Why do magic tricks fool us?
That question has fascinated magicians for centuries. Today, it is also at the heart of neuromagic – the scientific study of how magic exploits attention, perception, memory and expectation.
Neuromagic brings together the practical knowledge of magicians with research into attention, vision, memory, expectation and decision-making.
For magicians, the obvious question is usually “How did you do that?” Neuroscience asks a more interesting question:
“Why was I able to fool you in the first place?”
Understanding the answer can tell us something fascinating about how our minds work – and the lessons extend well beyond the world of magic.
Your brain doesn’t see everything
One of the fundamental principles behind magic is that our brains don’t process every detail of our surroundings equally.
Our attention is selective. We focus on what seems important and allow other information to fade into the background.
This is essential for navigating the world. Imagine trying to process every leaf on every tree, every sound in the street and every movement in your peripheral vision simultaneously. We’d quickly become overwhelmed.
Instead, the brain constantly makes predictions about what is likely to happen and fills in gaps using our previous experience and assumptions.
For a magician, these tendencies create opportunities.
The magician doesn’t necessarily have to hide something completely. Often, they simply have to make the audience look in the wrong place, expect the wrong thing or overlook something that is happening in plain sight.
Breaking our assumptions about cause and effect
Much of our perception is based on expectations about cause and effect.
If we throw a ball into the air, we don’t consciously track every tiny stage of its movement. We already know what is going to happen. Our brains use that knowledge to make sense of what we see.
Magic exploits these expectations.
A magician can perform an apparently ordinary action and allow the audience to automatically assume what happened next. The crucial secret action can take place during the moment when the audience’s attention is elsewhere — not necessarily because they weren’t looking, but because they weren’t processing what they saw in the way the magician wanted.
This is one reason magic can be so revealing. By deliberately manipulating perception, magicians can expose some of the assumptions our brains normally make without us noticing.
Even the way a magician moves matters
Research involving magician Apollo Robbins demonstrated just how subtle these effects can be.
Researchers studied how people respond to different types of hand movement during a magic trick. They found that straight and curved movements influenced where spectators directed their attention in different ways. Curved movements tended to keep attention following the trajectory of the hand, while straight movements encouraged attention to shift between the beginning and end points.
In other words, the shape of a magician’s movement can influence what the audience notices.
This is a remarkable example of how the techniques magicians have developed through centuries of practical experience can provide useful questions for scientists to investigate.
Magic can reveal how confident we are – even when we’re wrong
Another fascinating area of research concerns our ability to explain what we have seen.
Researchers have used magic tricks to study how children and adults interpret events that appear impossible. In one study, participants watched a magician make a pen disappear and were asked to explain how it had happened.
Very few people identified the actual method. More strikingly, many participants were confident in explanations that were completely wrong.
That is an important insight into human perception: being confident about what we think happened doesn’t necessarily mean that our explanation is accurate.
Magicians encounter this phenomenon all the time.
Someone can watch a trick from only a few feet away and be absolutely certain they know what happened – while having completely missed the method.
That isn’t because they’re unintelligent. It’s because perception is an interpretation of the world, rather than a perfect recording of it.
What can neuromagic teach us outside magic?
This is where the subject becomes particularly interesting.
The principles behind magic – attention, expectation, memory, perception and misdirection – are relevant to many aspects of everyday life.
We are constantly making decisions based on incomplete information. We notice some things and miss others. We form impressions quickly. We can become convinced that we remember something accurately when our memory has actually filled in the gaps.
Understanding how easily our attention and perception can be influenced can make us a little more sceptical about our own certainty.
It can also help us think differently about communication, advertising, negotiation and relationships.
The book Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions, by neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde with science writer Sandra Blakeslee, explores this fascinating territory in depth.
The authors worked with some of the world’s leading magicians to investigate how magic manipulates attention, perception, memory and belief, and how those principles relate to everyday behaviour.
It’s one of the books I would recommend to anyone interested in the relationship between magic and the mind.
Learning magic can have benefits too
The relationship between magic and psychology isn’t only about watching magic.
There has also been research into what happens when people learn magic.
Studies have explored the potential benefits of learning magic for children, including motor skills, social interaction, confidence and creativity. One study involving children with disabilities found increases in self-esteem and self-confidence after participants were taught magic tricks and given time to practise and perform them.
More recent research has also explored whether learning magic can encourage divergent thinking and creativity. A study involving 10- and 11-year-old children found that a magic-based activity produced improvements in measures of divergent thinking, although the researchers also noted that the effect did not persist when they tested participants again several weeks later.
There is something intuitive about this.
Learning a magic trick requires concentration, practice and coordination. But eventually you have to perform it for another person. You have to understand how they are likely to perceive what you’re doing, communicate clearly and respond to their reactions.
Magic is therefore both a technical skill and a social one.
Why I find neuromagic so fascinating
One of the things I love about magic is that it sits somewhere between art and science.
The magician is interested in creating an experience. The scientist is interested in understanding why that experience works.
Put the two together and magic becomes a fascinating way of exploring the human mind.
A good magic trick doesn’t simply demonstrate that someone has clever fingers. It reveals something about the person watching it.
It shows us that we don’t see everything. That our attention is limited. That our expectations influence what we perceive. That our memories aren’t perfect. And that we can sometimes be remarkably confident about things we have completely misunderstood.
Perhaps that’s one of the most valuable things magic can teach us:
We shouldn’t always trust our first impression of what we see.
And that’s a lesson that is useful far beyond the magic table.
Further reading
Sleights of Mind by Stephen Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde and Sandra Blakeslee is an excellent introduction to the neuroscience of magic and its implications for everyday life.
