Welcome to Week 1! This week Jeanette explores the science of magic during her first week as artist in residence. Register now to experience Pretext, her interactive virtual performance, Wednesday, July 8 on Zoom, and tune into Instagram Live Friday, July 10 (no registration required) for her first Coffee Chat, a conversation with neuroscientist and professor Stephen Macknik. Please enjoy her first blog post and the treasure trove of resources she's shared to explore this topic along with her.
You are Reading This Sentence
Blog post by Jeanette Andrews
Part I
You are reading this sentence.
Even the simplest experiences are woven together using an incredibly thin, fragile perceptual strand.
You are reading this sentence on a screen.
This screen has upwards of 1,000,000 pixels (dependent on your device, but it is typically more).
Your eyes move at an average rate of 4 times per second to capture the variance of light emitted from the screen in order to read. (This is 225 - 275 milliseconds per eye movement a.k.a. saccade.) 1
This article has 6,227 individual symbols/characters.
The left parietal cortex area of the brain helps to process these images as letters. 2
The ventral occipitotemporal cortex helps to transform this into language with meaning. 3
Neurons are transmitting that information within your brain.
You have over 86 BILLION neurons. 4
And on, and on, and on…..
Even all of this is a mere fraction of what is at play in this incredibly complex process.
It is dynamic.
It is shifting.
It is, to me, truly magical.
P.S. I know this process may not be the same for everyone. Perhaps you are using a text to speech app to listen to the words, perhaps you are learning English and are translating as you read, or are experiencing the other infinite number of variables in this example.
Part II
You are reading this sentence.
At any given moment, there are infinite processes occurring to constitute your experience.
This creates perceptual overload. Your brain must take shortcuts to process this extreme amount of information. Magic, as a form, takes advantage of one, or several of these perceptual shortcuts in order to create and execute techniques to create otherwise impossible seeming effects. Magic attempts to dive deeply into every single aspect that makes up a moment of our realities to, in essence, hack them.
There has been a recent uptick in both the scientific study of magic itself and the utilization of magic as a research tool. The relationship has a long history. In the late 1800’s we see some of the early formal studies of magic, both in science and psychology. French psychologist Alfred Binet published a study in 1896 titled, “The Psychology of Prestidigitation" in which he utilized chronophotography to study the perception of magic when viewed in slow motion / piecemeal images. It is noted in Scientific study of magic: Binet's pioneering approach based on observations and chronophotography that, “Binet thought he could "break down" his magicians' movements as they performed their tricks, in order to show that the illusions would disappear when the movements were shown in slow motion. [....] By studying the psychology of magic from the scientific standpoint, Binet (1894c) was able to unveil a number of psychological processes mastered by magicians but little known to psychology at the time (e.g., misdirection of attention, perceptual anticipation).” 5 Shortly thereafter, Norman Triplett published “The Psychology of Conjuring Deceptions” in 1900. 6 He sought to explore the “Psychological Justification of the Rules and Practices of the Conjurer, treated under, Attention, Perception, Suggestion and Association.” One hundred years later, this would give rise to the exciting work of The Macknik Lab 7, including their pioneering work on attention, awareness, and eye movements as they pertain to magic. Their 2008 publication “Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research” in Nature Reviews Neuroscience 8 proved to be one of the first major publications drawing this connection in contemporary neuroscience. The piece points out that the techniques utilized by magicians are of particular interest to neuroscientists, as they can explore the “underpinnings of cognition, memory, sensation, social attachment, causal inference and awareness. Among these devices, we would like to emphasize the use of misdirection as a means to generate cognitive illusions such as inattentional blindness, change blindness, memory illusions and illusory correlations. [...] We propose therefore that magical techniques that manipulate attention and awareness can 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.” This laid the groundwork for some of their most interesting research, including the possible use of neuroscientific study in order to develop illusions for the military 10, and “Stronger misdirection in curved than in straight motion,” which could have large implications for performance, sports, and marketing.11
Psychological study has had similar interests in the study of magic. In “The Psychology of Magic and the Magic of Psychology” 9 notes this study may “uncover novel cognitive mechanisms. Some classical magic effects provide intriguing insights into perceptual processes such as [...] the way in which we anticipate dynamic events.” Both neuroscience and psychology are fascinated with magician’s use of the gaze. In the study “Blinded by magic: eye-movements reveal the misdirection of attention,” 13 Dr. Tony Barnhart, examines a magic effect whereby a coin vanishes from under a cup and reappears under another cup. However, the coin is just visibly moved across the table in full view of the spectators. So even in this outrageously bold/ extreme example spectators, viewers generally did not perceive the coin literally moving across a table before their eyes. Why? Because numerous other pieces of information within the scene seemed far more important. Therefore, it is of extreme importance to magicians to guide viewer’s both psychological and visual movements. (In fact, you possess the highest resolution of visual acuity in only “1.25 degrees of visual angle” 12 Therefore you are only ‘seeing’ things in sharp focus in an area approximately the size of your thumbnail at arm’s length.)
This takes us back to Part I.
What can studying the science of magic teach neuroscientists and psychologists about the mind? What can studying the science of magic teach magicians about the nature of magic itself? And what can studying the science of magic teach all of us about our own perceptions, expectations, assumptions, and bodies as we interact with the world around us?
Related Resources
Many research articles noted here can be accessed using the Arlington Heights Memorial Library’s research databases. For further reading please visit my selections from the AHML collection found at ahml.info/residency, as well as:
Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic by Gustav Kuhn
Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions by Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde
Order both at your local bookseller. I recommend Semicolon, a Black-Woman owned bookstore & gallery space in Chicago.
SOURCES
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Eye Movements in Reading and Information Processing: 20 Years of Research Keith Rayner ~ University of Massachusetts (Approximate Mean Fixation Duration and Saccade Length in Reading, Visual Search, Scene Perception)
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Manuel Carreiras, Ileana Quiñones, Juan Andrés Hernández-Cabrera, Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, Orthographic Coding: Brain Activation for Letters, Symbols, and Digits, Cerebral Cortex, Volume 25, Issue 12, December 2015, Pages 4748–4760
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Mapping visual symbols onto spoken language along the ventral visual stream J. S. H. Taylor, Matthew H. Davis, and Kathleen Rastle
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Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. “The human brain in numbers: a linearly scaled-up primate brain.” Frontiers in human neuroscience vol. 3 31. 9 Nov. 2009, doi:10.3389/neuro.09.031.2009
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Thomas, Cyril, et al. "Scientific study of magic: Binet's pioneering approach based on observations and chronophotography." American Journal of Psychology, vol. 129, no. 3, Fall 2016, p. 313+. Gale General OneFile, Accessed 23 June 2020
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The Psychology of Conjuring Deceptions Author(s): Norman Triplett Source: The American Journal of Psychology , Jul., 1900, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Jul., 1900), pp. 439-510 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable
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Macknik, S., King, M., Randi, J. et al. Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research. Nat Rev Neurosci 9, 871–879 (2008).
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Editorial: The Psychology of Magic and the Magic of Psychology Gustav Kuhn, Jay A. Olson and Amir Raz, Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Psychiatry Department, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
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Battlefield Deceptions Macknik SL, Martinez-Conde S (2017) Scientific American mind; 28(2):18-19
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Stronger misdirection in curved than in straight motion. Jorge Otero-Millan, Stephen L. Macknik, Apollo Robbins, Michael McCamy and Susana Martinez-Conde. Front. Hum. Neurosci., 21 November 2011 https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2011.00133 Front. Psychol., 16 September 2016 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01358
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Costela FM, McCamy MB, Macknik SL, Otero-Millan J, Martinez-Conde S. 2013. Microsaccades restore the visibility of minute foveal targets. PeerJ 1:
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Blinded by magic: eye-movements reveal the misdirection of attention. Anthony S. Barnhart and Stephen D. Goldinger. Front. Psychol., 17 December 2014