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"Magic - psychology"
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The illusionist brain : the neuroscience of magic
\"Magic is the art of creating impossible effects that violate our expectations, games that conclude with the apparent transgression of natural law. As spectators, we find magic tricks-and the state of true cognitive dissonance that they create-tremendously provocative. Why is our brain caught by surprise? The human brain is a very advanced organ, its capacities highly adapted to our environment and lifestyle. But its capacities are not unlimited. Restricted by limited space and energy, the brain cannot possibly process the vast amount of information that we receive continuously through the senses, and the transmission of information that we do receive is relatively slow and must overcome several bottlenecks. To overcome these restrictions, the brain has developed extraordinarily effective strategies to create a sense of reality from limited information. Magic has learned to \"hack\" these strategies, essentially playing with our unconscious processing. In this book, neuroscientists Jordi Camí and Luiz Martínez explore how magic accomplishes this feat. As magic is fundamentally an art, presented in playful contexts, it has not received sustained attention from scientific disciplines-but as Camí and Martínez show, magic is an excellent entry point into the inner workings of the brain. In twelve chapters, Camí and Martínez explore the ways in which magicians manipulate attention, memory, perception, and decision-making, and what these tricks can tell us about these processes themselves. Early chapters offer an introduction to basic neuroscience and what we know about how the brain creates reality, and later chapters delve more deeply into how magic both sheds light on and impacts how we perceive and act. Throughout, Camí and Martínez draw on their own research and raise fascinating questions that have yet to be explored. This book was originally written in Spanish. The Spanish edition was published in February 2020 (RBA Books)\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Ingredients of ‘rituals’ and their cognitive underpinnings
Ritual is not a proper scientific object, as the term is used to denote disparate forms of behaviour, on the basis of a faint family resemblance. Indeed, a variety of distinct cognitive mechanisms are engaged, in various combinations, in the diverse interactions called ‘rituals’ – and each of these mechanisms deserves study, in terms of its evolutionary underpinnings and cultural consequences. We identify four such mechanisms that each appear in some ‘rituals’, namely (i) the normative scripting of actions; (ii) the use of interactions to signal coalitional identity, affiliation, cohesiveness; (iii) magical claims based on intuitive expectations of contagion; and (iv) ritualized behaviour based on a specific handling of the flow of behaviour. We describe the cognitive and evolutionary background to each of these potential components of ‘rituals’, and their effects on cultural transmission. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'.
Journal Article
Happenstance found
A boy awakens, blindfolded, with no memory of even his name, but soon meets Lord Umber, an adventurer and inventor, who calls him Happenstance and tells him that he has a very important destiny--and a powerful enemy.
Book
Cross-modal attentional entrainment: Insights from magicians
Recently, performance magic has become a source of insight into the processes underlying awareness. Magicians have highlighted a set of variables that can create moments of visual attentional suppression, which they call “off-beats.” One of these variables is akin to the phenomenon psychologists know as
attentional entrainment
. The current experiments, inspired by performance magic, explore the extent to which entrainment can occur across sensory modalities. Across two experiments using a difficult dot probe detection task, we find that the mere presence of an auditory rhythm can bias when visual attention is deployed, speeding responses to stimuli appearing in phase with the rhythm. However, the extent of this cross-modal influence is moderated by factors such as the speed of the entrainers and whether their frequency is increasing or decreasing. In Experiment
1
, entrainment occurred for rhythms presented at .67 Hz, but not at 1.5 Hz. In Experiment
2
, entrainment only occurred for rhythms that were slowing from 1.5 Hz to .67 Hz, not speeding. The results of these experiments challenge current models of temporal attention.
Journal Article
Princess Snowbelle and the Snow Games
Princess Snowbelle and her brothers look forward to competing against the neighboring kingdom of Snowland in the annual Snow Games, but they learn that winning is not always the most important thing.
Book
Shared striatal activity in decisions to satisfy curiosity and hunger at the risk of electric shocks
Curiosity is often portrayed as a desirable feature of human faculty. However, curiosity may come at a cost that sometimes puts people in harmful situations. Here, using a set of behavioural and neuroimaging experiments with stimuli that strongly trigger curiosity (for example, magic tricks), we examine the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the motivational effect of curiosity. We consistently demonstrate that across different samples, people are indeed willing to gamble, subjecting themselves to electric shocks to satisfy their curiosity for trivial knowledge that carries no apparent instrumental value. Also, this influence of curiosity shares common neural mechanisms with that of hunger for food. In particular, we show that acceptance (compared to rejection) of curiosity-driven or incentive-driven gambles is accompanied by enhanced activity in the ventral striatum when curiosity or hunger was elicited, which extends into the dorsal striatum when participants made a decision.
In two functional MRI studies in which participants pay for the revelation of the solutions to magic tricks and trivia questions by risking electric shocks, Lau et al. show that curiosity-driven decisions involve activity in the striatum.
Journal Article
Sorrow's knot
Otter is a girl of the Shadowed People, a tribe of women, and she is born to be a binder, a woman whose power it is to tie the knots that bind the dead--but she is also destined to remake her world.
Book
Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research
Magic tricks require the manipulation of the audience's attention and awareness. Macknik, Martinez-Conde and their magician co-authors describe the visual and cognitive illusions that underlie many magic tricks, and the techniques that magicians use to achieve these illusions. An interview with Martinez-Conde for Neuropod is available for
download
.
Just as vision scientists study visual art and illusions to elucidate the workings of the visual system, so too can cognitive scientists study cognitive illusions to elucidate the underpinnings of cognition. Magic shows are a manifestation of accomplished magic performers' deep intuition for and understanding of human attention and awareness. By studying magicians and their techniques, neuroscientists can learn powerful methods to manipulate attention and awareness in the laboratory. Such methods could be exploited to directly study the behavioural and neural basis of consciousness itself, for instance through the use of brain imaging and other neural recording techniques.
Journal Article
Crystal cove
When Justine Hoffman was born her mother cast a spell to protect her from heartbreak, and as a result, she is incapable of falling in love. Eventually Justine's irrepressible curiosity--and her wish to lead a normal life--get the better of her, and she finds a way to temporarily block the enchantment. However, when Justine meets the mysterious Jason Black, she accidentally unleashes a storm of desire and danger that will threaten everything she holds dear ... and together Justine and Jason discover that love is the most powerful magic of all.
Book
Subtly encouraging more deliberate decisions: using a forcing technique and population stereotype to investigate free will
Magicians’ forcing techniques allow them to covertly influence spectators’ choices. We used a type of force (Position Force) to investigate whether explicitly informing people that they are making a decision results in more deliberate decisions. The magician placed four face-down cards on the table in a horizontal row, after which the spectator was asked to select a card by pushing it forward. According to magicians and position effects literature, people should be more likely to choose a card in the third position from their left, because it can be easily reached. We manipulated whether participants were reminded that they were making a decision (explicit choice) or not (implicit choice) when asked to select one of the cards. Two experiments confirmed the efficiency of the Position Force—52% of participants chose the target card. Explicitly informing participants of the decision impairs the success of the force, leading to a more deliberate choice. A range of awareness measures illustrates that participants were unaware of their stereotypical behaviours. Participants who chose the target card significantly underestimated the number of people who would have chosen the same card, and felt as free as the participants who chose another card. Finally, we tested an embodied-cognition idea, but our data suggest that different ways of holding an object do not affect the level of self-control they have over their actions. Results are discussed in terms of theoretical implications regarding free will, Wegner’s apparent mental causation, choice blindness and reachability effects.
Journal Article