When I was seven years old, my friend Tyler showed me a card trick. I was amazed. I did not have any clue what had just happened. I did not know how the trick fooled me. I wanted to find out how exactly he tricked me. Have you ever been fooled by a magician? If so, how did it happen? What did the magician do to fool you? Was it some kind of distraction, the angle at which you saw things, or pure magic? Do you ever wish you could know the answers to these questions? The neuroscience behind magic will blow your mind.
Back to Tyler’s card trick. It was called the snap change. Tyler snapped and poof, the seemingly one card in his hand changed into a different card. This is not pure magic. Tyler simply had two cards in his hand. He performed a
…show more content…
But, we never see everything and, once again, our errors are exploited by magicians. Processing everything we see is very difficult. Our brains would have to be very large to process amounts of information that big. To solve this, our brains develop efficient strategies that leave out small details and only take in important things. In the world of magic, every detail is important. We can’t process it all.
We can also fail to see big things if we just decide we don’t need to pay attention to them. For example, a person could miss a kangaroo that appeared right in front of them. This is called inattentional blindness or change blindness.
Magicians easily exploit these limits your brain has by misdirecting our attention so as to not let us see a secret move.
All this proves that our vision is not as trustworthy as we thought it was. Magicians can exploit many limitations our eyes and our brains have. People fail to see things even if they are looking straight at them. So, in the future, don’t be sure to trust your vision on its own. You never really know what could be happening.
So, these are the techniques that magicians use to fool us. Magic is really amazing if you get down to the neuroscience of how it really happens.
Lastly, what inspires children to become a magician? It all depends on what the magician gives to the