What magic tricks can teach us the spirit

Choose a card, any card, and you may feel that you are in control when you shoot the queen of the hearts of a magician's bridge. But the magicians have strategies that force choice of their audience – pack the game with identical cards, spread the game with just the right moment for the choice to become inevitable.

This illusion of free will is one of the many illusions and tricks that Gustav Kuhn, a magician turned psychology researcher at Goldsmiths, University London, describes in his new book Living the impossible: the science of magic. Published in March by The MIT Press, the book explores how magic tricks and illusions can teach us about our brains. Kuhn takes the reader into the psychological underpinnings of tricks – optical illusions that reveal perceptual gaps to memory failures that make people thought they saw a bullet disappear, while there was no bullet to see at the start.

The immersive dive of the book into the worlds of magic and science is only possible thanks to Kuhn's deep experience in both areas. Kuhn's passion for magic was triggered at age 13 when a friend withdrew an egg from his ear. After stopping in London to work as a professional magician, Kuhn finally decided to divert his attention from the tricks themselves and turn to the spirits he was cheating on during his shows. "It was always clear that if I wanted to create powerful magic tricks, I had to understand the system that allows me to create them," he says.

During his doctorate on consciousness, he discovered that magic was a psychological field that few scientists were investigating. "I realized that many issues that are of interest to psychologists and that magicians have been exploiting for centuries," he says. "That's really what triggered everything for me, to try to bridge the gap between magic and science, and to try to use magic as a means of understanding human cognition."

Today, Kuhn is director of Goldsmiths' MAGIC Lab, University of London, where he leads a team of researchers studying how magic and illusions can help us understand free will, perception, and even cybersecurity. game design. For Kuhn, magic is a window to the shortcuts that our mind uses to make sense of the world. "Perception is all about problem solving," he says. "Above all, you know what the world really is, rather than what it really is. So, seeing that is really believing.

The edge spoke with Kuhn about magical thinking, false news, and the way humans and dogs view objects in the same way.

This interview has been modified for clarity and brevity.

What is the science of magic? Is not this a contradiction?

Magic does not work because magicians have real supernatural powers, but they divert our brains and manipulate and exploit many of our blind spots and boundaries to create their illusions. For example, they will divert your attention system to manipulate what you see and, most importantly, what you miss. But the key to magic is that magic really only works if you are not aware of these limitations. Think of a situation where a magician takes a coin, strikes it and suddenly, it disappears. What happens in your brain when you encounter something you know to be impossible? Over the last 15 years, magicians and scientists have come together to try to study the psychology behind magic – and in doing so, we have really learned a lot about the human spirit.

You talk about how magic manipulates our free will, exploits our limits, uses deceit and trickery – why do people like that?

Magic is one of the most sustainable forms of entertainment. And intuitively, you might think that you would not really want someone to lie to you. But of course, the magic is not limited to mere deceptions. Magic allows us to experience things we believe impossible. And I think there is a deep-seated cognitive mechanism that draws us to things we do not yet understand and that inspires us to learn more about the world around us.

What is the most surprising thing you have learned about the psychology of magic?

There's a lot. The two main problems are the extent to which we are not aware of internal processes. We are now used to the fact that you can fool your perception system or your memory, but even the feeling of free will [can be fooled]. In some simple card tricks, we ask someone to choose a card and use a sleight of hand and deception that is simple enough to get them all to choose the same card. They feel they have a truly free choice, yet the decision has been influenced. The way we can actually use magic tricks to undermine someone's free will has been staggering.

The other relates to the beliefs of people in magic. We had a great research program in which a magician claims to have psychic powers. We invite a whole class of undergraduates to watch these performances, then we ask them how they think this has been done. What is truly surprising is that a large part of our students sincerely believe that this person has psychic powers. What is even more surprising is that even though we say The participants had already noticed that they saw a magician who used tricks and deceptions, but they sincerely believed that he had psychic powers. This has very disturbing implications for our interaction with false news because it shows that if you have these very emotional situations where people can see something that they know is wrong, it can still have an impact on people's beliefs. We are very sensitive to misinformation and we really struggle to tell the difference between fiction and reality.

How do magicians divert the attention of their audience?

The magicians have developed so many different techniques that are all fascinating. In general, people think of the wrong attention orientation. I can distract your attention system and influence what you see and what you miss. One of the most powerful signals used by magicians is the look. Even newborns follow the eye of another person. So, if I want you to look or take care of a certain direction, I will look in that direction. It's a very powerful signal.

We have been studying this issue for many years by measuring people's eye movements while focusing their attention inappropriately. We find that these signals are so powerful that we encounter many situations in which people really look at something. If their mental attention is directed or misguided, they may not see things in front of their eyes. Intuitively, we feel aware of most of our environments. Yet, in reality, once you begin to probe our conscious experience, we realize that we simply ignore most things.

How can we bridge these gaps in our cognition so as not to be deceived?

This is the wrong way of thinking! These gaps do not exist because we have garbage brains. They exist because our brains are really incredible. The processing of information requires expensive resources. Rather than simply processing all the information, we have evolved into some very clever tips for solving many of these problems. Now, with any shortcut or trick, it can be very effective, but it can lead to errors that the wizards exploit. But without these mistakes, we simply would not have the neural capacity to process all this information. In some ways, these illusions must be celebrated because they really illustrate how intelligent, rather than stupid, our brain is.

In the book, you talk about how magicians correctly attributed the conjecture of a card to the mind that read and psychic powers. Now, some are turning more to pseudo-scientific explanations just as improbable, such as the interpretation of body language to guess the map. Why this change and what does it tell us about the practice and experience of magic?

Magicians have often used popular culture to inspire their magic tricks. During the Victorian era, magicians were very eager to exploit this idea of ​​spiritualism and would use it to frame their magical performances. In these effects, the magician can contact the dead to try to discover secret information about an individual. Nowadays, people are more skeptical about spiritualism. A new trend has really evolved: instead of using spiritual explanations to explain what they do, magicians use pseudo-psychological principles.

It is quite disturbing. We did some research on that. In fact, these performances can misinform people about what they think is possible. In this study, we did one of these pseudo-psychological demonstrations, and half of the participants were told that they saw a magician and the other half of the participants were supervising a psychologist. This framing has zero impact on their interpretation of what they saw, in that they really believe that the magician was using these psychological principles. This can fuel this belief that you can use psychology to discover things or to do things that are simply impossible. And in the same way that fraudulent psychics and fraudulent spiritualists have used magic as a means of misinforming the public about spirituality, the wizards who today use these evil principles really do educate the public about what "magic" is. is really psychology.

What is one of your favorite illusions?

One of my favorite illusions I've studied is the missing ball illusion, where the magician throws a ball through the air several times, then claims throw the balloon in the air – and most people claim to see it disappear in the air, even though it never left the hand. Humans behave exactly the same way dogs do when you pretend to throw a stick. We may not be running, but our perceptual experience is also fooled. This is not the most amazing magic trick, but I find psychology very confusing and absolutely fascinating.

Why do people see things that have not really happened? The reason is that we actually see in the future. Because seeing does not happen in the eyes, it happens in the brain and it takes at least a tenth of a second for the information to pass from the eyes to the visual cortex, which is part of the brain. The reason we do not see the world as falling behind is that our brain constantly predicts the future. So what you see as the present is not really the present, it's really your brain to predict what will the present look like based on past information? It's a difficult concept to understand. It is a very intelligent system. It's incredibly smart. But of course, this can lead to mistakes, and the illusion of balloon disappearing is one of those mistakes. You see something you are waiting for but it is not the case in reality.