Exploring Of How Magic Bends Human Perception

Magic tricks never go out of style. From centuries-old stunts of cutting the magician’s assistant in half, to disappearing and reappearing rabbits on hats, to undying card tricks, magic has always played a huge part in people’s entertainment. Magic tricks have been featured in many books and classic films. From the globally famous bestseller series of novels, Harry Potter, to the modern day film version of sense deception, Now You See Me, films seem to have embraced the idea of magic in its entertainment, which attests to the never-ending fascination of people with impossible illusions.

However, as time passed, the concept of magic evolved along with it. More and more magic tricks have surfaced through the years and it is surprising how new tricks continue to surface today. Magic relies on working together a thread of illusions and deceiving the eyes of viewers. The most fascinating part is, magicians do not use sorcery or supernatural abilities to trick your eyes and minds; they just use pure talent, trained hands, clever techniques, science, and your attention.

While magicians' secrets remain unpublished and unrevealed, scientists have a logical way of explaining how their tricks work. Magicians use the laws of science to take advantage of the limitations of the human brain, making them believe what they see, instead of what is actually happening.

Fooling the Human Vision

People consider vision as one of their most trusted senses. People even say, “to see is to believe. ” But in reality, human vision cannot be entirely reliable. As with the other senses, it can also be tricked. The perception of the human eye can easily be distorted, and a plethora of art illusions can attest to that. Visual illusions are results of the mismatch or discrepancy between people’s perceptual experience and the actual situation.

Seeing the Anticipated Future

In some tricks studied by scientists, they found a common denominator as to how magicians trick the human brain. A group of researchers, including Gustav Kuhn, a cognitive psychologist from the University of Durham and also a former magician, conducted research on one of the most common magic tricks today called the “vanishing ball. ”

In the experiment, a magician throws a ball into the air a couple of times and makes it vanish into thin air. This happens by concealing the ball in his hand in the last throw while pretending that he threw it again. Surprisingly, almost two-thirds of the audience claimed that they saw a ball tossed in the air and that it later disappeared, even though the ball never really left the magician’s hand at the last throw. Kuhn explained in his report that the viewers saw the imaginary ball because they believed that that was what was going to happen next. People’s perception can be bent by the anticipation of the future or what’s going to happen next. The illusion depicts how people perceive things that they expect to happen rather than what really has taken place.

Distraction and Losing Attention

Human brains have limitations. Its nature is to process things only within its capacity. Thus, it is not designed to process voluminous information all at the same time, or else humans must require large brains that can hold that capacity. Nevertheless, humans discovered a strategy to process huge amounts of information, and that is to prioritize things based on their importance.

In magic, however, humans tend to look closely at the things that they think matters. In another experiment conducted by Kuhn, the lighter trick, the magician tricks his viewers by making them think that his lighter has disappeared, though in full view, the lighter was actually dropped onto his lap, before his audience’s eyes. Even though the lighter was dropped visibly, half of the viewers didn’t see it because they weren’t paying enough attention to the lighter, which is a result of the distraction created by the magician from the lighter to his other hand. This phenomenon is dubbed as “inattentional blindness” where people fail to see obvious changes because they aren’t paying attention.

In the 2013 movie Now You See Me, it is stated that attention is the most precious gift viewers give to a magician, and that is exactly what they are taking away from them. This proves that misdirection is a very important weapon magicians use to mislead people’s attention to cover up reality.

Vebjorn Ekroll, a psychology professor from the University of Bergen in Norway, said that “magic is the illusion of impossibility, and there is nothing impossible about not noticing something that you are not looking at. ” He believes that magic takes place when you are positive that you couldn’t have missed the actual trick made in front of you. He calls this your own blindness to inattentional blindness, an occurrence in which people do not see their own blindness to attention thus resulting in an illusion. According to him, this is a concrete mechanism magicians hold on to.

Magic is no sorcery, it is just bending the laws of science to make you see differently. It may be surprising how your own mind can deceive you, but it is also a reminder that anything can take advantage of your perception.