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daffydoug Eternal Order Look mom! I've got 14077 Posts |
I ran across this on the web today:
Study Reveals How Magic Works By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience posted: 20 November 2006 12:31 pm ET Buzz up! Add to delicious del.icio.us Digg It! Digg It! Save to Newsvine Newsvine Add to reddit reddit 0 Comments |6 Recommend Scientists are figuring out how magicians fool our brains in research that also helps uncover how our mind actually works. A great deal of what scientists now understand about how the human visual system works stems from research into our susceptibility to optical illusions. "It made sense to look at magicians to advance knowledge of human cognition, since magicians have been working on figuring out how certain principles of psychology work for hundreds of years," said researcher Gustav Kuhn at the University of Durham in England, a cognitive psychologist who has also performed magic the past couple decades. "Magicians really have this ability to distort your perceptions, to get people to perceive things that never happened, just like a visual illusion," he added. The researchers looked into a magic trick called the "vanishing ball," in which a ball apparently disappears in midair. It's done by faking a throw while keeping the ball secretly palmed in the magician's hand. Kuhn videotaped himself performing two versions of the illusion. In the "pro-illusion" version, on the fake throw, his gaze and head followed an imaginary ball moving upwards. In the "anti-illusion" version, Kuhn's eyes stayed on the hand concealing the ball [video]. Videos Disappearing Ball How to Levitate Turn a Lemon into a Battery Roughly two-thirds of volunteers watching the pro-illusion version on television had a vivid recollection of the ball leaving the top of the screen. "Often they claimed someone at the top of the screen caught the ball," Kuhn told LiveScience. In comparison, only a third of the people viewing the anti-illusion version experienced that illusion. Kuhn and his colleagues measured the eye movements of volunteers during the experiment. Surprisingly, they found that when people believed they saw the ball vanish, most claimed they spent their entire time looking at the ball, yet most actually glanced at the magician's face prior to following the ball to help them perceive the ball's location. "Even though people claimed they were looking at the ball, what you find is that they spend a lot of time looking at the face. While their eye movements weren't fooled by where the ball was, their perception was. It reveals how important social cues are in influencing perception," Kuhn said. "As we are looking at the world, we have this impression that what we see is the real world. What this tells us is the way we see the world is more strongly dominated by how we perceive it to be rather than what it actually is," Kuhn added. "Even though the ball never left the hand, the reason people saw it leave is because they expected the ball to leave the hand. It's the beliefs about what should happen that override the actual visual input." In the future, the researchers plan to investigate how other magic tricks fool the brain. Kuhn and his colleagues will report their findings in the Nov. 21 issue of the journal Current Biology.
The difficult must become easy, the easy beautiful and the beautiful magical.
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john scot Special user brighton, uk 585 Posts |
I think somebody brought this up for discussion recently here; http://www.themagiccafe.com/forums/viewt......rum=27&2
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Jonathan Townsend Eternal Order Ossining, NY 27297 Posts |
More like a magician wants to do exposure under cover of some questionable psychology research where he makes a point of breaking the first few rules you can find in conjuring in Robert-Houdin's book and seems to forget to cite that book in his discussion of the ideas he sets out to study.
There are some wonderful studies of attention and how vision/perception are not as wide and finely detailed as we might like to believe. One notable study had a person look at a picture which would have small things change as they were looking at other features in the picture by using some eye tracking machinery and software to control the picture. That was over a decade ago. Another useful study showed how very young children don't notice when a toy car moving behind a wall seems to travel just fine even when in places you can see there's a gap in the wall and no car goes by. Kindly don't support or condone pointless and needless exposure.
...to all the coins I've dropped here
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Pakar Ilusi Inner circle 5777 Posts |
Ahh... It's misdirection in itself is what you're saying....
Interesting....
"Dreams aren't a matter of Chance but a matter of Choice." -DC-
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