Research

What brain-bending magic tricks can teach us about the mind

Pick a card, any card, and you might feel that you’re in control when you pull the queen of hearts from a magician’s deck. But magicians have strategies that force their audience’s choice — from packing the deck with identical cards, to fanning out the deck with just the right timing so that the choice becomes all but inevitable.

This illusion of free will is one of the many illusions and magic tricks that Gustav Kuhn, a magician turned psychology researcher at Goldsmiths, University London, describes in his new book Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic. Published in March by The MIT Press, the book explores the ways in which magic tricks and illusions can teach us about our brains. Kuhn takes the reader into the psychological underpinnings of tricks — from optical illusions that reveal gaps in perception, to failures of memory that make people think they’ve seen a ball vanish, when in fact there was no ball to see in the first place.

...During his PhD research studying consciousness, he discovered that magic occupied a realm of psychology that few scientists were really investigating. “I realized that a lot of the questions that psychologists are interested in, magicians have been exploiting for centuries,” he says. “That’s really what started it for me, to try and bridge this gap between magic and science, and trying to use magic as a way of understanding human cognition.”