A collection of visual illusions with explanations of the science behind them, gathered from the Best Illusions of the Year contest. --

What can magic tell us about ourselves and our daily lives? If you subtly change the subject during an uncomfortable conversation, did you know you're using attentional 'misdirection', a core technique of magic? And if you've ever bought an expensive item you'd sworn never to buy, you were probably unaware that the salesperson was, like an accomplished magician, a master at creating the 'illusion of choice'. Leading neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde meet with magicians from all over the world to explain how the magician's art sheds light on consciousness, memory, attention, and belief. As the founders of the new discipline of NeuroMagic, they combine cutting-edge scientific research with startling insights into the tricks of the magic trade. By understanding how magic manipulates the processes in our brains, we can better understand how we work - in fields from law and education to marketing, health and psychology - for good and for ill.

Focusing on the "American Century," the author explores the myths and realities of American power and discusses the role of the nation as a new century dawns. By the author of William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives.

Beware, the designs herein may boggle your mind and confound your eyes. Does the cube go in or out, is the line straight or curved? You'll have fun deciding while coloring them at the same time. 32 designs.

With this book you can enter a realm of dazzlingly deceptive designs that offer wonderful opportunities for imaginative and inventive coloring. You'll find a host of ingeniously contrived constructions, strange, interlocking shapes and mind-boggling arrangements that defy reality and challenge the imagination to grasp their form and structure. Optical illusions are always fun to look at; coloring these masterly mind-bending illusions will add an extra dimension of enjoyment and foster a new appreciation of mysterious pictorial puzzles that make us wonder if seeing is truly believing.

New York Times best-selling author and comedian-turned-motivational speaker, Kyle Cease, shows how your obsession with money is actually preventing you from living the life of your dreams. "I can't afford that." "Now's not the right time . . . I need to save up." "Quit my job? Are you nuts?!" Sound familiar? Money is one of the biggest excuses we make to not go after what we really want. Our fixation with money--the desire for more of it, and the fear of not having enough of it--is often really just a longing to feel safe. But this obsession with money is coming at a much bigger cost: our sanity, our creativity, our freedom, and our ability to step into our true power. This book is about eliminating the need to seek safety through the illusion of money, and learning to see ourselves for the perfection that we are--so that we can bring our gifts to the world in an authentic way, and allow ourselves to receive massive, true abundance as a result. Kyle Cease has heard excuses like the ones above countless times at his live events, and he has shown people how to completely break through them. In The Illusion of Money, he shares his own experiences as well as practical tools to help readers understand their ingrained beliefs and attachments to money, and how they can tap into our infinite assets and talents. "After 25 years as a successful comedian, actor, transformational speaker, author and junior-league amateur bowler, I've experienced many times how chasing money is not an effective way to create an abundant and fulfilling life. The most alive I've ever felt was after I left my comedy career at its peak to become a transformational speaker. I left tons of guaranteed money and so-called security for a complete unknown. It was terrifying--but what was on the other side of that terror was a completely different life that is not only more abundant financially, but has more freedom, more ease, more passion, more impact and more joy." -- Kyle Cease

Wiggling a pencil so that it looks like it is made of rubber, "stealing" your niece's nose, and listening for the sounds of the ocean in a conch shell– these are examples of folk illusions, youthful play forms that trade on perceptual oddities. In this groundbreaking study, K. Brandon Barker and Claiborne Rice argue that these easily overlooked instances of children's folklore offer an important avenue for studying perception and cognition in the contexts of social and embodied development. Folk illusions are traditionalized verbal and/or physical actions that are performed with the intention of creating a phantasm for one or more participants. Using a cross-disciplinary approach that combines the ethnographic methods of folklore with the empirical data of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology, Barker and Rice catalogue over eighty discrete folk illusions while exploring the complexities of embodied perception. Taken together as a genre of folklore, folk illusions show that people, starting from a young age, possess an awareness of the illusory tendencies of perceptual processes as well as an awareness that the distinctions between illusion and reality are always communally formed.