A magician tosses a coin in the air and catches it, only to reveal … a completely empty hand.
Where did the coin go? Was this some mysterious paranormal phenomenon? Or was it your brain — and not the magician — that really made the coin vanish?
Dirk Bernhardt-Walther knows the secret, and for three years the associate professor in the Department of Psychology has been revealing it and many others to students in his popular first-year foundations course, Psychology of Magic. But while his students emerge from the class able to analyze this and a variety of other tricks, they also learn a great deal about the fallibility of human perception — and the human mind itself.
That fallibility is something magicians exploit, in order to entertain us. The gaps in our attention and perceptual abilities are many, says Bernhardt-Walter. For example, our limited contrast perception enables magicians to hide dark objects within a black background; this makes you think they’ve been conjured from thin air. “Magicians also plant false memories. They’ll tell you what you just saw, and you’ll believe it whether it’s true or not,” he says. “Or they’ll ‘force’ a card on you — one you think you’ve chosen of your own free will.”
Magic tricks can often seem impossible to figure out. And applying considerable brainpower to the matter may not help.
Academics are the easiest to fool, because they concentrate very hard. That makes it easier for the magician to do something on the side that they don’t see.
“A high working memory capacity may help you to focus better on what the magician is doing, but you’re also more likely to miss something that comes up unexpectedly,” Bernhardt-Walther says, adding with a smile: “Academics are the easiest to fool, because they concentrate very hard. That makes it easier for the magician to do something on the side that they don’t see.”
Small children, on the other hand, are far less susceptible: one of the key requirements for a magic experience is a “strong belief in what’s possible and what’s not,” says Bernhardt-Walther.
“Kids believe in all kinds of things — the Tooth Fairy, Peter Pan, Santa Claus. Even some of our modern technology seems like magic to them. So for kids, seeing yet another amazing thing happening in their short lives doesn’t always produce the same effect of astonishment that makes stage magic so entertaining for adults.”
The study of how magic works in the human brain can help psychologists understand the many other ways in which humans are suggestible. Eyewitnesses in crimes are often very sure of their memories; many of us routinely trust our intuition to make decisions. But Bernhardt-Walther’s students have discovered that as sure as we are of these tools, they routinely fail us.
“It’s humbling,” says Stella King, a life sciences student and member of Innis College. “One takeaway from this course is that our brains are so unreliable: we feel we’re smart, but we’re not that smart. Our brains are actually quite flawed.”
Studying magic has been comforting to her as an aspiring scientist, as she now understands the source of her impatience when she’s analyzing processes where the outcome is already known. “Magicians prey on the fact that your brain is always jumping to conclusions,” she says. “Something we’ve learned in terms of neural processing is that your brain is always trying to use the least amount of energy, and the least amount of time, to get to a conclusion.”
Life sciences student Doga Pulat, a member of New College, also appreciates the window into human thinking that the course offers. She says that the many apparent flaws they study could be “evidence of the complexity of the evolution of the human mind: they’re a gateway into what aspects of perception have been truly necessary for survival, and what aspects can be spared for more efficient processing.”
I do not feel that magic has been spoiled for me, quite the opposite really. For one thing, simple tricks are now widely explained on the internet anyway. And great magicians do not simply know how tricks work — they’re also masters of stagecraft, distraction, sleight of hand and hypnotizing banter. Magic will always be entertaining, because it will always be theatrical.
But the most important question is: does revealing magic tricks take all the fun out of watching them?
Bernhardt-Walter answers the question with another one. “Let me ask you: if you know the physics of the refraction of light, do you enjoy rainbows any less? I don’t. I appreciate them more, because I can see how they are made — the angle of the sunlight, the raindrops in the air, the way they come together to create a really nice sight.”
Pulat and King agree. “I do not feel that magic has been spoiled for me, quite the opposite really,” says Pulat. For one thing, simple tricks are now widely explained on the internet anyway. And great magicians do not simply know how tricks work — they’re also masters of stagecraft, distraction, sleight of hand and hypnotizing banter. "Magic will always be entertaining, because it will always be theatrical," says King.
Indeed, Bernhardt-Walther’s course reveals that magicians are not only expert entertainers, but deft psychologists themselves. “Artists discover how the visual system works by trying things out; scientists draw inspiration from the artists,” he says. “There’s something similar going on with magic. To investigate the human mind, scientists are drawing from a rich bed of techniques already discovered by magicians."