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Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, the founders of the exciting new discipline of neuromagic, have convinced some of the world's greatest magicians to allow scientists to study their techniques for tricking the brain. The implications of neuromagic go beyond illuminating our behavior; early research points to new approaches for everything from the diagnosis of autism to marketing techniques and education. Fun and accessible, Sleights of Mind is "a tour through consciousness, attention, and deception via the marriage of professional magic and cognitive neuroscience" (Vanessa Schipani, The Scientist).
- Sales Rank: #78546 in Books
- Published on: 2011-11-22
- Released on: 2011-11-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.20" h x .82" w x 6.19" l, .84 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 291 pages
Review
“Sleights of Mind makes brain science so much fun, you'll swear the authors are as clever as Houdini.” ―Scientific American Book Club
“Magic is the place where our senses and beliefs fail us in magnificent ways. In this exciting book Stephen, Susana, and Sandra explore what magic and illusions can teach us about our fallible human nature--coming up with novel and fascinating observations.” ―Dan Ariely, author of Predictability Irrational
“Steve and Susana are two of the most innovative scientists I know. They aren't content to just conduct elegant experiments (although they do plenty of those, too). Instead, they're determined to explore those places where neuroscience intersects the mysterious and the magical, from visual illusions to Vegas card tricks. This book doesn't just change the way you think about sleight of hand and David Copperfield - it will also change the way you think about the mind.” ―Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide and Proust Was A Neuroscientist.
“I've long wished that there was a book that explained the art of magic from the point of view of cognitive neuroscience. Magic is a goldmine of information about the brain, as well as a source of fascination to laypeople. This is the book we've all been waiting for.” ―Steven Pinker PhD, author of The Stuff of Thought
“This is a highly original book. Science and magic have much in common. They both take seemingly inexplicable events and provide elegantly simple answers that enthrall the observer. The authors have done an admirable job in exploring this idea and also suggest ways in which the two disciplines can cross fertilize each other.” ―VS Ramachandran MD PhD, author of Phantoms in the Brain
“Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde's Sleights of Mind gives non-magicians a real up-close look at the true secrets of magic. They are revealing the real knowledge jealously guarded by all great performers...I know my fellow magicians are all going to be as jazzed as I am to read about how sophisticated magical techniques and state-of-the-art brain science combine.” ―Mac King, headliner, Harrah's Las Vegas
“In Sleights of Mind, authors Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde persistently remind us that the human mind is a bad data-taking device. And it's this fact that enables the science of magic to exist at all.” ―Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of The Pluto Files
“The authors make easily comprehensible the effects of neural adaptation, afterimages, occlusion, perspective, saccades, inattentional blindness, expectations and the pliability of memory...Entertaining.” ―Kirkus
“In their illuminating book, brain experts Martinez-Conde and Macknik make their case that magicians are some of the most skilled neuroscientists around...By tricking readers into having fun learning neuroscience, the authors bring the newly minted field of "neuromagic" to center stage.” ―Laura Sanders, Science News
“This book offers 'a revolutionary look a the science behind magic--what leads the mind to believe tricks are real and how magicians actually use the brain's own logic to acheive this.'” ―Phillip Manning, Science Book News
“If you want to learn more about "neuromagic," take a peek at Macknik and Martinez-Conde's most recent book. It explains how they've investigated the tricks of some of the world's greatest magicians to find out how the brain works in everyday situations. It's a great read whether you're passionate about brain science, magic, or both!” ―Odyssey Magazine (Editor's Choice)
About the Author
Stephen L. Macknik, Ph.D., is Director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. Susana Martinez-Conde, Ph.D., is Director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at BNI. Sandra Blakeslee is a regular contributor to "Science Times" at The New York Times who specializes in the brain sciences, and the author of several books.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
CLARKE'S THIRD LAW: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
NIVEN'S LAW: "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."
AGATHA HETERODYNE ("GIRL GENIUS") PARAPHRASE OF NIVEN'S LAW: "Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science!"
Have you ever wondered how magic effects work? Coins materialize out of thin air. Cards move through a deck as if pulled by an invisible force. Beautiful women are cut in half. Spoons bend. Fish, elephants, even the Statue of Liberty disappear before your eyes. How does a mentalist actually read your mind? How can you not see the gorilla in the room? Really, how can someone catch a bullet in his teeth? How do they do it?
Don't bother to ask a conjurer. When joining an organization of professional magicians, the initiate may be asked to take an oath: "As a magician I promise never to reveal the secret of any illusion to a nonmagician, unless that person also swears to uphold the magicians' oath. I promise never to perform any illusion for any nonmagician without first practicing the effect until I can do it well enough to maintain the illusion of magic." It is a code. A brotherhood. The magician who breaks this code risks being blackballed by his fellow magicians.
So what are we, a couple of muggles, doing writing a book on magic? Zipped lips aside, hasn't most everything about magic been revealed? Enter "magic" in the Amazon Books search box and 75,000 results pop up. Log in to YouTube and you can see just about every magic trick ever devised—often demonstrated by darling seven-year-olds in their bedrooms with Mom or Dad wielding the videocam. Visit Craigslist and choose from myriad charming descriptions of local amateur magicians. What's left to say?
Actually, plenty. This is the first book ever written on the neuroscience of magic, or, if you will, neuromagic, a term we coined as we began our travels in the world of magic.[1] Much has been said about the history of magic, tricks of the trade, the latest props, and psychological responses to magical effects. But neuroscience probes more deeply. We want to pop the hood on your brain as you are suckered in by sleights of hand. We want to explain at a fundamental level why you are so thoroughly vulnerable to sleights of mind. We want you to see how deception is part and parcel of being human. That we deceive each other all the time. And that we survive better and use fewer brain resources while doing so because of the way our brains produce attention.
Like so much that happens in science, we fell into magic by accident. We are neuroscientists at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. The BNI is the oldest stand-alone neurological institute in the United States and currently the largest neurosurgical service in North America, performing more than six thousand craniotomies per year. Each of us runs a research laboratory in the institute. Stephen is director of the laboratory of behavioral neurophysiology. Susana is director of the laboratory of visual neuroscience. Incidentally, we are married. Both of us are primarily interested in how the brain, as a device that is made up of individual cells called neurons, can produce awareness, the feeling of our first-person experience.[2] Somehow, when neurons are hooked up to each other in specific circuits, awareness is achieved. It's the ultimate scientific question, and neuroscience is on the verge of answering it.
Our foray into illusions began a decade ago when, as young scientists seeking to make a name for ourselves, we tried to rustle up some public enthusiasm for our specialty of visual neuroscience. In 2005, after accepting faculty appointments at BNI, we organized the annual meeting of the European Conference on Visual Perception, which was held in Susana's hometown of A Coruña, Spain. We wanted to showcase visual science in a new way that would intrigue the public and the media. We were fascinated with how science can explain something about the visual arts—for example, Margaret Livingstone's work on why the Mona Lisa's smile is so ineffably enigmatic. We also knew that visual illusions are fundamentally important to understanding how the brain turns raw visual information into perception.
The idea we came up with was simple: we would create the Best Illusion of the Year contest. We asked the scientific and artistic communities to contribute new visual illusions and received more than seventy entries. The audience (a mixture of scientists, artists, and the public) viewed the ten best illusions and then chose the top three. The contest, now in its seventh year, has been a huge success. Our Internet audience doubles every year, and our Web site (http://illusionoftheyear.com) currently has about 5 million page views each year.
Because of our success with the illusion contest, the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness asked us to chair its 2007 annual conference. The ASSC is a society of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers united in the aim to understand how conscious experience emerges from the interactions of mindless, individually nonconscious brain cells.
As our opening move, we proposed holding the conference in our hometown of Phoenix, but the association's board nixed that right away because the city is an inferno midyear. Instead, they suggested . . . Las Vegas. Hmmm. Las Vegas is every bit as blisteringly hot in June as Phoenix, and if you take the lap dancing, gambling, and showgirls into account it is probably several degrees hotter due to friction. So apparently our colleagues in consciousness studies were looking for a bit of real excitement to spice up their thought experiments.
So Vegas it was. We flew there in October 2005 to do some scouting. On the flight over we asked ourselves: How could we raise the visibility of consciousness research to the public? We didn't want to do another contest. The answer began to germinate the moment our plane dipped its wings on approach to the Las Vegas airport. Out the window we could see, all at once, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, an erupting volcano, the Space Needle, the Sphinx, Camelot, and the Great Pyramid. Soon we were driving up and down the Strip, checking out hotels for our meeting space. We passed Aladdin's castle, the Grand Canal of Venice, and Treasure Island. It seemed too strange to be real. Then, bingo: the theme for our conference appeared. Festooned on billboards, taxicabs, and buses were huge images of magicians: Penn & Teller, Criss Angel, Mac King, Lance Burton, David Copperfield. They stared out at us with mischievous eyes and beguiling smiles. And then it hit us that these tricksters were like scientists from Bizarro World—doppelgängers who had outpaced us real scientists in their understanding of attention and awareness and had flippantly applied it to the arts of entertainment, pickpocketing, mentalism, and bamboozlement (as well as to unique and unsettling patterns of facial hair).
We knew as vision scientists that artists have made important discoveries about the visual system for hundreds of years, and visual neuroscience has gained a great deal of knowledge about the brain by studying their techniques and ideas about perception. It was painters rather than scientists who first worked out the rules of visual perspective and occlusion, in order to make pigments on a flat canvas seem like a beautiful landscape rich in depth. We realized now that magicians were just a different kind of artist: instead of form and color, they manipulated attention and cognition.
Magicians basically do cognitive science experiments for audiences all night long, and they may be even more effective than we scientists are in the lab. Now, before our in-boxes fill up with flames from angry colleagues, let us explain. Cognitive neuroscience experiments are strongly susceptible to the state of the observer. If the experimental subject knows what the experiment is about, or is able to guess it, or sometimes even if she incorrectly thinks she has figured it out, the data are often corrupted or impossible to analyze. Such experiments are fragile and clunky. Extraordinary control measures must be put in place to keep the experimental data pure.
Now compare this with magic shows. Magic tricks test many of the same cognitive processes we study, but they are incredibly robust. It doesn't matter in the slightest that the entire audience knows it is being tricked; it falls for each trick every time it is performed, show after show, night after night, generation after generation. We thought, if only we could be that deft and clever in the lab! If only we were half so skilled at manipulating attention and awareness, what advances we could make!
The idea rapidly took shape: we would bring scientists and magicians together so scientists could learn the magicians' techniques and harness their powers.
But there was just one problem: we were clueless about magic. We didn't know any magicians. Neither of us had ever even seen a real magic show. Fortunately, our colleague Daniel Dennett got us our big break. Dennett is a fellow scientist and philosopher who also happens to be a good friend of James the Amaz!ng Randi, a famous magician and skeptic who has spent decades debunking claims of the paranormal. Randi wrote back, enthusiastically endorsing our idea. He told us that he knew three more magicians who would be perfect for our purposes: Teller (from the magic duo Penn & Teller), Mac King, and Johnny Thompson. All of them lived in Las Vegas and all were personally interested in cognitive science. Apollo Robbins, "the Gentleman Thief," a friend of Teller, joined our group a few months later. Much of this book is based on our interactions with these talented magicians.
Thus began our journey of discovery about the neural underpinnings of magic. We have spent the last few years traveling the world, me...
Most helpful customer reviews
67 of 73 people found the following review helpful.
Now You See It!
By Rob Hardy
It is hard not to pay attention to optical illusions, and wonder how can it be that one line is _not_ really longer than the other or one circle is _not_ really darker than the other or all the other varieties that tell us our eyes lie to us. It was only a few decades ago that neuroscientists realized that the mistakes in visual processing were tools to examine how the eyes and brain process information. (It was also a reminder of the wonderful and mysterious lesson that our brains do not make perfect inner models of reality, but only use the tricks and shortcuts descended from their evolution to make useful, rather than exact, models.) In a way, magicians perform optical illusions and even behavioral illusions. You enjoy a magician's performance because although it looks as if he makes coins manifest from the air or makes a ball vanish when he throws it up, you know that such things cannot really be and yet you cannot figure out how the impression the magician makes is so strong. If we can get neurological understanding of the visual system from optical illusions, perhaps the illusions performed by magicians would offer an even broader range of tools to evaluate brain function. This was the insight of Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde. They are both directors of neuroscience labs and they are married. Because they had done research on visual illusions, they hosted a conference in 2005 in Las Vegas, and were reminded that it was headquarters for some of the best magicians in the world. They got the insight that magic could be studied to gain understanding of perception and even consciousness. They even became certified magicians. You might not be able to get through any of their scientific papers on the subject, but here (written with Sandra Blakeslee) is _Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions_ (Henry Holt), a delightful and illuminating book about how magicians in many ways take advantage of our brains' imperfect modeling of reality and what this tells us about how the brains work.
The immediate attraction to this book for many people will be that it gives magic secrets away. The authors have conscientiously marked all such explanations with a "Spoiler Alert," so that if you still want to be baffled you can skip the explanation. Of course you will be missing all the fun and insight, and it is hard to imagine anyone that would resist looking at the spoilers. Even more important is that knowing the trick doesn't make it any less of a trick; the authors still go to magic shows and still are fooled. The hardwired processes of paying attention cannot be overcome, but they can be hacked, and this is what magicians do. A magician who produces a live dove, for instance, knows that you cannot help but pay attention to the flapping of the dove. While the spotlight of that attention is on the dove, who knows what might be manipulated outside the spotlight? The authors describe with good humor and charm their attempts to become full-fledged performing magicians, and the difficulties involved. Skill with the hands is important, but not as important as you might think. "Pulling off these simple sleights requires about as much dexterity as you need when learning how to shuffle a deck of cards for the first time." The reason that a magician can so easily take your attention away from the mechanics of the trick is that we are so bad at multitasking. There has been a decade of research on multitasking, long before the authors got interested in magic. Multitaskers just don't get all the tasks done as well as those who are doing one thing at a time. Those who couple the task of driving with the task of talking on a cell phone, even if the phone is hands-free, are able to pay as little attention to the road as drunks do. There are wonderful examples in the book of magicians (or psychologists doing experiments) who do such things as literally riding around on a unicycle in a clown suit without being noticed because attention is elsewhere. Remember, too, that a good patter is not just the mark of a smooth performance; the magician who tells jokes, witty or corny, is counting on your mind to be occupied with the humor so that it can't do much else.
The authors have no concern that pushing scientific investigation of magical feats will make them any less magical, any more than Copernicus diminished the beauties of sunsets. In fact, they are doing what magicians have been doing all along: "Magicians basically do cognitive science experiments for audiences all night long, and they may be even more effective than we scientists are in the lab." And it may well be that armed with better understanding of how magic works, the authors can improve the effectiveness of their own tricks and those of other magicians. Their book reads well as a summary of a personal quest for scientific and magical understanding, and one of the best things about it is that it refers repeatedly to their website where you can see the specific magic effects themselves. Their book is a delightful tour of magic techniques; but in showing the techniques this way, abracadabra, the authors have induced the reader to learn some serious neuroscience as well.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Will Alter Your Sense of How You Perceive the World
By Osmun R. Latrobe
If you are the type who is interested in how the mind perceives its world, this is an essential book. It was written by two psychologists who venture to find out how magic works from a neurological point of view. Through the explanation of several artful magic illusions, it describes how our brains process our sensory information, and how those senses can be deceived by very simple artifices. As one who both professionally and personally has great interest in our ability to properly perceive what is going on around us, I was fascinated. If epistimology is your interest, then this book is a Must Have.
It was as paradigm changing as Umberto Ecco's Foucault's Pendulum, albeit in a more direct and to the point fashion.
i
44 of 54 people found the following review helpful.
Blakeslee & Son Really Shine In This Book
By Samuel M. Randolph
If you are familiar with the prior writings of Sandra Blakeslee and her son Michael, who provided the writing talent for "Sleights of Mind" and co wrote her last book "The Body Has a Mind of Its Own" you will love this latest product of a very talented mother and son science writing team.
Though dated, her prior book "On Intelligence" with Jeff Hawkins, was a quick and concise read that is still one of the best sources on the topic of reverse engineering of the neocortex. I was hoping that this latest project would stand up to the standards of her two prior books, and I wasn't disappointed with the quality of this project - it's just as good. Major insights are offered from a fresh perspective, and it's a speedy read that you can recommend to others.
The contributions of Macknik and Martinez-Conde are far from stuffy. They obviously have had a great time as a couple exploring their areas of expertise through the lens of magic performance, and with the kind help of experts who bring a powerful sense of depth and history to the presentation.
The material is original and it's been presented in a clear and easy to follow format with illustrations provided when needed. This book overcomes one of the objections that I had to Blakeslee's last book, which was the lack of references.
I find it interesting to see that Blakeslee has returned to the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix for this new project, which was also the source of some of the best materials in The Body Has a Mind of Its Own. For more on this back story, you may wish to refer to two interviews of Blakeslee by Ginger Campbell see brainsciencepodcast.com episodes 21 and 23 for more on that project. My take on the the chicanery that can take place in the brain comes from experiences with handedness reversals, as discussed in "Hidden Handedness" which provides yet another illustration of the principle that our brains are the true virtuoso virtual reality machines, the place where the best magic shows are always happening.
My thanks to all of the team members who worked together to produce this important book.
Samuel Randolph
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