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Art and Science Team Up To Steal Your Attention With Magic..

Art and Science Team Up To Steal Your Attention With Magic..

 By Susana Martinez-Conde for Scientific American

When we focus our attention, we sometimes fail to detect changes–even spectacular, seemingly impossible-to-miss changes—that have taken place right in front of us. Cognitive scientists call this “change blindness”.

Change blindness is so prevalent in our perception that Hollywood movie producers often employ a continuity editor: someone whose job is to make sure that impossible things don’t accidentally occur during and between scenes, due to the editing process..

This is not so different from what happens in your brain when card tricks fool you. Whenever you pay attention to something, your brain automatically and powerfully suppresses other information that is not relevant to the task. Magicians don’t distract us in a literal sense, but create attentional points that our perceptual and cognitive systems are helplessly drawn to…

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Technology Is An Engineered Illusion, MIT’s Digital Magician Marco Tempest Says..

Technology Is An Engineered Illusion, MIT’s Digital Magician Marco Tempest Says..

“There’s a lot of similarity between the world of interactive computing and magic. To me, the world of interactive computers is a kind of an engineered illusion. We swipe on screens. We have things which feel like books, but they’re not books. We want them to be books.”

I met digital magician Marco Tempest some weeks ago, after a show he gave at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna. He was soft spoken and kind, much different from the smart and all-but-shy entertainer I had the pleasure to see at work just an hour before.

Watching him on stage was a bit like turning back time and being a child again, the awe and wonder of age not yet corrupted by life experience. Being first of all a scientist at the MIT’s Media Lab, the magic he practices is of course a strange one: it has more to do with smartphones, LEDs, algorithms and motion templates than with Harry Potter style magic wands.

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What a Magician Carries in His Travel Bag..

What a Magician Carries in His Travel Bag..

By Hilary Potkewitz for The Wall Street Journalimage

Back in his hotel room after every performance, Ryan Oakes methodically goes through all his pockets and lays everything out on the bed, taking inventory.

The ritual takes a while. Mr. Oakes is a professional magician who has his suits custom-made with extra pockets—10 in all. He performs at corporate events and parties. He might mingle in the crowd doing card tricks, mind games and lighting the occasional $100 bill on fire. He has an hour-long stage show that incorporates magic and mentalism.

Mr. Oakes, 36, has performed for Fortune 500 companies like TD Bank, the Ritz Carlton and Google, and at executives’ private homes, including Paul Tudor Jones of Tudor Investments and Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group. He is based in New York City but is on the road seven to 10 days a month.

He needs to pack strategically. “Many of the items I carry will get flagged by TSA, not because they’re dangerous, but because they look funny,”….

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Exclusive: A New Carbonaro Effect..

Exclusive: A New Carbonaro Effect..

The Carbonaro Effect – Thursday 11/20 @ 10/9c: Michael Carbonaro is at it again, this time surprising an unsuspecting hardware store customer looking to exchange a previous purchase. In this outrageous trick, Michael miraculously transforms two extension cords into one leaving the customer to exclaim “I’m not crazy!” Check it out below:

 https://www.youtube.com/embed/q0MUCWAK39Y?list=UUb0xfM3HGOsqPYNAocXXNAQ