Why do magic tricks work

I have always been captivated by magic and I dedicated most of my teenage years to it. As a kid, I borrowed every book on magic from the local library and spent my free time practising new tricks.

I was particularly interested in understanding why magic works, so I read books on psychology, which I hoped would give me a deeper understanding of how to trick the mind. It was this desire to discover more powerful ways of hacking the mind that led me to study psychology at university. For most magicians, this link between magic and psychology is obvious. Magic relies on powerful psychological illusions and magicians create their tricks by exploiting gaps and errors in our conscious experience.

For example, magicians use misdirection to manipulate what you attend to and this allows them to control what you see — and what you miss. However, as I enrolled on my degree course, I was surprised to learn scientists were not particularly interested in magic. None of my textbooks on cognitive psychology talked about misdirection, and there was only a handful of research papers that had investigated magic scientifically — and most of them had been published more than years ago.

I was disappointed, but as I started to engross myself in learning more about the mysteries of the brain, I replaced my passion for magic with psychology. To put it simply, I exchanged my cape for a lab coat and embarked on a career in cognitive science. It was also the first time we had scientific data that helped us understand how misdirection works, and we were surprised that people often failed to see things that were right in front of their eyes.

The misdirection was so effective that some people were looking at an object, yet they simply did not see it. We soon realised magic could provide a useful tool to study visual attention. When a performer vanishes a coin by pretending to move it from one hand to another, they do so by mimicking the movements we would expect during the real thing. Your brain is hardwired for pattern-seeking. This is a crucial part of how your brain works. We are surrounded by so much stimuli all the time and our brains have devised a way to pay attention to the information most likely to have a survival benefit.

And, at least in Now You See Me 's case, that allows for some cool heists. Sign Up For Free to View. Credit: Lionsgate. What exactly is going on in the brain when you see a magic trick? Science Behind the Fiction. Bats, bacteria, and brains: The science behind a zombie outbreak. Yes, it turns out if you die in a dream, you could die in real life.

Explanation: Angel was in fact walking atop plexiglass pillars! Plexiglass has a refractive index that's very similar to water's and is nearly invisible in water. How many of you remember David Blaine pushing a card through a window? I always wondered how he did it, till I read an article that explained his modus operandi.

Explanation: Such a trick requires the participation of another person with an identical deck of cards on the other end of the window. As part of the act, the volunteer shows the card to everyone but the magician.

In the act, the partner on the other side of the glass gets to see it to, who slaps the card against the glass, making it seem like impromptu street magic. Source: HalifaxVideos. Ever seen a person being hacked by a guillotine, yet escaping unscathed?

It's just a smart trick employed by magicians to entertain the audience. Explanation: While the upper part employs a real, deadly blade like the one used in a real guillotine , the lower part has secret compartments. You must have seen women being suspended in mid-air without support? This is where someone thinks they are choosing a card at random, but the magician is really manipulating their decision and the "choices" are false.

People are much more suggestible than they think. All of our perceptions are very malleable," says Dr Kuhn. This suggestibility and use of false options can be misused in a political sense, he says.

But it's also important in understanding how eye-witness evidence can be so "highly subjective", with implications for the legal system. The attitude towards examining the connections between magic and science has gone from scepticism to becoming one of the hottest research topics, says Dr Kuhn.

This week the Wellcome Collection in London is launching an exhibition into the Psychology of Magic, looking at what conjuring can tell us about the human mind and the "nature of perception". Dr Kuhn says he was interested in magic before he became interested in studying psychology. When he learned how to perform magic, he says he enjoyed the sociability, with the tricks becoming ice-breakers for the awkward years of growing up.

Great magicians can perform tricks in a way that moves people like great art, he says. He mentions watching a card trick from the Spanish magician, Juan Tamariz. It almost connects you to childhood, when the world seems very magical.

Watching him show a card trick was like seeing "Jimi Hendrix performing a guitar solo".