The magician snaps his fingers and a ball disappears right in front of your eyes. How is this possible, you ask yourself? You have a pretty good understanding of how objects behave and you know from experience that objects cannot simply disappear into thin air, yet this is exactly what you see. Magic is one of the oldest art forms and since written records began, magicians have baffled and amazed their audiences by creating illusions of the impossible. While most of their tricks remain precious secrets, scientists, myself among them, have started studying magic to gain insights into how and why our minds are so easily deceived.
Magic allows you to experience the impossible. It creates a conflict between the things you think can happen and the things that you experience. While some magicians would like you to believe that they possess real magical powers, the true secret behind magic lies in clever psychological techniques that exploit limitations in the way our brains work. Many of these limitations are very counter-intuitive which is why we can experience the magical wonder of the impossible.
How? Let’s start with the basics. Vision is our most trusted sense, and influences many of our thoughts and behaviors. In fact, vision is so important that we often don’t believe things until we see them with our own eyes. But it turns out that our visual experiences are far less reliable than we intuitively think. It’s relatively easy to distort your perceptual experience and these distortions become very apparent when we look at visual illusion.
