Stephen Macknik,Susana Martinez-Conde – Sleights of Mind What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions

Stephen Macknik,Susana Martinez-Conde – Sleights of Mind What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions

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Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday DeceptionsStephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, the founders of the exciting new discipline of neuromagic, have convinced some of the world’s greatest magicians to allow scientists to study their techniques for tricking the brain. The implications of neuromagic go beyond illuminating our behavior; early research points to new approaches for everything from the diagnosis of autism to marketing techniques and education. Fun and accessible, Sleights of Mind is “a tour through consciousness, attention, and deception via the marriage of professional magic and cognitive neuroscience” (Vanessa Schipani, The Scientist). Editorial ReviewsReview”Sleights of Mind makes brain science so much fun, you’ll swear the authors are as clever as Houdini.”—Scientific American Book Club”Magic is the place where our senses and beliefs fail us in magnificent ways. In this exciting book Stephen, Susana, and Sandra explore what magic and illusions can teach us about our fallible human nature—coming up with novel and fascinating observations.”—Dan Ariely, author of Predictability Irrational”Steve and Susana are two of the most innovative scientists I know. They aren’t content to just conduct elegant experiments (although they do plenty of those, too). Instead, they’re determined to explore those places where neuroscience intersects the mysterious and the magical, from visual illusions to Vegas card tricks. This book doesn’t just change the way you think about sleight of hand and David Copperfield – it will also change the way you think about the mind.”—Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide and Proust Was A Neuroscientist.”I’ve long wished that there was a book that explained the art of magic from the point of view of cognitive neuroscience. Magic is a goldmine of information about the brain, as well as a source of fascination to laypeople. This is the book we’ve all been waiting for.”—Steven Pinker PhD, author of The Stuff of Thought”This is a highly original book. Science and magic have much in common. They both take seemingly inexplicable events and provide elegantly simple answers that enthrall the observer. The authors have done an admirable job in exploring this idea and also suggest ways in which the two disciplines can cross fertilize each other.”—VS Ramachandran MD PhD, author of Phantoms in the Brain”Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde’s Sleights of Mind gives non-magicians a real up-close look at the true secrets of magic. They are revealing the real knowledge jealously guarded by all great performers…I know my fellow magicians are all going to be as jazzed as I am to read about how sophisticated magical techniques and state-of-the-art brain science combine.”—Mac King, headliner, Harrah’s Las Vegas”In Sleights of Mind, authors Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde persistently remind us that the human mind is a bad data-taking device. And it’s this fact that enables the science of magic to exist at all.”—Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of The Pluto Files”The authors make easily comprehensible the effects of neural adaptation, afterimages, occlusion, perspective, saccades, inattentional blindness, expectations and the pliability of memory…Entertaining.”–Kirkus”In their illuminating book, brain experts Martinez-Conde and Macknik make their case that magicians are some of the most skilled neuroscientists around…By tricking readers into having fun learning neuroscience, the authors bring the newly minted field of “neuromagic” to center stage.”–Laura Sanders, Science News”This book offers ‘a revolutionary look a the science behind magic–what leads the mind to believe tricks are real and how magicians actually use the brain’s own logic to acheive this.'”–Phillip Manning, Science Book News”If you want to learn more about “neuromagic,” take a peek at Macknik and Martinez-Conde’s most recent book. It explains how they’ve investigated the tricks of some of the world’s greatest magicians to find out how the brain works in everyday situations. It’s a great read whether you’re passionate about brain science, magic, or both!”–Odyssey Magazine (Editor’s Choice)About the AuthorStephen L. Macknik, Ph.D., is Director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. Susana Martinez-Conde, Ph.D., is Director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at BNI. Sandra Blakeslee is a regular contributor to “Science Times” at The New York Times who specializes in the brain sciences, and the author of several books.Most Helpful Customer ReviewsNow You See It!*****By R. Hardy HALL OF FAME TOP 500 REVIEWER on December 16, 2010Format: HardcoverIt is hard not to pay attention to optical illusions, and wonder how can it be that one line is _not_ really longer than the other or one circle is _not_ really darker than the other or all the other varieties that tell us our eyes lie to us. It was only a few decades ago that neuroscientists realized that the mistakes in visual processing were tools to examine how the eyes and brain process information. (It was also a reminder of the wonderful and mysterious lesson that our brains do not make perfect inner models of reality, but only use the tricks and shortcuts descended from their evolution to make useful, rather than exact, models.) In a way, magicians perform optical illusions and even behavioral illusions. You enjoy a magician’s performance because although it looks as if he makes coins manifest from the air or makes a ball vanish when he throws it up, you know that such things cannot really be and yet you cannot figure out how the impression the magician makes is so strong. If we can get neurological understanding of the visual system from optical illusions, perhaps the illusions performed by magicians would offer an even broader range of tools to evaluate brain function. This was the insight of Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde. They are both directors of neuroscience labs and they are married. Because they had done research on visual illusions, they hosted a conference in 2005 in Las Vegas, and were reminded that it was headquarters for some of the best magicians in the world. They got the insight that magic could be studied to gain understanding of perception and even consciousness. They even became certified magicians. You might not be able to get through any of their scientific papers on the subject, but here (written with Sandra Blakeslee) is _Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions_ (Henry Holt), a delightful and illuminating book about how magicians in many ways take advantage of our brains’ imperfect modeling of reality and what this tells us about how the brains work.The immediate attraction to this book for many people will be that it gives magic secrets away. The authors have conscientiously marked all such explanations with a “Spoiler alert,” so that if you still want to be baffled you can skip the explanation. Of course you will be missing all the fun and insight, and it is hard to imagine anyone that would resist looking at the spoilers. Even more important is that knowing the trick doesn’t make it any less of a trick; the authors still go to magic shows and still are fooled. The hardwired processes of paying attention cannot be overcome, but they can be hacked, and this is what magicians do. A magician who produces a live dove, for instance, knows that you cannot help but pay attention to the flapping of the dove. While the spotlight of that attention is on the dove, who knows what might be manipulated outside the spotlight? The authors describe with good humor and charm their attempts to become full-fledged performing magicians, and the difficulties involved. Skill with the hands is important, but not as important as you might think. “Pulling off these simple sleights requires about as much dexterity as you need when learning how to shuffle a deck of cards for the first time.” The reason that a magician can so easily take your attention away from the mechanics of the trick is that we are so bad at multitasking. There has been a decade of research on multitasking, long before the authors got interested in magic. Multitaskers just don’t get all the tasks done as well as those who are doing one thing at a time. Those who couple the task of driving with the task of talking on a cell phone, even if the phone is hands-free, are able to pay as little attention to the road as drunks do. There are wonderful examples in the book of magicians (or psychologists doing experiments) who do such things as literally riding around on a unicycle in a clown suit without being noticed because attention is elsewhere. Remember, too, that a good patter is not just the mark of a smooth performance; the magician who tells jokes, witty or corny, is counting on your mind to be occupied with the humor so that it can’t do much else.The authors have no concern that pushing scientific investigation of magical feats will make them any less magical, any more than Copernicus diminished the beauties of sunsets. In fact, they are doing what magicians have been doing all along: “Magicians basically do cognitive science experiments for audiences all night long, and they may be even more effective than we scientists are in the lab.” And it may well be that armed with better understanding of how magic works, the authors can improve the effectiveness of their own tricks and those of other magicians. Their book reads well as a summary of a personal quest for scientific and magical understanding, and one of the best things about it is that it refers repeatedly to their website where you can see the specific magic effects themselves. Their book is a delightful tour of magic techniques; but in showing the techniques this way, abracadabra, the authors have induced the reader to learn some serious neuroscience as well.

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