How magicians exploit the natural functioning of our brains to astonish and amaze us How do magicians make us see the impossible? The Illusionist Brain takes you on an unforgettable journey through the inner workings of the human mind, revealing how magicians achieve their spectacular and seemingly impossible effects by interfering with your cognitive processes. Along the way, this lively and informative book provides a guided tour of modern neuroscience, using magic as a lens for understanding the unconscious and automatic functioning of our brains. We construct reality from the information stored in our memories and received through our senses, and our brains are remarkably adept at tricking us into believing that our experience is continuous. In fact, our minds create our perception of reality by elaborating meanings and continuities from incomplete information, and while this strategy carries clear benefits for survival, it comes with blind spots that magicians know how to exploit. Jordi Camí and Luis Martínez explore the many different ways illusionists manipulate our attention—making us look but not see—and take advantage of our individual predispositions and fragile memories. The Illusionist Brain draws on the latest findings in neuroscience to explain how magic deceives us, surprises us, and amazes us, and demonstrates how illusionists skillfully “hack” our brains to alter how we perceive things and influence what we imagine.

The Anatomy of Misdirection is a complete guide for both amateur and professional magicians. Fifteen basic principles of misdirection are defined in the book. These principles are presented in an easy to read, conversational manner. The reader is guided step-by-step through each principle learning both how-to and when-to apply the various techniques. Many illustrations are included with each principle to demonstrate its use with a practical example. The 35th Anniversary Edition is a revised and updated edition of the book which was published in 1978. The book was widely acclaimed by the magic community and received accolades from around the world. This edition contains some new and updated material and illustrations.

An authoritative overview of current research on human attention, emphasizing the relation between cognitive phenomena observed in the laboratory and in the real world. Laboratory research on human attention has often been conducted under conditions that bear little resemblance to the complexity of our everyday lives. Although this research has yielded interesting discoveries, few scholars have truly connected these findings to natural experiences. This book bridges the gap between “laboratory and life” by bringing together cutting-edge research using traditional methodologies with research that focuses on attention in everyday contexts. It offers definitive reviews by both established and rising research stars on foundational topics such as visual attention and cognitive control, underrepresented domains such as auditory and temporal attention, and emerging areas of investigation such as mind wandering and embodied attention. The contributors discuss a range of approaches and methodologies, including psychophysics, mental chronometry, stationary and mobile eye-tracking, and electrophysiological and functional brain imaging. Chapters on everyday attention consider such diverse activities as driving, shopping, reading, multitasking, and playing videogames. All chapters present their topics in the same overall format: historical context, current research, the possible integration of laboratory and real-world approaches, future directions, and key and outstanding issues. Contributors Richard A. Abrams, Lewis Baker, Daphne Bavelier, Virginia Best, Adam B. Blake, Paul W. Burgess, Alan D. Castel, Karen Collins, Mike J. Dixon, Sidney K. D'Mello, Julia Föcker, Charles L. Folk, Tom Foulsham, Jonathan A. Fugelsang, Bradley S. Gibson, Matthias S. Gobel, Davood G. Gozli, Arthur C. Graesser, Peter A. Hancock, Kevin A. Harrigan, Simone G. Heideman, Cristy Ho, Roxane J. Itier, Gustav Kuhn, Michael F. Land, Mallorie Leinenger, Daniel Levin, Steven J. Luck, Gerald Matthews, Daniel Memmert, Stephen Monsell, Meeneley Nazarian, Anna C. Nobre, Andrew M. Olney, Kerri Pickel, Jay Pratt, Keith Rayner, Daniel C. Richardson, Evan F. Risko, Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, Vivian Siu, Jonathan Smallwood, Charles Spence, David Strayer, Pedro Sztybel, Benjamin W. Tatler, Eric T. Taylor, Jeff Templeton, Robert Teszka, Michel Wedel, Blaire J. Weidler, Lisa Wojtowicz, Jeremy M. Wolfe, Geoffrey F. Woodman

Magicians have dazzled audiences for many centuries; however, few researchers have studied how, let alone why, most tricks work. The psychology of magic is a nascent field of research that examines the underlying mechanisms that conjurers use to achieve enchanting phenomena, including sensory illusions, misdirection of attention, and the appearance of mind-control and nuanced persuasion. Most studies to date have focused on either the psychological principles involved in watching and performing magic or “neuromagic” - the neural correlates of such phenomena. Whereas performers sometimes question the contributions that modern science may offer to the advancement of the magical arts, the history of magic reveals that scientific discovery often charts new territories for magicians. In this research topic we sketch out the symbiotic relationship between psychological science and the art of magic. On the one hand, magic can inform psychology, with particular benefits for the cognitive, social, developmental, and transcultural components of behavioural science. Magicians have a large and robust set of effects that most researchers rarely exploit. Incorporating these effects into existing experimental, even clinical, paradigms paves the road to innovative trajectories in the study of human behaviour. For example, magic provides an elegant way to study the behaviour of participants who may believe they had made choices that they actually did not make. Moreover, magic fosters a more ecological approach to experimentation whereby scientists can probe participants in more natural environments compared to the traditional lab-based settings. Examining how magicians consistently influence spectators, for example, can elucidate important aspects in the study of persuasion, trust, decision-making, and even processes spanning authorship and agency. Magic thus offers a largely underused armamentarium for the behavioural scientist and clinician. On the other hand, psychological science can advance the art of magic. The psychology of deception, a relatively understudied field, explores the intentional creation of false beliefs and how people often go wrong. Understanding how to methodically exploit the tenuous twilight zone of human vulnerabilities – perceptual, logical, emotional, and temporal – becomes all the more revealing when top-down influences, including expectation, symbolic thinking, and framing, join the fray. Over the years, science has permitted magicians to concoct increasingly effective routines and to elicit heightened feelings of wonder from audiences. Furthermore, on occasion science leads to the creation of novel effects, or the refinement of existing ones, based on systematic methods. For example, by simulating a specific card routine using a series of computer stimuli, researchers have decomposed the effect and reconstructed it into a more effective routine. Other magic effects depend on meaningful psychological knowledge, such as which type of information is difficult to retain or what changes capture attention. Behavioural scientists measure and study these factors. By combining analytical findings with performer intuitions, psychological science begets effective magic. Whereas science strives on parsimony and independent replication of results, magic thrives on reproducing the same effect with multiple methods to obscure parsimony and minimise detection. This Research Topic explores the seemingly orthogonal approaches of scientists and magicians by highlighting the crosstalk as well as rapprochement between psychological science and the art of deception.

This thought-provoking tour through the science of magic will make you question what you know about your brain and your reality. A psychologist and magician shows how the scientific study of magic reveals intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the mysteries of the human mind. What do we see when we watch a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat or read a person’s mind? We are captivated by an illusion; we applaud the fact that we have been fooled. Why do we enjoy experiencing what seems clearly impossible, or at least beyond our powers of explanation? In Experiencing the Impossible, Gustav Kuhn examines the psychological processes that underpin our experience of magic. Kuhn, a psychologist and a magician, reveals the intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the human mind that the scientific study of magic provides. Magic, Kuhn explains, creates a cognitive conflict between what we believe to be true (for example, a rabbit could not be in that hat) and what we experience (a rabbit has just come out of that hat!). Drawing on the latest psychological, neurological, and philosophical research, he suggests that misdirection is at the heart of all magic tricks, and he offers a scientific theory of misdirection. He explores, among other topics, our propensity for magical thinking, the malleability of our perceptual experiences, forgetting and misremembering, free will and mind control, and how magic is applied outside entertainment—the use of illusion in human-computer interaction, politics, warfare, and elsewhere. We may be surprised to learn how little of the world we actually perceive, how little we can trust what we see and remember, and how little we are in charge of our thoughts and actions. Exploring magic, Kuhn illuminates the complex—and almost magical—mechanisms underlying our daily activities.

This book is the first systematic study in decades of Malory’s development of his characters in the Morte Darthur. Focusing on sixteen key figures in the most important medieval English treatment of the Arthurian saga, it examines Malory’s thematic characterization of individual rulers, knights, and ladies in keeping with the twin trajectories of his history of the Round Table and fifteenth-century English history. Looking at how Malory develops his characters as exemplars of kingship, knighthood, and womanhood, the book traces the medieval author’s exploration of the values constituting chivalry as embodied in individual characters, a process that enabled him to formulate a vision of those values for his own troubled period of the Wars of the Roses. This book further explores the contribution Malory’s art of characterization makes to the literary and aesthetic power of the Morte Darthur. Each chapter’s focus on individual characters makes the book not only an integrated thematic overview, but also a useful reference for focused study of particular Arthurian figures. As such, the book is designed to meet the interests and needs of both professional scholars and students of Arthurian and medieval literature.

Many people believe that they have experienced paranormal phenomena and others claim to possess psychic abilities. For the past hundred years or so, researchers have undertaken systematic and scientific work into these alleged experiences and abilities. This collection of articles provides readers with a general sense of the methods used in this research, the findings that have been obtained and the controversies generated by this work. They cover a wide range of issues, including the psychology of paranormal belief, investigations into ghosts and hauntings, laboratory research into extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis, and controlled tests of psychics and mediums. An introductory essay sets each of the selected papers in context and provides additional references for those wishing to delve deeper into the issues surrounding each of the areas covered.