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Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions Paperback – Illustrated, November 22, 2011
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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).
- Print length291 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPicador
- Publication dateNovember 22, 2011
- Dimensions6.1 x 0.68 x 9.15 inches
- ISBN-100312611676
- ISBN-13978-0312611675
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“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
Susana Martinez-Conde, Ph.D., is Director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at Barrow Neurological Institute. She is co-author of Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions.
Sandra Blakeslee has been writing about science and medicine for The New York Times for more than thirty years and is the co-author of Phantoms in the Brain by V. S. Ramachandran and of Judith Wallerstein's bestselling books on psychology and marriage. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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, meeting magicians, learning tricks, and inventing the science of neuromagic. We developed our own magic show and decided to audition at the world's most prestigious magic club, the Magic Castle in Hollywood, California, as bona fide magicians. (For how we did, see chapter 11.)
Magic tricks work because humans have a hardwired process of attention and awareness that is hackable. By understanding how magicians hack our brains, we can better understand how the same cognitive tricks are at work in advertising strategy, business negotiations, and all varieties of interpersonal relations. When we understand how magic works in the mind of the spectator, we will have unveiled the neural bases of consciousness itself.[3]
So pull up a seat, because Sleights of Mind is the story of the greatest magic show on earth: the one that is happening right now in your brain.
[1]Devin Powell, a writer for the popular science magazine New Scientist, described our early studies in a 2008 article that introduced the term "magicology" (the scientific study of magic) as an alternative to "neuromagic" (the neuroscientific study of magic). Although "neuromagic" is somewhat narrower than "magicology," both terms are roughly equivalent and usually interchangeable.
[2]Throughout this book we use the terms "awareness" and "consciousness" as synonyms.
[3]Readers can find relevant citations of the original research studies discussed throughout this book in each chapter's note section.
Excerpted from Sleights Of Mind by Stephen L. Macknik & Susana Martinez-Conde
Copyright 2010 by Stephen L. Macknik & Susana Martinez-Conde
Published in 2010 by Henry Holt and Company
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.
Product details
- Publisher : Picador; Reprint edition (November 22, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 291 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0312611676
- ISBN-13 : 978-0312611675
- Item Weight : 11.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.1 x 0.68 x 9.15 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #871,431 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #220 in Magic & Illusion
- #278 in Magic Tricks
- #673 in Neuroscience (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Sandra (aka Sandy) Blakeslee. I am a science writer with endless curiosity and interests but have spent the past 35 years or so writing about the brain, mostly for the New York Times where I started my career back in the dark ages (late 60s.) I've been writing books for the past few years (The Body Has a Mind of It's Own, On intelligence, Sleights of Mind, Dirt Is Good and more.) As for back story -- I graduated from Berkeley in 1965 (Free Speech Movement major), went to Peace Corps in Borneo, joined the NYT in 1968 as a staff writer, then took off on my own, raised a family, lived in many parts of the world, now live in Santa Fe NM and even have grandchildren. To quote Churchill, so much to do....
Stephen is a Professor of Ophthalmology, Neurology, Physiology & Pharmacology--and an Empire Innovator Scholar--at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY, where he studies visual, sensory and cognitive neuroscience.
He is a member of the Academy of Magical Arts (aka The Magic Castle in Hollywood), the Magic Circle (UK), the Society of American Magicians, and the International Brotherhood of Magicians.
His research and outreach activities have been written up in hundreds of media stories including many that have appeared in Scientific American, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, The Times (London), The Evening Standard, The Boston Globe, USA Today, La Vanguardia, ScienceNews, Der Spiegel, The Scientist, New Scientist WIRED magazine, and dozens of other publications around the globe.
Television and radio appearances include CBS Sunday Morning, The Discovery Channel, Catalyst (Australia), Horizon (KAET - PBS), and National Public Radio, in addition to dozens of radio interviews all over the world.
Stephen is a columnist for Scientific American. He shares his column with Susana Martinez-Conde, and the write about the neuroscience of illusions. One of these contributions is the most downloaded article in sciam.com history. SciAm has published several special issues of dedicated completely to the authors previous and ongoing contributions on illusions.
Stephen is a founding board members of the Neural Correlate Society, and Susana serves as its Executive Chair. NCS hosts the annual "Best Illusion of the Year Contest." The contest's website maintains an archive of visual illusions and their explanations for a broad audience, and receives over three million hits per year. Stephen serves on the board of advisors for Scientific American: Mind and in addition to his column he has published several feature articles in Scientific American (circulation > 1,000,000 readers) and several of its family of journals. Their academic publication credits include contributions to Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
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The authors, top-notch neuroscientists in their own right, had access both to world-class scientists and magicians, who generously shared insights and, yes, secrets -- real secrets of magic that have been kept hidden for decades. Artfully and delightfully, through a series of vignettes interweaving magic history and current performers, the authors reveal the neuroscience behind how magic tricks work.
Some of these tricks you may have seen and been befuddled by for years: disappearing coins; the ball and cup routine; mentalism; card predictions, transformations, disappearances; women being sawed in half; ventriloquism; and a whole lot more. On the way to understanding these sleights, you get to meet the colorful and brilliant practitioners of the art: Apollo Robbins, the world's greatest pickpocket; mentalist Max Maven; Magician & Debunker The Amaz!ng Randi (sic); Jamy Ian Swiss; Penn & Teller; Mac King and his bewildering coin-tossing routine; the Great Tomsoni; and many more.
If you're attentive and clever, you'll also learn some of the tricks and be able to duplicate them at home. Once you know how they work, your appreciation of the magician's craft can only deepen. The big bonus happens when you realize that the book is familiarizing you with a very important stranger in your life: your own mind. How is it that you can miss something happening right under your nose? Is your memory reliable? How about your vision? It's all in there. Macknick and Martinez-Conde, pioneers of the new field of neuromagic, have done us a great service by creating a delightfully funny, informative, well-intentioned work that helps us know ourselves a little better.
-- Ali Binazir, M.D., M.Phil., author of "The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible", the highest-rated dating book on Amazon for 157 weeks
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
Top reviews from other countries
A fantastic read full of specifics that really read well.