movie three hundred
Speaker 1: is because things are speeding up and slowing down. Let's
Speaker 1: say Trinity jumps up in the air and we have
Speaker 1: very clear predictions about when she should hit the ground,
Speaker 1: but she stays in the air longer than she's supposed to.
Speaker 1: That sort of thing really grabs our attention.
Speaker 4: I wonder if a neural adaptation also plays into that,
Speaker 4: because these kind of unexpected events sort of like keep
Speaker 4: you on your toes, and that a fast motion followed
Speaker 4: by slow motion, like you may imagine that your neurons
Speaker 4: would adapt to a certain rate of motion and then
Speaker 4: the unexpected or the change is what then drives again
Speaker 4: neural firing. But there's there's nothing else that you brought
Speaker 4: up that I wanted to comment on, and it's it's
Speaker 4: the social aspect of magic that is so important at
Speaker 4: so many levels, and that is one of the main
Speaker 4: tools that magicians use. For one, humor, it's a fantastic
Speaker 4: element of misdirection. One of the magicians that we originally
Speaker 4: collaborated with, Johnny Thompson, the Great TOMSONI he died a
Speaker 4: few years ago, but he used to say that when
Speaker 4: the audience laughs, time stops and the magician can do anything.
Speaker 4: And that's because emotions, priority, tie attention so powerfully related
Speaker 4: to this, Magicians they cultivate relationships with the with the audience,
Speaker 4: they're they're empathetic figures. It is in the in the
Speaker 4: magician's favor that the audience wants the magic to work,
Speaker 4: that they want the magician to succeed rather than trying
Speaker 4: to prove it wrong. But that's so that's another element.
Speaker 4: And finally I wanted to touch on the fact that
Speaker 4: a number of magic tricks rely on bringing on stage magic.
Speaker 4: They rely on bringing a volunteer on the stage, and
Speaker 4: that is just so compelling for the audience because spectators
Speaker 4: are identifying with the volunteers, just wondering what's.
Speaker 6: Going to happen.
Speaker 4: Imagine mirror neurons firing wildly, and while the attention is
Speaker 4: fully allocated on the volunteer, then the magician can do
Speaker 4: whatever they need to be doing. And what's more, sometimes
Speaker 4: within that the magician draws an attention to something while
Speaker 4: they're doing something else. But there is also an element
Speaker 4: of time misdirection, because it is not necessarily that the
Speaker 4: magic manipulation is happening right now while the magician is
Speaker 4: misdirected and then maybe setting up a trick for later on,
Speaker 4: or they may be disposing of evidence for a trick
Speaker 4: that happened minutes ago. So things are not happening necessarily
Speaker 4: in the chronology that we perceive them from the audience perspective.
Speaker 1: We've touched on this issue about attention, and that's something
Speaker 1: that we study in neuroscience, but there are actually so
Speaker 1: many things that we discover in neuro about what our
Speaker 1: limits are, whether that's about color or about time perception
Speaker 1: or anything like that. Give us an example of the
Speaker 1: way that magicians operate more broadly taking advantage of these
Speaker 1: cognitive limits.
Speaker 5: Sure, So, following up on Susanna's comments about the late
Speaker 5: great tom Sony, so he had one trick that we
Speaker 5: discussed in our book Slights of Mind, and it's a
Speaker 5: visual illusion trick. And the way it worked was he
Speaker 5: had a beautiful volunteer, which of course the idea of
Speaker 5: using volunteers, or in this case, he wasn't a volunteer,
Speaker 5: was actually an assistant. But one thing you can do
Speaker 5: with volunteers or assistants is pick people who are interesting
Speaker 5: looking or have an assistant whos beautiful or whatever to
Speaker 5: draw attention of the audience to that person. And that
Speaker 5: was the case here. She was wearing a white dress.
Speaker 5: It left little to the imagination as it was described
Speaker 5: to us. We haven't seen the trick, but it was
Speaker 5: described to us. And so he on the stage he
Speaker 5: would tell the audience that he could turn this dress
Speaker 5: into a red dress. And he would say, let me
Speaker 5: show you how I do it on the counter of three,
Speaker 5: one two three, and then all the lights on the
Speaker 5: stage would turn red, turning everything red, the white dress,
Speaker 5: the assistant himself, and he would admit that that was
Speaker 5: a bad joke, but he did. You have to admit
Speaker 5: do it that he turned it into a red dress.
Speaker 5: But now he's really going to do it and entre
Speaker 5: it like this. At that moment, the lights would flicker
Speaker 5: again back to white, and the dress was red under
Speaker 5: white light. So what he actually did that? And this
Speaker 5: is a spoiler alert that we have to warn people
Speaker 5: about that we're going to spoil this trick. We had
Speaker 5: the Great Tom Sony's permission to spoil the trick, but
Speaker 5: we also have to put spoiler alerts whenever we do this.
Speaker 5: But the way it would work would be to have
Speaker 5: the bright red lights on the woman, so super bright
Speaker 5: people are looking at her. He's used his voice to
Speaker 5: direct attention to her, and this is for some period
Speaker 5: of time, which is causing an after image to develop
Speaker 5: in their visual system based on this brightly lit woman
Speaker 5: against a back background. And then when the lights turn off,
Speaker 5: there are gimmicks in the stage that a trapdoor opens
Speaker 5: and her dress is pulled off. And the dress is
Speaker 5: a special dress that's very tight, but she's got an
Speaker 5: even tighter dress on underneath that's the same, looks the same,
Speaker 5: but it's actually red. Okay, So the white dress is
Speaker 5: on top of the red one. So just within a
Speaker 5: few milliseconds, the white dress is pulled off. She has
Speaker 5: a red dress on while the stage is black. But
Speaker 5: they're everybody's seeing this positive after image that that happens.
Speaker 5: It's called iconic memory. That happens for just a very
Speaker 5: few brief milliseconds when you turn off the lights, you
Speaker 5: can see a positive after image, and then the lights
Speaker 5: come back on and you see her with real lighting,
Speaker 5: with white lighting, with the dress change.
Speaker 1: So let me just repeat this in that during the
Speaker 1: few milliseconds when the lights went off, in between the
Speaker 1: red lights and the white lights, the audience is still
Speaker 1: seeing her as though she's there because they're having an
Speaker 1: after image. It's as though the stage hasn't gone black, right.
Speaker 5: Well, they can tell something's happened, and the light flickers.
Speaker 5: People see in their normal course of life. They might
Speaker 5: be in the bathroom and about to leave and they
Speaker 5: turn off the lights and they'll see that they get
Speaker 5: an after image. But we learn to ignore these things
Speaker 5: through life, right. But he's got the audience paying attention
Speaker 5: intentionally at the woman at the time that this happens,
Speaker 5: and so when the lights are actually off. What they
Speaker 5: can't see is any motion or the trap door or
Speaker 5: the dress going down through the trapdoor in just this
Speaker 5: hundred milliseconds or so that actually happens. They can't see
Speaker 5: it because there is no light on that time, and
Speaker 5: then the lights come back on and she's still standing there,
Speaker 5: and it reduces the chances that they're going to see anything.
Speaker 1: Okay, so he's taking advantage of a visual illusion here.
Speaker 1: So tell us about the difference between visual illusions and
Speaker 1: cognitive illusions.
Speaker 6: But we should start with defining what an illusion is.
Speaker 4: An illusion is a perception that doesn't match reality, and
Speaker 4: we talk about visual or conit evlusions happen in the
Speaker 4: brain as opposed to optical illusions that have to do
Speaker 4: with the physical property supplied.
Speaker 6: Right, So, if we take a glass.
Speaker 4: Of water and we put a pencil inside and it
Speaker 4: appears to ban, that's an optical illusion. It has to
Speaker 4: do with the refraction indexes of air and water. It
Speaker 4: doesn't happen in the brain per se. But visual illusions
Speaker 4: and cognitive evlutions are constructed in the brain, and the
Speaker 4: difference really has to do with a water level. They
Speaker 4: take place in the hierarchy of information processing, so a
Speaker 4: visual illusion would be primarily a sensory illusion. We can
Speaker 4: also talk about there are attack delusions, auditory illusions, and
Speaker 4: so on. They happen close to the input. In fact,
Speaker 4: some of these visual illusions we can largely explain at
Speaker 4: the level of the retina instide of the eyeball, whereas
Speaker 4: a coality evlution happens higher up in the brain. And
Speaker 4: then we're talking about what we call cognitive processes, such
Speaker 4: as attention and memory and decision making. Magicians are going
Speaker 4: to rely much more often in cognitive evlutions attention and
Speaker 4: to a lesser extent, memory and decision making.
Speaker 1: So give us an example of a cognitive ilution, well, a.
Speaker 6: Cognitive elution that happens in magic.
Speaker 4: Well, we have already talked about failing to perceive sleight
Speaker 4: of hand techniques and so forth, due to not paying
Speaker 4: attention to that place at a time, or due to
Speaker 4: having your attention divided. One of the great magicians and
Speaker 4: magic theorists is a Juan Tabarith from Spain, and that
Speaker 4: he famously conducts a magic tricking which he vanishes a coin,
Speaker 4: and that he has pumped the coin, he has it
Speaker 4: grabbed in the pomp on his hand. But at some
Speaker 4: point he makes a gesture to the audience. He says,
Speaker 4: wait a second, and that he actually he's showing them
Speaker 4: the coin. But because he's so masterful that manipulating attention,
Speaker 4: the image of that coin is getting into their readiness,
Speaker 4: but they do not see the coin because he's manipulating
Speaker 4: their attention so well.
Speaker 6: So he really pushes.
Speaker 4: The boundaries and challenges just how much can I get
Speaker 4: away with in terms of showing the audience exactly what
Speaker 4: I'm doing without them noticing because they're not paying attention.
Speaker 5: We talked about how attention, which is a cognitive illusion,
Speaker 5: can happen where you pay attention to the wrong place.
Speaker 5: One of the ways to do that, the most common way,
Speaker 5: perhaps is to get you to look in the wrong
Speaker 5: place with the center of your eyes, so you're looking
Speaker 5: over here while they're doing something over here, and in
Speaker 5: the perfe of your vision you can't see very well anyway.
Speaker 5: So that is one way to misdirect attention. We call
Speaker 5: that overt misdirection. Now, with covert misdirection, it's much more
Speaker 5: interesting and Wantemoteth is a master of it, and one
Speaker 5: of the things he's been able to do is he'll
Speaker 5: do something with his hands. I can't do it because
Speaker 5: my hands would be off camera here, but say, down
Speaker 5: near his waist, he'll have you looking at something he's
Speaker 5: doing in his hands, and he'll look at it while
Speaker 5: he does it. And because of his gaze position, that
Speaker 5: audience learns through normal human and interactions to look where
Speaker 5: your interlocutors looking. So he is really well aware of this.
Speaker 5: So if he looks down at his hands, you guys
Speaker 5: are trying to pay attention and I know what's in
Speaker 5: my hands now, even though it's off camera here. But
Speaker 5: then what he'll do is, while he's doing it, he'll
Speaker 5: look up at you and then look back down. And
Speaker 5: when he looks up at you, you sense that he's
Speaker 5: looking up at you, so you look back at his eyes.
Speaker 5: And while you're doing that, even before you've moved your eyes,
Speaker 5: you'll move your attentional spotlight to see is he looking
Speaker 5: at me right? So you haven't even moved your eyes.
Speaker 5: He's moved his eyes up, got you to pay attention
Speaker 5: to his eyes while he does his magic trick. While
Speaker 5: you're you're still looking at his hands with the center
Speaker 5: of your vision. But he's got you to pay attention
Speaker 5: to his eyes and then he looks back down before
Speaker 5: you would move your eyes, and it's this really uncanny
Speaker 5: feeling that he did something huge right at the center
Speaker 5: of your gaze and you're certain of it, and still
Speaker 5: this magical effect happens. It's very powerful feeling of magical
Speaker 5: wonderment when that happens.
Speaker 1: He must have to time that really carefully, exactly when
Speaker 1: to look up and then when to do the sleight
Speaker 1: of hand. How do magicians get good at doing this?
Speaker 1: How do they get the feedback from the audience about
Speaker 1: you know when they're timing this right.
Speaker 4: Well, generally magicians they they start with sleight of hand
Speaker 4: techniques and then they add the misdirection layer on top
Speaker 4: of having mastered slide of hands. When we actually started
Speaker 4: studying magic, and that we did learn magic for a year,
Speaker 4: and that we perform magic in front of a judge
Speaker 4: panel to gain entry to the Magic Castle in Hollywood,
Speaker 4: and that we barely made it, but we made it.
Speaker 4: So we are magician members. But the magicians that we
Speaker 4: our various magician mentors at the time, they were telling
Speaker 4: us that the way that we were going into magic
Speaker 4: ourselves was very unusual because we already knew a lot
Speaker 4: of the without calling it misdirections.
Speaker 6: Early, but we knew a lot of the.
Speaker 4: Misdirection principles right from a cognitive science perspective. We knew
Speaker 4: a lot about attention. We knew a lot about memory.
Speaker 4: For magicians that generally comes much later.
Speaker 1: So this is a good segue. Why do you, as
Speaker 1: neuroscientists study magic.
Speaker 5: We feel as neuroscientists that one of the very best
Speaker 5: ways to find out what the brain is actually doing
Speaker 5: is to study illusions, and so we had trained in
Speaker 5: studying illusions I did as part of my thesis. Susanna
Speaker 5: and I both studied illusions as postdocs in David Hewbles
Speaker 5: Live at Harvard Medical School, and we knew that the
Speaker 5: reason studying visual illusions was really important was that it's
Speaker 5: where the physical reality doesn't match perception, and so we
Speaker 5: can study perception in a very pure sense by studying
Speaker 5: the neurons that are responding to the illusory effect, but
Speaker 5: not the physical reality. But if you really want to
Speaker 5: understand the underpinnings of perception itself, we realized we really
Speaker 5: had to use illusions because it's where we could study
Speaker 5: perception in a very pure sense where the physical reality
Speaker 5: was not a confounding factor. Now in doing this, we
Speaker 5: started the illusion contest because we realized that it would
Speaker 5: be fun and it would bring in the public into
Speaker 5: the world of vision research. If we had an annual
Speaker 5: illusion contest where scientists and later on graphic artists and
Speaker 5: people from all around the world various backgrounds could submit
Speaker 5: what they've noticed in the world that is illusory, and
Speaker 5: the whole world would be able to vote on these things.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 5: Shortly after doing this, we were asked by the Association
Speaker 5: for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. They asked us to
Speaker 5: run one of their meetings in Las Vegas, and I
Speaker 5: think they were hoping we were going to do the
Speaker 5: illusion contest there, But Susanna and I decided that instead
Speaker 5: of doing the illusion contest, we were going to do
Speaker 5: something different that's more related to consciousness itself. When we
Speaker 5: did this conference on the Consciousness in Las Vegas, we
Speaker 5: were driving up and down the strip doing our administrative
Speaker 5: duties and booking hotels and booking restaurants and all of this,
Speaker 5: and we're trying to think what could we do to
Speaker 5: bring the public in that isn't just the illusion contest. Again,
Speaker 5: we already have that going on for the vision community,
Speaker 5: and we realized that we're passing by these hundred foot
Speaker 5: signs of Pennant Teller and other magicians on these hotels,
Speaker 5: and that they magicians were the artists of attention and awareness.
Speaker 5: And this was a huge epiphany for us. We realized
Speaker 5: that they are the ones who create not only interesting
Speaker 5: related cognitive allusions to science, but they create the best
Speaker 5: illusions that science could benefit from stealing their techniques and
Speaker 5: learning and poaching what they do in the stage and
Speaker 5: bringing into the lab with the hope that we would
Speaker 5: actually increase the rate of discovery in science by increasing
Speaker 5: the quality and the robustness of the illusions. And we
Speaker 5: also discovered when we did this. We started talking to
Speaker 5: our friends in the consciouence community, and one of them
Speaker 5: was the late Great Daniel Dennett, and he knew a
Speaker 5: lot of magicians because he was part of a group
Speaker 5: of people who were part of this new atheism movement.
Speaker 5: And we're doing a lot of podcasts and doing a
Speaker 5: lot of different shows to talk about aseism, and these
Speaker 5: groups were generally scientists and philosophers and magicians and magicians
Speaker 5: would talk about in these groups how magic was being
Speaker 5: used to trick people in religious ceremonies to think that
Speaker 5: actual miracles were happening. And in fact, one possibility in
Speaker 5: the history of magic is that that's how magic actually started,
Speaker 5: was as a religious ceremonyal behavior to invent miracles. When
Speaker 5: we started meeting with these magicians, because Dennett knew them,
Speaker 5: started calling the for example, James Randy, the Amazing Randy.
Speaker 5: Randy got us hooked up with Penn and Teller, Apollo, Robbins,
Speaker 5: all these different magicians, the great Tom Sony and we
Speaker 5: started having meetings in Las Vegas to talk about a
Speaker 5: collaboration between magic and science, and that became a symposium
Speaker 5: that we had at our conference that introduced the idea
Speaker 5: of neuromagic, the idea that we can actually take magic
Speaker 5: tricks and study them in neuroscience. And it was during
Speaker 5: these meetings that something very important happened. We realized that
Speaker 5: magicians didn't just have great tricks, but they actually had
Speaker 5: theories about the magic. Okay, they had theories about why
Speaker 5: they worked in the mind. And what we discovered as
Speaker 5: scientists was more than half of these ideas were just
Speaker 5: completely wrong. They were just you know, flat out Nope,
Speaker 5: we'd already rolled those things out in cognitive science. Some
Speaker 5: of those theories, like for example, the spotlight of attention
Speaker 5: were actually correct, So there was convergent evolution between magic
Speaker 5: and science, which is really interesting to us. But the
Speaker 5: most important thing was that some of those theories we
Speaker 5: didn't know if they were correct or not scientifically, and
Speaker 5: they had plausible ideas in magic that very well might
Speaker 5: be right. And this could really cut decades off the
Speaker 5: science of cognitive neuroscience because we could potentially have the
Speaker 5: illusions that magic brought to us, but not only the illusions,
Speaker 5: but the theories kind of handed to us on a
Speaker 5: silver platter that we could now just go test in
Speaker 5: a scientific method fashion.
Speaker 1: And what do you see as the future of magic
Speaker 1: and how does that intersect with neuroscience.
Speaker 4: I think that we can basically benefit from each other.
Speaker 4: I believe that art is whether we're talking about painters
Speaker 4: or magicians or musicians, say they do a bit of
Speaker 4: research in the informal sense through see what works, see
Speaker 4: what doesn't. If every performance is a bit of an experiment,
Speaker 4: but it's not systematized. And so, as Steve expressed, there
Speaker 4: are volumes like literal libraries of magic theory in which
Speaker 4: these theories have never been put to the test, they
Speaker 4: have never been systematically investigated in a laboratory.
Speaker 6: So what I think that science.
Speaker 4: Can really contribute to magic is in the realm of
Speaker 4: magic theory helping magicians understand why tricks.
Speaker 6: Work the way they do, why misurrection.
Speaker 4: Happens in the way that it happens, and that then
Speaker 4: magicians as artists can take this knowledge and then use
Speaker 4: it in different creative ways. But I think that well
Speaker 4: times can bring to magic and do art and do
Speaker 4: human endeavors in general, is greater understanding.
Speaker 1: And I think you guys have written, if I'm remembering correctly,
Speaker 1: about how understanding magic can also be used for let's say,
Speaker 1: treatment and diagnosis of various cognitive disorders in neuroscience.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so one of the things that magic does is,
Speaker 5: for example, with misdirection that we talked about, is manipulate attention.
Speaker 5: So it should be possible to use these kinds of stimulation,
Speaker 5: that is, magic tricks to manipulate attention and determine the
Speaker 5: differences between patients who have cognitive decline that affect spatial
Speaker 5: attention and patients that do not. For example, it could
Speaker 5: become a, for example, a diagnostic and one of the
Speaker 5: reasons we believe this is because there are magicians that
Speaker 5: are specialized for performing for children and in the field
Speaker 5: of it's interesting because it's similar to science. They have
Speaker 5: annual conferences that they go to and they get up
Speaker 5: and give talks to each other, and they reveal how
Speaker 5: certain tricks work and don't work to each other in
Speaker 5: very much similar culture that scientists do when they get
Speaker 5: together for annual conferences and give talks to each other
Speaker 5: about what they've discovered. And one of the things that
Speaker 5: they do is split these rooms into different kinds of magic.
Speaker 5: One room would be for children's magic, whereas other rooms
Speaker 5: will be for adult magic. And the reason is because
Speaker 5: children have a different attentional system, especially below the age
Speaker 5: of five, than adults, and so certain types of magic
Speaker 5: you're not going to work with them in the sense
Speaker 5: that children actually have a gain of function for detecting
Speaker 5: the trick, so they'll actually have a chance of seeing
Speaker 5: something wrong in the trick or seeing a method that
Speaker 5: adults won't because adults are much more likely to be
Speaker 5: led down the garden path because their attentional systems are
Speaker 5: better than children. And this is also true with people
Speaker 5: who have different kinds into attentional deficit.
Speaker 4: When an Acdoral example is that, contrary to popular opinion,
Speaker 4: magicians don't like to perform in front of drug people
Speaker 4: because they're harder to misdirect. You really need to be
Speaker 4: able to allocate your attention precisely to be misdirected by
Speaker 4: the magician. Otherwise if the magician, if they cannot be
Speaker 4: in control, that makes their life much harder. There are
Speaker 4: specific magic shows that are devised for children and that
Speaker 4: they frankly don't tend to really so much or misdirections
Speaker 4: per se.
Speaker 6: They're more kind of like.
Speaker 4: Comedy magic small small percentage of magic compared to comedy,
Speaker 4: and that in fact, children's magicians will often do something
Speaker 4: that almost no magician performing for adult audiences will do,
Speaker 4: which is to announce what they're going to be doing next,
Speaker 4: and that is to the children's attention. But in a
Speaker 4: regular magic show, audiences will be surprised and that it
Speaker 4: works against the performance to say I'm going to make
Speaker 4: a rabbit disappear or I'm going to make a rabbit appear.
Speaker 4: In a show for children, the magician will more often
Speaker 4: than not make that type of announcement to get the
Speaker 4: children to stay on tusk.
Speaker 5: The magician Silly Billy, who we talk about in our book,
Speaker 5: is an amazing children's magician, and he says that you
Speaker 5: have to you have to do different kinds of tricks
Speaker 5: that draw the attention for very short periods of time.
Speaker 5: Like that's why with children you take a coin out
Speaker 5: of their ear. They you know, you have to do
Speaker 5: things that they know about the world. So because certain
Speaker 5: things they don't, they won't know that it's magical, but
Speaker 5: they just so much of what about the world is
Speaker 5: a surprise to them anyway, you know, it has to
Speaker 5: be something that they know is actually not true that
Speaker 5: they don't have quarters in their ear, for example.
Speaker 4: And children are just sometimes not so appreciative of the
Speaker 4: art of magic. Frankly, because when we started working with
Speaker 4: these magicians, our oldest child was a toddler, and I
Speaker 4: remember at some point we had them with us. He
Speaker 4: met Apolo Robins, who's a theatrical pick pocket and he's amazing,
Speaker 4: and he was getting a coin to appear and disappear
Speaker 4: over babies, you know, ears and hands and all over
Speaker 4: his body like he would do on stage and it
Speaker 4: was just the most amazing magic, such a special opportunity,
Speaker 4: and her toddler was just angry that this man had
Speaker 4: given him a coin and then he took it away,
Speaker 4: and then he couldn't know where he was, and he
Speaker 4: was just basically not appreciating the magic whatsoever.
Speaker 6: He was just rage.
Speaker 1: This didn't mean you another question I mean wondering about,
Speaker 1: which is can magic tricks be performed on animals? What
Speaker 1: do you guys know about that?
Speaker 4: I think that it's definitely possible to trick animals, dogs,
Speaker 4: plain FETs, and that you can go to YouTube and
Speaker 4: that search for magic with animals, and that you'll see
Speaker 4: all sorts of monkeys and dogs and cats being tricked
Speaker 4: with magic in various ways. Now that is misdirection, however,
Speaker 4: because I think that magic is not just being tricked.
Speaker 4: Magic is being trigged, and then there's an element of wonder,
Speaker 4: there's an element of art, there's an element of joy
Speaker 4: even because something that happens with a magic trick that
Speaker 4: is very interesting is that people most often they laugh
Speaker 4: as if it's the punchline of a joke. So there's
Speaker 4: this enjoyment something i'n expected happening magic and audiences laugh
Speaker 4: in surprise and enjoyment.
Speaker 6: I don't know that.
Speaker 4: Other animals have this kind of experience, so I think
Speaker 4: that that question remains open a little bit.
Speaker 1: I think it was Friends the Wall who pointed out
Speaker 1: that chimps just aren't entranced with human magicians, and they
Speaker 1: just simply don't pay attention. Do you suppose it would
Speaker 1: work if you performed magic for chimps but you were
Speaker 1: set up as a hologrammer in VR looking like a chimp,
Speaker 1: would they pay more attention?
Speaker 4: In the case of our own human toddler, he was
Speaker 4: very reward oriented, so he wasn't appreciating the magic in
Speaker 4: which something was being taken away from him for no
Speaker 4: good reason. Is the magic would have been, I don't know,
Speaker 4: to produce toms of candy like one of these production
Speaker 4: magic shows.
Speaker 6: He might have been a lot more engaged by that.
Speaker 1: Tell me about magic tricks that take advantage of something
Speaker 1: about our memory.
Speaker 4: Yes, so we have terrible memories and magicians know that
Speaker 4: and they take advantage of it. And in fact, something
Speaker 4: the magician's use in many shows is what we can
Speaker 4: call the recap, and what that does is generates a
Speaker 4: memory illusion.
Speaker 6: So if you have.
Speaker 4: Ever been to a magic show or watch a magic
Speaker 4: show on TV. Oftentimes the magician will do some wonderful
Speaker 4: feit of magic, often with a volunteer, and after that
Speaker 4: they will say, well, we didn't know each other. You
Speaker 4: can hear you got your choice of course, and you
Speaker 4: did this, and then this happened, and then that happened,
Speaker 4: and I couldn't have known, and then this amazing thing happened,
Speaker 4: and the description makes sense and everybody agrees, and that
Speaker 4: the show goes on. Now here's the thing. That description
Speaker 4: is not perfect. It deviates from reality. It doesn't deviate
Speaker 4: from reality in a very obvious way that would make
Speaker 4: people just figure out, okay, this is not what I saw.
Speaker 4: There's something fishy going on, but it's not an accurate description.
Speaker 4: So what happens then is that people go home and
Speaker 4: they talk to their friends and that I saw this thing,
Speaker 4: I went to this magic.
Speaker 6: Show, this happened. That happened.
Speaker 4: But the way that they're describing it now is not
Speaker 4: the original way that they witness it. That's the magician's
Speaker 4: recap that they're using as their description. And so it's
Speaker 4: like now when they try to figure out how the
Speaker 4: magician did it. It's like trying to put together apostle,
Speaker 4: and not only you don't have all the pieces, but
Speaker 4: you have some wrong pieces as well. So it's impossible
Speaker 4: to reconstruct whatever happened exactly on stage. And that's why
Speaker 4: when people come to us sometimes they and they say, well,
Speaker 4: I saw this amazing magic trick.
Speaker 6: Can you tell me how it works?
Speaker 4: And we may say, look, we're not gonna tell you,
Speaker 4: because one we're not supposed to, but also what you're
Speaker 4: describing and what took place are probably very different things.
Speaker 1: Right. I've seen this where magicians will say something like, okay, now,
Speaker 1: as you've seen, I have not touched the deck of cards,
Speaker 1: even though they have, And so it becomes something like
Speaker 1: you know, eyewitness testimony in courtrooms, where you know your
Speaker 1: memory gets overwritten with this statement that you think must
Speaker 1: have been true even though it wasn't.
Speaker 5: So they might say something like you chose a number,
Speaker 5: when in fact they picked a card and got the number,
Speaker 5: which is two very different things, because if a magician's
Speaker 5: controlling a deck of cards, they're choosing the number for
Speaker 5: you in certain circumstances, right, And so it's not that
Speaker 5: you picked the number, right, And so this kind of
Speaker 5: discrepancy in the memory can specifically, you know, have you
Speaker 5: go home and because it was a recapped to you,
Speaker 5: you described it that you picked a number right, and
Speaker 5: it may not gel in your memory that you actually
Speaker 5: picked a card rather than a number.
Speaker 3: One.
Speaker 5: Thing that I think that scientists could study in magic
Speaker 5: that would be of real value would be the field
Speaker 5: of magic called mentalism. Now, in mentalism, it's largely standard
Speaker 5: magic tricks, but instead of manipulating coins and cards and objects,
Speaker 5: it's manipulating information. It has to do with the way
Speaker 5: the brain actually works, and we don't know how it works.
Speaker 5: So there are, for example, magic tricks that famously the
Speaker 5: answer is the number thirty seven, and for some reason,
Speaker 5: people are able much more likely than chance to pull
Speaker 5: the number thirty seven out of their brain as an
Speaker 5: answer to this trick. And you do this trick in
Speaker 5: a way where you are essentially using the audience to take,
Speaker 5: in a sense, a statistical likelihood function of what they
Speaker 5: the whole audience is answering. And when you do this,
Speaker 5: there's like fifty people there and ten or fifteen people
Speaker 5: say thirty seven out of When you feel like you've
Speaker 5: just chosen a number one out of fifty right, and
Speaker 5: the chances should be two percent, but they're all you know,
Speaker 5: fifteen percent of them are choosing the same number. It's remarkable.
Speaker 5: And so this kind of thing and other things about
Speaker 5: the way we manipulate symbols in the brain and the
Speaker 5: way that we manipulate certain kinds of information, I think
Speaker 5: these tricks work. It's very mysterious from a neuroscientific point
Speaker 5: of view. It's not explained by sleight of hand in
Speaker 5: and that understanding the neural underpinnings of this would be
Speaker 5: a real insight into how the brain actually manipulates certain
Speaker 5: kind of information.
Speaker 1: What is an illusion of choice?
Speaker 4: Well, an illusion of choice would be a situation in
Speaker 4: which you feel that you do have a choice, when
Speaker 4: in fact you don't. And without disclosing too much, I
Speaker 4: think it would be fair to say that in a
Speaker 4: magic show, very few of the choices made by a
Speaker 4: volunteer in the audience are real choices. The magician is
Speaker 4: typically in control of the choice, and that can be
Speaker 4: done in a number of ways.
Speaker 6: But illusions of choice.
Speaker 4: Are yet one more type of cognitive ilution that plays
Speaker 4: or come players from rolling magic tricks.
Speaker 1: That was Stephen Macknick and Susannah Martinez Conde, two neuroscience
Speaker 1: colleagues at Sunny Downstate who study the intersection of neuroscience
Speaker 1: and magic. So what does a stage magician have in
Speaker 1: common with a pickpocket, or a seance director or a
Speaker 1: street hustler. They all have curious minds that chew on
Speaker 1: these questions of perception. How could someone misperceive this? How
Speaker 1: can I cause a momentary pull of attention so that
Speaker 1: I can do something right here and no one would
Speaker 1: ever see it. People like this have for centuries been
Speaker 1: carefully observing and exploiting human minds. So as a result,
Speaker 1: nowadays there's a close relationship between magicians and neuroscientists, to
Speaker 1: the degree that some magicians now collaborate with neuroscientists to
Speaker 1: create performances that explicitly incorporate knowledge about the brain. That
Speaker 1: means designing tricks that highlight specific pitfalls of perception or cognition,
Speaker 1: ones that weren't known about before but have come from
Speaker 1: the laboratory. So it's a two way street. Now increasingly
Speaker 1: we're going to see neuroscience informed magic performances, and you
Speaker 1: can think about exploiting this to an enormous degree. When
Speaker 1: we think about the future of magic. For example, I
Speaker 1: did an episode some months ago about the possibility of
Speaker 1: mind reading by reading brain signals, and this raises questions
Speaker 1: about the potential for magic tricks that involve a deeper
Speaker 1: understanding or manipulation of brain signals. This could lead to
Speaker 1: new forms of interactive and immersive magical experiences where we
Speaker 1: find ourselves totally fooled by an internal narrative that tells
Speaker 1: us one thing, even though something else actually happened. So
Speaker 1: whatever direction our new technologies evolve, it seems likely that
Speaker 1: the repertoire of magic is going to keep expanding, and
Speaker 1: I can't wait to go to a magic show twenty
Speaker 1: years from now, where we, like the aliens who can't
Speaker 1: see obvious things, will find ourselves amazed, astonished, and bewildered
Speaker 1: by the mismatch between the external world and our internal cosmos.
Speaker 1: Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
Speaker 1: and to find further reading. Send me an email at
Speaker 1: podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or discussions, and
Speaker 1: check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for
Speaker 1: videos of each episode and to leave comments. Until next time,
Speaker 1: I'm David eagleman, and this is inner cosmos.