How Magic Routines Trick The Brain..
Magic is about misdirection and sleight-of-hand. Magicians twirl the fingers of one hand to distract you as they flick it away with the other. Or, on a larger scale, they distract you with a curtain and lights to make the Statue of Liberty seem to disappear.
In the past decade, researchers have begun devoting serious study to explaining how these routines trick our brains. And some of them are now stripping magic tricks down to their bare essentials, to isolate and describe how they “hack” the very mental processes that help us understand the world.
In new research published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, a group of psychologists recruited 420 participants to watch several short, silent videos on their computers and report on what they saw. Read more…