What's on the shelf? Sleights of Mind

The full title of Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde's book is Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions. It's a fun romp through the world of stage magic, by a husband-wife team of neurology researchers. This is my favorite kind of pop science book: a survey of current research in a specific area, told with wit and humor.

Stage magicians hack our nervous systems. Some of the techniques go back hundreds of years, while others are brand new. The authors are careful to mark reveals with spoiler alerts, but omigosh, did I love those spoilers.

Macknik and Martinez-Conde must both possess considerable charm, because they go through a Who's Who of practicing magicians in researching this book. They also practice what they preach, developing their own stage act, and successfully applying to The Academy of Magical Arts Hall of Fame.

Human attention is a limited thing. There are hardwired limits to our attention and processing. Magicians have fine tuned a host of ways to mislead, overload, and generally bamboozle the human nervous system. Computer scientist Danny Hillis drove the brilliant Richard Feynman to distraction by showing him what looked like one trick, but was actually a series of different tricks that all produced the same illusion.

Someone one said, "If you fool the eye, the brain can figure it out. If you fool the brain, that's much less likely." Our brain is constantly filling in the gaps in our perceptions, and clever people can trick it into filling the gaps with what they want you to believe, instead of what actually occurs.

As someone who writes about humans that can craft real illusions, this was a very interesting read. Combined with the recent work on brain maps (see my post on Rebecca Schwarzlose's book Brainscapes), it's given me some interesting material to work with in describing systems of magic. Just like stage magic, real magic is not one thing, but a multitude of things. And it can be very hard to tell them apart.

My only regret with this book is that's it's given me a strong desire to go to Las Vegas, just to see the magic shows!