Magicians and magicians test the limits of human perception and its nature. Therefore, it is not surprising that today's cognitive specialists are discovering features of the mind that sorcerers and magicians have understood (and used) for centuries.
A closer look at the numerous books on magic and witchcraft published since the 16th century reveals the kind of insights and insights that are only now making their way into the scientific literature.
1. Don't look now, but …
Magicians have long used elusive eye movements to manipulate the attention of their viewers. In their 1909 book, The Art of Magic, T. Nelson Downs and John Northern Hilliard emphasized that "hardly worth talking" about the fact that during a performance secret maneuver "the eyes of the performer should not for a moment be directed to the right hand" involved in the performance of the trick.
“If the performer forgets about this rule,” they warned, “the audience would immediately begin to suspect” that a corresponding movement was made.
In recent years, the effect of "gaze perception" in all things - from attention to social cognition - has become the object of numerous psychological studies. Not surprisingly, magic tricks have proven to be a useful experimental tool.
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For example, in an article published in 2009 in the journal Visual Cognition, researchers at the University of Durham conducted a study of how the magician influenced the attention of 32 viewers during the demonstration of tricks.
Indeed, the authors found that "the subjects spent less time looking at the critical hand when the magician's gaze was used to distract their attention from it." Downs and Hilliard were a century ahead of them in this respect.
2. What is the difference?
Another topic has been highly controversial over the past two decades among cognitive scientists. We are talking about "change blindness", or, as experts Daniel Simons and Ronald Rensink call this phenomenon, about the "amazing inability of a person to see significant changes, which in a normal environment are not difficult notice."
In one representative experiment, a researcher stopped pedestrians on campus and asked them how to get to a specific location. This conversation was then interrupted for a short time by two people carrying the large door, and during this short time the first researcher to ask the question was replaced by a completely different person.
In more than half of the cases, the pedestrians showing the direction did not notice that their interlocutor had turned into a completely different person.
Of course, magicians and magicians got to the bottom of this first. In the field of map tricks, for example, many techniques rely on subtle visual differences that remain almost invisible even to an observer at close range.
Some tricks use two similar cards - an eight of spades and an eight of clubs, which, say, need to be swapped out, and often in a rather brazen way. Perhaps the earliest mention of this specific principle comes from August Roterberg's 1897 book New Era Card Tricks.
3. Choose a side dish, any side dish
The method of stimulating free choice is one of the oldest tools at the disposal of magicians and magicians. Just think of the endless variety of techniques for "imposing" a certain card from the deck while maintaining the illusion of free choice.
This method has been around since at least 1584, when Reginald Scott published The discoverie of witchcraft, which is the earliest English book to contain detailed descriptions of various tricks.
And, nevertheless, the knowledge that insignificant, invisible factors can influence our decisions in a predictable and imperceptible way is only now receiving due attention from representatives of the academic world, especially those who are engaged in behavioral economics. The field produces a steady stream of bestsellers, and one of its forefathers, Daniel Kahneman, received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002.
She also became popular with policy experts such as Cass Sunstein. He actively advocates the use of behavioral economics techniques to secretly "nudge" citizens towards some decisions - whether it be saving money for retirement or choosing healthier foods.
4. Where were you when the elephant disappeared?
An imperfect memory can become a magician's best friend. For the public, magical performances are often more impressive - and impossible - when viewed in retrospect.
As one author noted in the 1918 edition of Magic Circular, the memory blackouts in viewers "we owe half of the incidents involving miraculous tales of things that never happened, but which nonetheless contribute to our reputation."
Some artists in this genre actually have the ability to stimulate exaggerated memory, and they do it in a way that I am not able to talk about here.
Our main tendency is to create inaccurate memories after an event has occurred - psychologists often call this phenomenon "reconstructive memory", and it has received more and more attention lately - especially with regard to its impact on the testimony of witnesses in the United States. the judicial system.
Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus found, for example, that “questions asked immediately after an event are able to introduce new - and not necessarily correct - information that is then added” to the witness's memory.
5. The audience is always right - unfortunately
People's cognitive deficiencies don't always work in the magician's favor. Practicing masters of this genre know all too well that it is not uncommon for a viewer to interrupt the focus and give the wrong explanation of a particular number (the phrases "It's in your sleeve" and "Magnets!" Are constant favorites).
Even when ill-conceived statements of this kind do not explain anything (what does a magnet have to do with the disappearance of a coin?), It is sometimes enough to spoil the public's impression of the focus.
Episodes of this kind are used as textbook examples of what psychologists Frank Keil and Leonid Rosenblit call the “illusion of depth of understanding,” or the feeling that we “understand complex phenomena with significantly more precision, consistency, and depth than we usually do it."
As they wrote in a 2002 article in the journal Cognitive Science, “laymen … usually do not notice the incompetence of their theories,” and this is partly because they “rarely have to provide a complete explanation for most of the phenomena that they think, they understand . And I still claim that they were magnets.
Robert Herritt