May 14, 2026 • 20 mins
George Noory and psychologist Dr. Gustav Kuhn explore how magic can be used to understand the human mind, why people are easily deceived by magic tricks, and how the brain processes the illusions that it sees.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Doctor Gustav Kuhn with us. A cognitive psychologist with an
unusual background. Before becoming an academic, he worked as a
semi professional magician, and he now directs the Magic Lab,
which stands for Mind Detention and General Illusionary Cognition at
(00:25):
the University of Plymouth, which is on the southwest coast
of England, where his research uses magic as a powerful
tool for ut covering the secrets of the human mind.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
As one of the.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Leading researchers in the science of magic, doctor Kuhn works
across disciples and disciplines to explore why our minds are
so easily deceived into experiencing events that seem impossible. His
book is called Experiencing the Impossible. His website is linked
up at Coast tocoastam dot com. Doctor Kuhn, Welcome to
(00:56):
the program. Hello, looking for this. How did you get
involved in magic in the first place.
Speaker 4 (01:03):
Well, like quite a lot of magicians, my passion for
magic started as a teenager. I sort of hung out
with a friend and he made an egg appear behind
my ear. I was really blowing I was really blowing
away by it, not just the trick itself, but actually
the method used to perform the illusion. And that's what
really got me hooked into magic. And so from then
(01:25):
on I really pretty much educated for most of my
life to this weird world of deception and illusion.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Tell us what your definition of magic is? So many
magicians have different interpretations. What would yours be?
Speaker 5 (01:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (01:39):
So for me, so magic is really about I'm interested
in psychology. My background is as a psychologist, so I'm
interested in how people experience magic. And for me, magic
I think of it as a conflict, sort of like
between beliefs. It's a conflict between the things that you
experience and the things that you believe to be possible. So,
(02:01):
for example, so you know that rabbits can't appear from hats,
and yet when you experience a magician making a rabbit
appear from a hat, that creates a conflict in our
minds between the things that we believe to be possible
and the things that we've just experienced.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
So you became a magician first and a psychologist later.
How did you mention the two together.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Well.
Speaker 5 (02:24):
As a magician, I was.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
I was really passionate the bat magic and I wanted
to become a professional. Am must have become a professional magician.
But I knew even back then, I knew that in
order for me to perform produce really powerful magic, I
needed to understand how the human mind works, because magic
involves a lot of psychology involves misdirection.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Deception, and so I thought, well, one step.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
To improve in my art would be to learn about
the human mind. And that's what got me interested in
studying psychology at university.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
And how do you equate magic with psychology? Where did
the two mix together?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Well, it's an interesting mix.
Speaker 4 (03:07):
I mean when I I went to university around around
the sort of late nineties, and I was a little
bit disappointed because what I was hoping to learn a
lot of psychology that could help with my magic, and
that wasn't really good case. And it kind of like
most of my professors they had never thought about magic,
(03:27):
and there was no research on magic either. I then
did a PhD in consciousness study and it was sort
of almost three a fluke that I was working with
some academics who were particularly interested in attention. They were
interested in where people look and what they attend to
was they're doing everyday tasks and in the UK, making
(03:50):
a cup of tea is a very everyday task, so
that's what they were interested in. And we thought, well, actually,
what about studying where people look whilst they're being misdirected
by a magician, And so we embarked on the first
ever scientific study on missed direction and that led me
(04:11):
to the realization that actually, magicians have got vast amounts
of experience in manipulating what people see, what they believe,
and a lot of these principles could potentially be of
interest to psychologists. So psychologists they're really interested in perception
and attention. Magicians have hundreds, if not thousands of years
(04:33):
of experience and manipulating people's perception and the tension. And
so that really sparked this idea of not just using
psychology to improve my magic, but actually also using magic
as a way of understanding the human mind. And so
over the last twenty years or more, I've been merging
(04:54):
these two fields to create what is now known as
the science of Magic, which uses magic as a really
powerful tool to understand the human mind.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
And would you say magic is much more than sleight
of hand.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
Yeah, I mean, slight of hand is just one part
of it. Magic is really about psychology. It's about misdirecting
people's attention. So we studied this in the context of misdirection,
but also like the decisions that you make, so principle
that magicians often uses the principle of forcing, so influencing
(05:28):
your decisions. So that's about influencing decision making. And it's
about illusions and beliefs. So even though it slight of hand,
so it's often used in magic to create some of
these illusions, there's a lot more to magic than just
simple sleight of hand.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
How did you begin to use magic in psychology and
what was the reaction of your peers and friends.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Well, we started off, I mean it was a serious
piece of research, but it was quite fun as well.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
So we have these eye trackers.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
These were glasses that we could put onto our participants
and they've got cameras inside the glasses. At the time,
this was still I mean, as I said, this is
sort of like the two thousands. So a lot of
this was done manually as well, and we measured people's
eye movements whilst they were watching a very simple magic trick,
(06:24):
and what we found, which was very surprising, is that
people could be looking so in the magic trick itself,
I just make a lighter and a cigarette disappear. And
the method behind this I just dropped the lighter right
in front of their eyes. I just dropped it into
my lap, and yet most people didn't see it. But
by using science, so by using eye tracking, we established
(06:47):
that people can often look at the lighter and yet
they still don't see it, and so that was.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
Really very surprising.
Speaker 4 (06:54):
People were very surprised by this because we often assume
that if you're looking at something, you should be able
to see it, and yet what this study illustrated that
if your mind is being distracted, you can fail to
see really obvious things. Now, the reception of sort of
like this research I first was sort of it wasn't
taken that seriously. Like I think scientists often quite conservative.
(07:17):
We'd like our paradigms and we stick to these paradigms
and sort of using magic to study visual perception. That
was a really there was a change. It was a
real sort.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Of like a novel way of doing that. And in the.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
Beginning, quite a lot of the scientists felt, oh, yeah,
this is fun, but can it actually tell us anything
more than just be entertaining and engaging. So it elicited
quite a lot of skepticism at first, but I'm sort
of pleased to say that actually kind of like now,
twenty years later, I mean, the scientists magic, I would
still consider it as being a bit of a fringe
(07:52):
science within psychology, but the approach more generally has been
quite widely accepted now.
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Speaker 2 (09:28):
Doctor. What would you call Harry Houdini? Was he merely
an escape artist? Was he a ma digician? An illusionist?
What would you call him?
Speaker 4 (09:37):
Well, he was a bit of everything. I mean, yeah,
he was a great escape artist. I mean there's there's
often there was a lot more behind this. There's a
lot more behind his stunts than meets the eye. So
he was also an amazing illusionist, kind of like giving
this illusion that he could literally escape from every jail.
(10:00):
But of course, kind of like I mean, Houdini, he
had lots of sides to him. He was also sort
of like a big skeptic as well, so he used
a lot of his research on magic and his understanding
of the east by which the mind can be manipulated
to expose a lot of fraudulent psychics as well.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
And he was also a huge publicist as well.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
I mean, I think Houdini was really one of the
first magicians or entertainers who managed to create these huge
public stunts that were great for his publicity. So yeah,
he was I think Houdini encompasses kind of like a
lot of amazing, amazing feats of a modern entertainer.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
When you see a magician do what they do, are
you still baffled by itt?
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (10:47):
Sometimes? I mean it depends. I guess it sort of depends.
I mean, as a magician, you build up a fairly
good understanding of how tricks work, You know what to
look out for, and it often makes it more difficult
to deceive fellow magicians because we understand some of these
deceptive principles, but there's a lot of tricks that still
(11:08):
completely baffle me. And like we have, there's lots of
magic conventions where magicians perform tricks for fellow magicians, and
quite a lot of these tricks are specially designed to
fool magicians. They may bore lay audiences, you may not
find them particularly interesting, but we magicians love them just
(11:29):
because of the sophistication of the deception that is involved,
a novelty of deception, and the fact that we can
be deceived. So I mean, some magicians like being deceived.
Others really just want to know how the trick is done.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
I have one magic trick that I do doctor that
baffles people. And what I use is two small paper
napkins and I have one rolled up and hidden in
my palm on my hand. The other I give to
an individual and say tear this up, please, And they
tear it up in the little pieces, and I say,
roll it into a ball and blow into it, and
(12:04):
they do, and I say open it up but slowly,
and they do and it crumbles, it falls apart. So
then we pick up the pieces intentionally, and I switch
the ball in my hand, which is the napkin that's
not cut up, and I take the other one and
put it back in my palm, and I make the
switch so quickly nobody sees that. I give it to
(12:27):
the individual and say, now do it again, but slower,
and so they puff into the napkin and I say,
now open it up slowly, not fast, and they open
it up and it's a whole napkin and it just
blows their mind. Would that be a great magic trick?
Speaker 4 (12:44):
Yeah, I mean I think that would be a great
I mean the great the greatness of the magic, doesn't it?
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Magic happens in the audience's mind.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
So I guess it's very hard for me to sort
of like to say this is a great trick without
actually knowing how the audience reacts to it.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
So for a member of.
Speaker 4 (13:02):
The audience who is deceived by this would be a
fantastic trick.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
It could be. I mean, you could almost describe it
as a miracle if.
Speaker 4 (13:08):
You don't know how it's done. So I think it is.
I think it is a great trick. I guess the
question is would it fall a fellow magician probably not.
And that's not because they can't be deceived, but because
they would already know the trick, so they would know
what to look out for. So yes, So for for
someone who doesn't know how the trick is done, I
think this would be a fantastic trick and the exactly
(13:30):
sort of More importantly, it would create this cognitive conflict
in their minds, namely, sort of like this conflict between
the things they know that is possible about the world, namely,
a napkin can't just restore itself automatically, and the things
that they've just seen. So in their mind they have
literally seen experience tearing up a napkin, picking it up,
(13:52):
and then it magically restores, it restores in their hands.
So from their perspective, that would be a miracle. Now
take this a step further. They'll go to their friends. Well,
they will recall is actually they will forget all of
the little details. They will they won't recall you switching
(14:12):
that you switching the two balls. They will explain to
their friends, you know what happened is I just tore
up a napkin into little pieces. I took the pieces
into my hand. I swear only I kind of like
touched these pieces, I opened them up, and they magically restored,
and there you go.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
You've got a completely unexplainable miracle.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Does magic play much with the human mind?
Speaker 4 (14:43):
Yeah, I think it's all about the mind. I mean,
all of our experience is really about the mind. I
mean that's sort of so if we think about the
magic trick, like you need to be able to see
the magic trick, so sort of like that's all to
do with visual perception, and we know that.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
Vital per can be highly influenced.
Speaker 4 (15:02):
So as I sort of mentioned in one of these
studies that we sort of that that we investigated before
with the Lighter Trick, attention plays a really important role
in determining what you see. So our perception of the
world is very much determined by what we tend to
rather than what's actually out there. So if you don't
attend to something in the world, you simply won't be
(15:24):
able to perceive it. But it's also got to do
with your memory as well. We can't remember everything because
it just it'd be very inefficient, and so we only
remember past sort of like small fragments of the things
that we've experienced, and even our memories. Like with visual illusions,
they can be high, they're highly malleable, they could be influenced,
(15:47):
and they can change. And so what you remember has
happened that has happened may not necessarily reflect what has
actually happened. And so these are all the type of tools,
sort of the psychologue tricks that magicians manipulate to create
what could, at face value be explained as a magical miracle.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
What does magic tell you, doctor about misdirection and its
ability to play with the human mind.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
I mean, I think sort of like one of the
things that's really powerful about magic is that it just
illustrates the ease by which the human mind can be
influenced and manipulated. Like if we think about this in
terms of visual perception, and as I'm talking to you here,
I've got a computer open in front of me, I
can see lots of things that are going on around me,
(16:38):
and yet sort of like that experience of the world
is an illusion. Like it's a very compelling illusion that
is really very difficult to break because in actual reality
we are far less aware of our surroundings than we
intuitively think. Like, I mean, I can give you kind
of like a really quite an astonishing example. So it's
(17:02):
a little bit difficult. It's a bit difficult to do,
but I guess kind of like if your listeners, I mean,
if everybody kind of like imagines the world around them,
you can have a look around the world. We experience
the world in full detail, like that's the subjective experience
that I have, and yet in reality, most of that
(17:23):
information is really impoverished. So again the little exercise, if
you take your hand and don't do this if you're driving,
by the way, but if you sort of stretch out
your hand and sort of put up your thumb, close
one eye and just look at that thumb. Now, that
thumb now projects onto the back of our retina onto
a very small area known as the favera. It's a
(17:46):
really tiny area, and it turns out that about ninety
percent of all of the visual processing just happens in
that tiny area.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
So what this means is that our.
Speaker 4 (17:58):
Visual system only sees high acuity information from this very
small part of the scene. Everything else would actually be
completely blurred. Not only blurred, it would also be black
and white because we only actually process color information in
this tiny area off the forverar.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Now I find it very hard to imagine that. I can't.
Speaker 4 (18:24):
I studied it, I understand the physiology behind it, but
I just cannot imagine that my peripheral vision is completely
blurred black and white. And that is because my experience
of the world is an illusion. It's really my brain
making stuff up about what's happening in the periphery and
(18:45):
that's what I'm experiencing. So most of what we experience seeing,
So most of our visual perception isn't really just about
what's out there.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
It's very much about what our brain expects to be
out there.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
So of what we see is really just a compelling illusion.
I mean, there's an illusion that we often mistake for reality,
and there's an illusion that is very difficult for us
to abandon. And so what missdirection illustrates is that actually,
given that our experience of the world is an illusion,
it's malible and we can change that. We can manipulate that,
(19:21):
and that's exactly what magicians do.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Are there some people who are easily manipulated with magician
via a sleight of hand or misdirection than others?
Speaker 4 (19:32):
Yeah, I mean again, missdirection is a very complex process.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
I want to guess.
Speaker 4 (19:39):
I mean, one of the one of the challenges as
a magician is always like in order to be actually misdirected,
you need to attend to things like in a magic show.
If you don't pay any attention to what the magician
is doing, they can't missdirect your attention, and that can
happen sometimes. I mean, I've had this experience many times
where I perform a magic trick and then sort of
(20:01):
like someone from the back kind of like shouts out, oh,
I saw that they usually kind of like drunk as well,
and quite often they did actually see it because they
weren't actually paying attention to what I was doing. And
said that meant it was impossible for me to have
actually missed direct them and they potentially would have been
able to spot the secret.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Doctor Gustav Kuhn with us. A cognitive psychologist with an
unusual background. Before becoming an academic, he worked as a
semi professional magician, and he now directs the Magic Lab,
which stands for Mind Detention and General Illusionary Cognition at
(00:25):
the University of Plymouth, which is on the southwest coast
of England, where his research uses magic as a powerful
tool for ut covering the secrets of the human mind.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
As one of the.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Leading researchers in the science of magic, doctor Kuhn works
across disciples and disciplines to explore why our minds are
so easily deceived into experiencing events that seem impossible. His
book is called Experiencing the Impossible. His website is linked
up at Coast tocoastam dot com. Doctor Kuhn, Welcome to
(00:56):
the program. Hello, looking for this. How did you get
involved in magic in the first place.
Speaker 4 (01:03):
Well, like quite a lot of magicians, my passion for
magic started as a teenager. I sort of hung out
with a friend and he made an egg appear behind
my ear. I was really blowing I was really blowing
away by it, not just the trick itself, but actually
the method used to perform the illusion. And that's what
really got me hooked into magic. And so from then
(01:25):
on I really pretty much educated for most of my
life to this weird world of deception and illusion.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Tell us what your definition of magic is? So many
magicians have different interpretations. What would yours be?
Speaker 5 (01:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (01:39):
So for me, so magic is really about I'm interested
in psychology. My background is as a psychologist, so I'm
interested in how people experience magic. And for me, magic
I think of it as a conflict, sort of like
between beliefs. It's a conflict between the things that you
experience and the things that you believe to be possible. So,
(02:01):
for example, so you know that rabbits can't appear from hats,
and yet when you experience a magician making a rabbit
appear from a hat, that creates a conflict in our
minds between the things that we believe to be possible
and the things that we've just experienced.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
So you became a magician first and a psychologist later.
How did you mention the two together.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Well.
Speaker 5 (02:24):
As a magician, I was.
Speaker 4 (02:27):
I was really passionate the bat magic and I wanted
to become a professional. Am must have become a professional magician.
But I knew even back then, I knew that in
order for me to perform produce really powerful magic, I
needed to understand how the human mind works, because magic
involves a lot of psychology involves misdirection.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Deception, and so I thought, well, one step.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
To improve in my art would be to learn about
the human mind. And that's what got me interested in
studying psychology at university.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
And how do you equate magic with psychology? Where did
the two mix together?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Well, it's an interesting mix.
Speaker 4 (03:07):
I mean when I I went to university around around
the sort of late nineties, and I was a little
bit disappointed because what I was hoping to learn a
lot of psychology that could help with my magic, and
that wasn't really good case. And it kind of like
most of my professors they had never thought about magic,
(03:27):
and there was no research on magic either. I then
did a PhD in consciousness study and it was sort
of almost three a fluke that I was working with
some academics who were particularly interested in attention. They were
interested in where people look and what they attend to
was they're doing everyday tasks and in the UK, making
(03:50):
a cup of tea is a very everyday task, so
that's what they were interested in. And we thought, well, actually,
what about studying where people look whilst they're being misdirected
by a magician, And so we embarked on the first
ever scientific study on missed direction and that led me
(04:11):
to the realization that actually, magicians have got vast amounts
of experience in manipulating what people see, what they believe,
and a lot of these principles could potentially be of
interest to psychologists. So psychologists they're really interested in perception
and attention. Magicians have hundreds, if not thousands of years
(04:33):
of experience and manipulating people's perception and the tension. And
so that really sparked this idea of not just using
psychology to improve my magic, but actually also using magic
as a way of understanding the human mind. And so
over the last twenty years or more, I've been merging
(04:54):
these two fields to create what is now known as
the science of Magic, which uses magic as a really
powerful tool to understand the human mind.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
And would you say magic is much more than sleight
of hand.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
Yeah, I mean, slight of hand is just one part
of it. Magic is really about psychology. It's about misdirecting
people's attention. So we studied this in the context of misdirection,
but also like the decisions that you make, so principle
that magicians often uses the principle of forcing, so influencing
(05:28):
your decisions. So that's about influencing decision making. And it's
about illusions and beliefs. So even though it slight of hand,
so it's often used in magic to create some of
these illusions, there's a lot more to magic than just
simple sleight of hand.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
How did you begin to use magic in psychology and
what was the reaction of your peers and friends.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Well, we started off, I mean it was a serious
piece of research, but it was quite fun as well.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
So we have these eye trackers.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
These were glasses that we could put onto our participants
and they've got cameras inside the glasses. At the time,
this was still I mean, as I said, this is
sort of like the two thousands. So a lot of
this was done manually as well, and we measured people's
eye movements whilst they were watching a very simple magic trick,
(06:24):
and what we found, which was very surprising, is that
people could be looking so in the magic trick itself,
I just make a lighter and a cigarette disappear. And
the method behind this I just dropped the lighter right
in front of their eyes. I just dropped it into
my lap, and yet most people didn't see it. But
by using science, so by using eye tracking, we established
(06:47):
that people can often look at the lighter and yet
they still don't see it, and so that was.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
Really very surprising.
Speaker 4 (06:54):
People were very surprised by this because we often assume
that if you're looking at something, you should be able
to see it, and yet what this study illustrated that
if your mind is being distracted, you can fail to
see really obvious things. Now, the reception of sort of
like this research I first was sort of it wasn't
taken that seriously. Like I think scientists often quite conservative.
(07:17):
We'd like our paradigms and we stick to these paradigms
and sort of using magic to study visual perception. That
was a really there was a change. It was a
real sort.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Of like a novel way of doing that. And in the.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
Beginning, quite a lot of the scientists felt, oh, yeah,
this is fun, but can it actually tell us anything
more than just be entertaining and engaging. So it elicited
quite a lot of skepticism at first, but I'm sort
of pleased to say that actually kind of like now,
twenty years later, I mean, the scientists magic, I would
still consider it as being a bit of a fringe
(07:52):
science within psychology, but the approach more generally has been
quite widely accepted now.
Speaker 6 (07:58):
And I know you're going to want some after hearing this.
This is an amazing story.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
We've got Stephen and Malachi Gregory in Nelson, New Zealand.
Speaker 6 (08:05):
I understand that Malachi, who is eight almost nine years
old now, was suffering with not just one or two warts,
but I mean a significant outbreak of warts all over
his body, so significant it impacted his ability to really function.
Speaker 5 (08:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (08:19):
Yeah, he was having trouble even holding a pencil to
right TI's book.
Speaker 5 (08:23):
Actually that got me thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
I'm not surprised.
Speaker 6 (08:26):
It is an amazing immuno modulator, and so I can
see that it would work. And so at what point
did you see that there was actually improvement It's really
going to work.
Speaker 7 (08:36):
Well, look, we really started to notice it around twelve weeks.
You can see these things actually getting smaller and smaller
and then going down to with just a little red marks.
Speaker 5 (08:46):
The whole things are gone. And we're talking about what's
one the size of the wanner. I thought, no way,
that's gonna Wow. That's just been miraculous to see him
get into a pair of shoes.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yes, how wonderful.
Speaker 5 (08:57):
It's great to see him so happy.
Speaker 6 (08:59):
And yes, absolutely wonderful.
Speaker 5 (09:01):
For instead of seen it that is blown away. TI,
this is awesome, Yeah, this is awesome.
Speaker 8 (09:06):
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Speaker 2 (09:28):
Doctor. What would you call Harry Houdini? Was he merely
an escape artist? Was he a ma digician? An illusionist?
What would you call him?
Speaker 4 (09:37):
Well, he was a bit of everything. I mean, yeah,
he was a great escape artist. I mean there's there's
often there was a lot more behind this. There's a
lot more behind his stunts than meets the eye. So
he was also an amazing illusionist, kind of like giving
this illusion that he could literally escape from every jail.
(10:00):
But of course, kind of like I mean, Houdini, he
had lots of sides to him. He was also sort
of like a big skeptic as well, so he used
a lot of his research on magic and his understanding
of the east by which the mind can be manipulated
to expose a lot of fraudulent psychics as well.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
And he was also a huge publicist as well.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
I mean, I think Houdini was really one of the
first magicians or entertainers who managed to create these huge
public stunts that were great for his publicity. So yeah,
he was I think Houdini encompasses kind of like a
lot of amazing, amazing feats of a modern entertainer.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
When you see a magician do what they do, are
you still baffled by itt?
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (10:47):
Sometimes? I mean it depends. I guess it sort of depends.
I mean, as a magician, you build up a fairly
good understanding of how tricks work, You know what to
look out for, and it often makes it more difficult
to deceive fellow magicians because we understand some of these
deceptive principles, but there's a lot of tricks that still
(11:08):
completely baffle me. And like we have, there's lots of
magic conventions where magicians perform tricks for fellow magicians, and
quite a lot of these tricks are specially designed to
fool magicians. They may bore lay audiences, you may not
find them particularly interesting, but we magicians love them just
(11:29):
because of the sophistication of the deception that is involved,
a novelty of deception, and the fact that we can
be deceived. So I mean, some magicians like being deceived.
Others really just want to know how the trick is done.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
I have one magic trick that I do doctor that
baffles people. And what I use is two small paper
napkins and I have one rolled up and hidden in
my palm on my hand. The other I give to
an individual and say tear this up, please, And they
tear it up in the little pieces, and I say,
roll it into a ball and blow into it, and
(12:04):
they do, and I say open it up but slowly,
and they do and it crumbles, it falls apart. So
then we pick up the pieces intentionally, and I switch
the ball in my hand, which is the napkin that's
not cut up, and I take the other one and
put it back in my palm, and I make the
switch so quickly nobody sees that. I give it to
(12:27):
the individual and say, now do it again, but slower,
and so they puff into the napkin and I say,
now open it up slowly, not fast, and they open
it up and it's a whole napkin and it just
blows their mind. Would that be a great magic trick?
Speaker 4 (12:44):
Yeah, I mean I think that would be a great
I mean the great the greatness of the magic, doesn't it?
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Magic happens in the audience's mind.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
So I guess it's very hard for me to sort
of like to say this is a great trick without
actually knowing how the audience reacts to it.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
So for a member of.
Speaker 4 (13:02):
The audience who is deceived by this would be a
fantastic trick.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
It could be. I mean, you could almost describe it
as a miracle if.
Speaker 4 (13:08):
You don't know how it's done. So I think it is.
I think it is a great trick. I guess the
question is would it fall a fellow magician probably not.
And that's not because they can't be deceived, but because
they would already know the trick, so they would know
what to look out for. So yes, So for for
someone who doesn't know how the trick is done, I
think this would be a fantastic trick and the exactly
(13:30):
sort of More importantly, it would create this cognitive conflict
in their minds, namely, sort of like this conflict between
the things they know that is possible about the world, namely,
a napkin can't just restore itself automatically, and the things
that they've just seen. So in their mind they have
literally seen experience tearing up a napkin, picking it up,
(13:52):
and then it magically restores, it restores in their hands.
So from their perspective, that would be a miracle. Now
take this a step further. They'll go to their friends. Well,
they will recall is actually they will forget all of
the little details. They will they won't recall you switching
(14:12):
that you switching the two balls. They will explain to
their friends, you know what happened is I just tore
up a napkin into little pieces. I took the pieces
into my hand. I swear only I kind of like
touched these pieces, I opened them up, and they magically restored,
and there you go.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
You've got a completely unexplainable miracle.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Does magic play much with the human mind?
Speaker 4 (14:43):
Yeah, I think it's all about the mind. I mean,
all of our experience is really about the mind. I
mean that's sort of so if we think about the
magic trick, like you need to be able to see
the magic trick, so sort of like that's all to
do with visual perception, and we know that.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
Vital per can be highly influenced.
Speaker 4 (15:02):
So as I sort of mentioned in one of these
studies that we sort of that that we investigated before
with the Lighter Trick, attention plays a really important role
in determining what you see. So our perception of the
world is very much determined by what we tend to
rather than what's actually out there. So if you don't
attend to something in the world, you simply won't be
(15:24):
able to perceive it. But it's also got to do
with your memory as well. We can't remember everything because
it just it'd be very inefficient, and so we only
remember past sort of like small fragments of the things
that we've experienced, and even our memories. Like with visual illusions,
they can be high, they're highly malleable, they could be influenced,
(15:47):
and they can change. And so what you remember has
happened that has happened may not necessarily reflect what has
actually happened. And so these are all the type of tools,
sort of the psychologue tricks that magicians manipulate to create
what could, at face value be explained as a magical miracle.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
What does magic tell you, doctor about misdirection and its
ability to play with the human mind.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
I mean, I think sort of like one of the
things that's really powerful about magic is that it just
illustrates the ease by which the human mind can be
influenced and manipulated. Like if we think about this in
terms of visual perception, and as I'm talking to you here,
I've got a computer open in front of me, I
can see lots of things that are going on around me,
(16:38):
and yet sort of like that experience of the world
is an illusion. Like it's a very compelling illusion that
is really very difficult to break because in actual reality
we are far less aware of our surroundings than we
intuitively think. Like, I mean, I can give you kind
of like a really quite an astonishing example. So it's
(17:02):
a little bit difficult. It's a bit difficult to do,
but I guess kind of like if your listeners, I mean,
if everybody kind of like imagines the world around them,
you can have a look around the world. We experience
the world in full detail, like that's the subjective experience
that I have, and yet in reality, most of that
(17:23):
information is really impoverished. So again the little exercise, if
you take your hand and don't do this if you're driving,
by the way, but if you sort of stretch out
your hand and sort of put up your thumb, close
one eye and just look at that thumb. Now, that
thumb now projects onto the back of our retina onto
a very small area known as the favera. It's a
(17:46):
really tiny area, and it turns out that about ninety
percent of all of the visual processing just happens in
that tiny area.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
So what this means is that our.
Speaker 4 (17:58):
Visual system only sees high acuity information from this very
small part of the scene. Everything else would actually be
completely blurred. Not only blurred, it would also be black
and white because we only actually process color information in
this tiny area off the forverar.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Now I find it very hard to imagine that. I can't.
Speaker 4 (18:24):
I studied it, I understand the physiology behind it, but
I just cannot imagine that my peripheral vision is completely
blurred black and white. And that is because my experience
of the world is an illusion. It's really my brain
making stuff up about what's happening in the periphery and
(18:45):
that's what I'm experiencing. So most of what we experience seeing,
So most of our visual perception isn't really just about
what's out there.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
It's very much about what our brain expects to be
out there.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
So of what we see is really just a compelling illusion.
I mean, there's an illusion that we often mistake for reality,
and there's an illusion that is very difficult for us
to abandon. And so what missdirection illustrates is that actually,
given that our experience of the world is an illusion,
it's malible and we can change that. We can manipulate that,
(19:21):
and that's exactly what magicians do.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Are there some people who are easily manipulated with magician
via a sleight of hand or misdirection than others?
Speaker 4 (19:32):
Yeah, I mean again, missdirection is a very complex process.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
I want to guess.
Speaker 4 (19:39):
I mean, one of the one of the challenges as
a magician is always like in order to be actually misdirected,
you need to attend to things like in a magic show.
If you don't pay any attention to what the magician
is doing, they can't missdirect your attention, and that can
happen sometimes. I mean, I've had this experience many times
where I perform a magic trick and then sort of
(20:01):
like someone from the back kind of like shouts out, oh,
I saw that they usually kind of like drunk as well,
and quite often they did actually see it because they
weren't actually paying attention to what I was doing. And
said that meant it was impossible for me to have
actually missed direct them and they potentially would have been
able to spot the secret.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
Host
George Noory
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