Question 1

Hi, what are some of the main traps the brain falls into in relation perception, misdirection and illusion?

Gustav Kuhn · Accepted Answer

Magic relies on exploiting lots of surprising cognitive limitations.  In terms of perceptual misdirection, the main trap lies in overestimating the amount that you see.  We typically feel as if we accurately perceive the world in full detail.  This conscious experience is an illusion, and psychological research shows that we are blind to most of the things that are going on around us. However, we are oblivious to this blindness.  It’s this blindness that lies at the heart of attentional misdirection, one of the most powerful tools in the magician’s psychological arsenal.

Question 2

What happens to our brain when watching something that should be impossible?

Gustav Kuhn · Accepted Answer

Magic allows us to experience things that we believe to be impossible, and in doing so it elicits a wide range of emotions.  However, at the core of this experience lies a cognitive conflict between the things we believe to be possible (e.g., rabbits cannot simply materialize from nowhere) and the things that we have experienced (e.g., a rabbit has mysteriously appeared from a hat).  We have conducted studies in which we scan people’s brains whilst they watch magic tricks to find out what happens inside their brains whilst they experience such magical effects.  These studies showed that magic activates areas of the brain that are typically associated with other forms of cognitive conflict – the anterior cingulate cortex and the left dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex.

Question 3

How can we help patients understand that sensory information is filtered through our assumptions and beliefs and that our brain truly does create our reality?

Gustav Kuhn · Accepted Answer

It is virtually impossible for us to grasp the full extent to which our conscious experience is decoupled from reality. Magic provides a powerful tool to highlight the ease by which you can manipulate people’s conscious experiences, and it highlights some of the mismatches between reality and our conscious experience.  However, even as someone who spends most of his time studying these illusions, I still struggle to appreciate how my internal brain processes filter and manicure my own personal sense of reality.

Question 4

Does exposure to magic tricks alter the human mind? ie. is it good for people to experience magic?

Gustav Kuhn · Accepted Answer

Magic pushes the boundaries of what we believe to be possible, and this can affect our thoughts and beliefs.  For example, it’s been shown that children who watch short video clips of the Harry Potter movie that contain magical content become more creative.  We are conducting similar studies on adults, and I believe that adding more magic to our lives can have a positive impact on all of us.  However, magic often relies on deception and misinformation, which can also have a detrimental impact on what we believe to be possible.

Question 5

Does the scientific study of magic support the idea that we don't have as much free will as we think that we do?

Gustav Kuhn · Accepted Answer

Magicians have developed powerful techniques that allow them to covertly manipulate the choices you make.  For example, in a typical card trick, you may feel as if you were in control of picking any playing card when in reality the magician had full control over the card that you would select.  In the MAGIC lab (https://www.magicresearchlab.com/publications), we have been studying many of these forcing techniques, and they illustrate the ease by which you can unconsciously manipulate the decisions people make.  These findings coincide with much of the recent psychological and neuroscientific research that suggests that the sense of free will we feel when we make a decision may be an illusion (https://www.magicresearchlab.com/mindcontrol).

Question 6

Are there any resources for using magic techniques as therapeutic tools in therapy with children?

Gustav Kuhn · Accepted Answer

Magic is now often used as a therapeutic tool to help children’s physical and mental wellbeing.  For example, BREATHE magic is an organisation that trains children with hemiplegia, a condition that causes strong stiffness and weaknesses in one side of their body to perform magic tricks, to perform sleight of hand as a form of physiotherapy.  Others have used magic to enhance people's mental wellbeing, and we have recently reviewed many of these approaches in an article written for the WHO (https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/331580/php-6-1-155-171-eng.pdf).

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