Robbins Library Notes

Good morning, readers!

Recently, I came across two fascinating articles about research which explores how some recent empirical research on magic illuminates the workings of human perception.  Both of these articles may be of great interest to those who study epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and perception.

The first, “Magicians Know More Than Scientists,” by Jeanna Bryner, begins by stating:

Magicians are way ahead of psychologists when it comes to understanding and exploiting the human mind and our perceptual quirks.

A new study, detailed in the current online issue of the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, reveals how elements of human cognition, such as awareness and perception, could be explained by the success of some techniques commonly used by magicians….

“Although a few attempts have been made in the past to draw links between magic and human cognition, the knowledge obtained by magicians has been largely ignored by modern psychology,” said researcher Ronald Rensink, who specializes in vision and cognition at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

The remainder of the article discusses how empirical studies of magic and what magicians do is opening up insights into human perception and how it works.

The second article, “How magicians control your mind,” by Drake Bennett, covers similar ground, though Bennett includes information studies not referenced in the first article.  (A hat-tip to Bookforum.com for this article.)  Bennett writes:

At a major conference last year in Las Vegas, in a scientific paper published last week and another due out this week, psychologists have argued that magicians, in their age-old quest for better ways to fool people, have been engaging in cutting-edge, if informal, research into how we see and comprehend the world around us. Just as studying the mechanisms of disease reveals the workings of our body’s defenses, these psychologists believe that studying the ways a talented magician can short-circuit our perceptual system will allow us to better grasp how the system is put together.

“I think magicians and cognitive neuroscientists are getting at similar questions, but while neuroscientists have been looking at this for a few decades, magicians have been looking at this for centuries, millennia probably,” says Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute and coauthor of one of the studies, published online last week in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. “What magicians do is light-years ahead in terms of sophistication and the power of these techniques.”

As magicians have long known and neuroscientists are increasingly discovering, human perception is a jury-rigged apparatus, full of gaps and easily manipulated. The collaboration between science and magic is still young, and the findings preliminary, but interest among scholars is only growing: the New York Academy of Science has invited the magician Apollo Robbins to give a presentation in January on the science of vision, and a team of magicians is scheduled to speak at next year’s annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, the world’s largest organization of brain researchers.

And in a world where concentration is a scarce resource, a better understanding of how to channel it would have myriad uses, from safer dashboard displays to more alluring advertisements - and even, perhaps, to better magic.

What do you think, readers?

And now, to complete our magic theme and entertain you, here is the band, America, singing “Magic”: