Magic and perception

Magic is not just a set of tricks - it is a proven technology for forming illusions. Now researchers are learning from it.

In September 1856, in the face of a rising insurrection, Napoleon III sent Jean-Eugène Robert-Udin to Algeria. Robert-Uden was neither a general nor a diplomat. He was a magician - the father of modern magic. (A budding young artist named Erich Weiss took his stage name after several decades, adding “i” to the name “Houdin”). His mission was to surpass the Algerian hermit marabouts, spellcasters, whose magical art helped convince the Algerian people that Allah is against French rule in their land.
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The French colonial authorities gathered the Arab leaders, and Robert-Uden organized a show that basically would be understandable to everyone: he pulled the cannonballs out of his hat, took out the lit candlesticks from the air and poured coffee a gallon by gallon from an empty silver cup.

After that, as he recalls in his memoirs, Robert-Uden proceeded to the magic designed to intimidate the leaders. He asked for a small wooden box with a metal handle. Selecting the muscular person present, he asked him to lift the box; man did it effortlessly. Then Robert-Uden announced, with a threatening gesture, that he had taken the force from that person. When the volunteer again took the box handle, he did not move - assistant Robert-Udena turned on a powerful magnet under the stage. The volunteer leaned on the box until, by a gesture of Robert-Uden, his assistant missed a charge of electricity through the handle, forcing the person to run away in horror. The leaders were impressed, and the uprising gradually faded away.

The history of Robert-Uden’s diplomatic tricks is widely known in the history of magic, mainly because it is the only documented case (at least after the events of antiquity) of the exorcist’s influence on world affairs. Stage magic, after all, is not so much the art of managing people as a show and entertainment.

However, in recent years, some researchers have begun to realize that magic is more than that: a deep and untouched source of knowledge about the human mind.

At a large conference last year in Las Vegas, in a scientific report, psychologists proved that wizards, in their age-old ways of deceiving people, unwittingly participated in an unsurpassed study of how we see and perceive the world around us. As well as studying the mechanism of the disease helps to understand the work of the protective systems of the body, psychologists believe that the study of the working methods of a talented illusionist, causing "short circuits" of our perception system, will help to better understand the structure of this system.

“I think that mages and neurobiologists face similar questions - but if neurobiologists have been studying them for several decades, magicians have been doing the same thing for centuries, and maybe thousands of years.” published last week in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience. “What illusionists do sometimes exceeds our research in complexity and efficiency.”

How long the magicians have known, and neuroscientists recently discovered, the human sense system is an unstable mechanism, full of gaps and relatively easy to control. Collaboration between science and magic does not last long, and conclusions are premature, but interest among scientists is growing: the New York Academy of Sciences invited illusionist Apollo Robbins to present the mechanisms of vision, and another group of magicians should speak at the next annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, largest association of brain researchers.

In a world where attention is a scarce resource, a better understanding of its operation can have millions of uses, from dashboards to advertisements - and possibly new magical tricks.

Most of the success in the magic room is attracting the attention of the audience and directing it to another place - to the left hand, in which the wand dances, while the right one hides the ball in his pocket or takes a card from his sleeve. Magical shows are masterpieces of disorientation: they attract our attention with bright colors and brilliant things, clouds of smoke and constant entanglement that the magician must maintain as far as the focus goes.

For years, cognitive scientists have considered perception of something like a movie camera that reproduces the world in detail. In the past ten years, however, this model has undergone a major revision. For example, people have a clear tendency to miss events right under their noses. Daniel Simons, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, conducted a series of experiments in the late 1990s that showed the extent of this cognitive blindness. In one of them, people were asked how to get to a certain place, but in the middle of the conversation the interlocutor was replaced by another person. Only half of the respondents noticed the substitution.

In another experience, people were shown a movie in which two teams, one in white T-shirts, the other in black, played basketball. The subjects were asked to count the number of shots made by the players of each team. Half of the participants, as it turned out, did not notice the woman in the gorilla costume, who appeared in the middle of the video and beat her fists into the chest (here’s an exemplary reproduction of the experience).

Thanks to such research, in the last ten years a new model has been developed, in which visual perception is understood not as a camera, but as something more - like a searchlight that fumbles a gloomy landscape. At each moment of time we can see in details only a small piece of the overall picture, on which we concentrate. The rest is combined from memory, prediction and a rough side view. We do not so much perceive the world around us as we constantly construct it.

“Our picture of the world resembles virtual reality,” says Ronald A. Rensink, a professor of computer science and psychology at Columbia University and co-author of a report on magic and psychology, which is preparing to be published next week in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences. "This is very much like a managed hallucination."

The advantage of such cognitive tricks is that they allow us to create a fairly detailed image of the surrounding reality, despite the fact that the two optic nerves have a resolution approximately like that of a mobile phone camera. We don’t have to, for example, spend time looking at each car on the highway to understand that these are really cars and to make a guess about how they are moving - our mind simply collects an image from thousands of cars we have seen in life.

But due to the fact that this method relies so much on expectation — not only to fill the scenery around us, but also to determine where to send what psychologists call the “spotlight” —we are so vulnerable to those who know our expectations and can manipulate them, for example - a magician.

“In magic,” says Teller, a member of the famous duet Penn and Teller and one of the five illusionists mentioned as co-authors in the Nature Neuroscience report, “we take what makes us reasonable and turn it against us.”

Deception, in fact, the most understandable of the tools of the caster - we do not notice some things simply because we do not look at them. Martinez-Conde is particularly interested in deception, and the question "what is special about certain movements that attract and hold our attention." Robbins, the pickpocket illusionist and another magician, co-author of the report, found out that semi-circular gestures attract people's attention better than direct ones. “It is better to distract a person,” says the magician, “I use them when I pull something out of someone else’s pocket.”

Martinez-Conde became interested in this distinction, and hypothesized that the particular attraction of indirect movements can come from the fact that they do not simply relate to fast, rectilinear eye movements, or saccadas. As a result, she believes, tracking such movements requires a lot of effort and concentration of perception.

Other effects, however, are even more confusing. Eye movement studies have often shown that the subject may look directly at the object and not see it - car crash survivors often talk about the same paradox. Or, with a little impulse, a person can be made to see something that actually is not.

Illusion with a fading ball is one of the main tricks available to the magician: the ball is constantly thrown into the air and caught. Then, during the final throw, he disappears right in the air. In fact, the magician simply depicted the last throw, tracing the trajectory of an imaginary ball with his eyes. The ball itself remained in his hand.

But if the technique is easy to explain, the phenomenon itself is not. When performed correctly, the focus really makes the observers see how the ball rises into the air at the last throw and disappears at the top point. As Rensink points out, this is much more difficult than just making a person look the other way — this is a demonstration of how to simply plunge the brain into the space of pure hallucination. And the cognitivists still do not know what causes this behavior.

Cognitive scientists who observe these tricks limit themselves to simple effects and the fundamental questions that flow from them. Over time, Rensink compiled a kind of periodic table of effects of attention: methods of attracting attention, methods of his dispersion, methods that cause a person not to see what is before his eyes. Such a classification, he believes, will be useful to magicians themselves. Control and management of attention is important in all areas of human activity. Cockpits of aircraft and street signs can be better designed, security and police can be trained in attention management, computer graphics can become more natural, training less coercive.

However, if none of this is ever destined to happen, the study of gaps and limitations of perception is of certain value. Like the audience at Robert-Uden, we are easily manageable and can rather be in an awkward situation if we do not know this.

“The key to this is knowing that you have certain limitations,” says cognitive processes researcher Daniel Simons. “Most people don't understand how talking on a cell phone affects their driving.”

If you believe Teller, magic more than anyone reminds us of this. And this explains why, despite its relatively modest effects, it continues to be popular in the age of cinemas and computers.

“Every day we are forced to be convinced of the reality of what is happening around us, to recognize what the signals received by our eyes mean,” he says. “We say 'This is a fence, I can’t get through there,' or 'Is this car driving around the corner? I see her well? Oh, no, it's just a bike. ”

He believes that in the magic of people attracts an understanding of how deceptive can be seemingly simple judgments.

“They understand,” he says, “that the best way to understand the power of deception is to undergo it yourself.”

Source: Mechanical World