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A New Magic Roadshow..

A New Magic Roadshow..

A new issue of the Magic Roadshow Journal of Magic has published. For those of you who don’t know, this ‘little’ newsletter is the largest free newsletter in all of magic. This issue is 28 pages and 10,000 words long. Here’s the table of content…

– FINDING EEYORE  – Propless mentalism by Mick Ayres
– Flipper Revisited  –  An Effect of Sorts
– Nick Trost’s Eight Card Brainwave Tutorial
– Eight Card Brainwave tutorial by Juan Fernando
– The Emperor’s New Sleight  –  Advice from Francis Menotti
– Candle To Ball  –  An Effect by Jeff Hobson
– FAIR PLAY –  A Card Effect by Paul Lelekis
– CHILDRENS MAGIC SHOWS  –   David John O Connor
– THE ENGAGING RING  –   David John O Connor
– Tricks Without Names   –  Werner Miller
– How to Learn Magic  – A  PDF  ( Freeware For the Young Magician )
– New book by Professor Solomon: “Lives of the Conjurers, Volume Two.”
– Brian Brushwood Live Video Q&A with Full Circle Magic
– Johnny Thompson  –  Live Q&A with Full Circle Magic
– Banachek  –  Live Video Q&A with Full Circle Magic
– Harry Anderson’s “Hello, Sucker!”  –  Original Showtime Telecast
– Ricky Jay Plays Poker  –  Video
– 121 Easy To Perform Magic Tricks.. Tutorials Ideal For New Magicians
– An Idea For Jay Sankey’s 3 Free Magic Gimmicks –  Gospel Magic Gaff
– Cardini Performing on the First TV Magic Show -1957
– 10 Things No One Tells You About Being A Magician  –  Article
– How to Book Restaurant Gigs –  Audio Interview
–  A Reminder –  Lu Brent’s Exclusive Card Mysteries   –   Free PDF for Roadshow Readers
– Reminder .. A  Flea Market for Magicians
– Blur –  A Great Little Resource
– Free eBooks For Subscribers….

You can read it at:  http://MagicRoadshow.com/164.php

The science behind magic: Study reveals psychology at work during card tricks..

The science behind magic: Study reveals psychology at work during card tricks..

A good magician never reveals his tricks, but that hasn’t stopped Jay Olson from trying to understand the science behind them.

Mr. Olson, 28, a professional magician and graduate student at McGill University, is the lead author of a study that explores the psychological factors that make card tricks work. The goal was to learn how outside factors influence decision-making.

“Magicians usually know the secret, but they don’t know the psychology behind the magic trick,” said Mr. Olson, who is in McGill’s psychiatry program.

For the first part of the study, published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, he performed a card trick on 118 people. The trick is simple: The magician flips through a deck of cards and asks the subject to pick a card, intentionally showing one card for longer than the rest. Read more..

http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/02/11/the-science-behind-magic-study-reveals-psychology-at-work-during-card-tricks/

Pick a card, any card: Researchers show how magicians sway decision-making

Pick a card, any card: Researchers show how magicians sway decision-making

Press Release – University of British Columbia.

Magicians have astonished audiences for centuries by subtly, yet powerfully, influencing their decisions. But there has been little systematic study of the psychological factors that make magic tricks work.

Now, a team of researchers from McGill University and UBC has combined the art of conjuring and the science of psychology to demonstrate how certain contextual factors can sway the decisions people make, even though they may feel that they are choosing freely – a finding with potential implications even for daily decision-making.

“We began with a principle of magic that we didn’t fully understand: how magicians influence audiences to choose a particular card without their awareness,” explains Jay Olson, lead author of a new study published in Consciousness and Cognition. “We found that people tend to choose options that are more salient or attention-grabbing, but they don’t know why they chose them,” says Olson, a graduate student in psychiatry in McGill University’s Raz Lab, which investigates psychological phenomena such as attention and consciousness.

The research was conducted in two stages. In the first, Olson (who is also a professional magician) approached 118 people on streets and university campuses and asked them to choose a card by glancing at one as he flipped through a deck of playing cards. The entire riffle took around half a second, but Olson used a technique to make one of the cards – the “target card” – more prominent than the rest. Some 98% of participants chose the target card; but nine in 10 reported feeling they had a free choice. Many concocted explanations for their decisions: one, for example, claimed she chose the target card (the 10 of Hearts) because “hearts are a common symbol and the red stood out.”

In the second stage, the researchers created a simple computer-based version of the riffle by presenting a series of 26 images of cards sequentially on a screen. Researchers asked participants to silently choose a card, then enter it after each of 28 different trials. Overall, participants chose the target card on 30% of the trials. Although “reasonably high” this rate was much lower than in the first study, “possibly because many of the social and situational factors central to magic tricks were absent” from the conventional laboratory conditions in which this stage was carried out, says co-author Ronald Rensink, a professor of psychology and computer science at the University of British Columbia. In a magic performance, for instance, spectators may be influenced by the personality of the magician, expectations created by the setup, and pressure to choose a card quickly, he notes.

“Magic provides an unusual lens to examine and unravel behaviour and the processing of higher brain functions,” says co-author Amir Raz, who is a former professional magician and holds the Canada Research Chair in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention in McGill’s Faculty of Medicine. “This study joins a nascent wave of experiments that binds the magical arts to the principles of psychological and neural sciences. Such a marriage has the potential to elucidate fundamental aspects of behavioural science as well as advance the art of conjuring.”

Vancouver magician Alym Amlani, an accounting instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, B.C., also contributed to the study.

Funding for the research was provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

“Influencing Choice Without Awareness,” Jay A. Olson et al, Consciousness and Cognition, published online Feb. 5, 2015. DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2015.01.004

– See more at: http://www.noodls.com/view/FAC18B6C29CC2C8DEB79E1A36809C655D08F5366?9801xxx1423159869#sthash.Re9C0EHX.dpuf

Does illusionist David Blaine have a death wish? “I have another decade . . . before something goes wrong”

Does illusionist David Blaine have a death wish? “I have another decade . . . before something goes wrong”

Extensive article by Cole Moreton for the Telegraph..

LONDON — The first time I meet David Blaine, he is weird. Really weird. Zoned out, distracted or high on something, I can’t tell. It’s a private dinner in an upstairs room at a London hotel and he enters without small talk. Dressed all in black with a black baseball cap, the American illusionist is big, bulky and intimidating.

His eyes are droopy but his gaze wanders the room constantly, until he has something he really wants you to know, when he stares at you like the snake in the Jungle Book. “I’m going to try something new,” he says quietly, in a New York hipster drawl. “Would you like to see it?” Of course. We expect to be astonished. So a card goes missing and is found under a wristwatch. Another is chosen at random and its suit and number appear written on the side of a pen. He makes a pack vanish from under our noses, by riffling it in one hand.

People gasp and wow and ask, “How do you do that?” As if he was ever going to say. Some of these tricks are familiar to those who know magic, but the execution is breathtaking. Blaine practises with the cards for eight hours at a time and astonishes people every day of his life. He seems to find it easier than talking to them….

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