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..