mouth,” he says, “go to light it, and then notice it
was the wrong way round.” He mimes astonishment.
“So I take it out and, at the same time, move my
other hand, holding the lighter, down to table level,
and drop the lighter into my lap. I then move
that hand up to my line of sight, snap my fingers
and, hey presto, the lighter had disappeared.”
Not that great a trick, as Kuhn is the first to
acknowledge. But from a perceptual point of view,
the magic was just about to happen. At the same
time as snapping his fingers, he simply let go of the
cigarette with his other hand, so it fell into his lap.
He then stared at that hand as if the cigarette had
vanished. “What we found,” he says, “is that most
people would not see the cigarette falling, including
some looking directly at it. We had shown that whator much of human history, science and magic
were practically the same thing. In the
late 19th century, psychologists were
intrigued by stage magicians and
seance psychics and their ability to play
with the minds of their audiences.
And magicians returned the favour,
snapping up scientific innovations
in optics and electromagnetism.
That all changed in the 20th century.
“From about 1910 there was very little study
of magic,” says Gustav Kuhn, 44, a reader in
psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London –
and a professional magician. “That was probably
because of the influence of behaviourism. Magic
is all about experiences; behaviourists were more
interested in actions and reactions,” he says. “For
me, there was always a very close link between
magic and psychology. To be a good magician you
really need to understand how the brain works.”
Kuhn grew up in Switzerland and moved to
Britain in 1993 to work as a magician. He “fell into”
academia. “I was lucky to meet some researchers
who were using eye-tracking technology to study
how attention can be misdirected. And soon I
realised that magic provides us with a really useful
tool to study some of these perceptual areas.”
We don’t see things literally happening in front of
our eyes, says Kuhn, because the brain is a brilliant
economiser of resources. “We have to filter out
information, otherwise we would get overwhelmed.
The brain selects the stuff that’s really important. So
we can be looking at something, but the information
doesn’t reach our conscious experience.”
Try this by looking at the wall opposite you.
Unless you have been thinking about decorating,
you will notice marks that you were unaware of. It’s
not that photons from those marks never landed
on your retina. It’s just that the brain discarded that
data as unimportant. Magicians have understood
this phenomenon for centuries: in many illusions,
the sleight of hand is not hidden – but we don’t
notice. Most magicians will tell you that they
achieve this “misdirection” by getting the audience
to look away when the rabbit is popped into the hat.
Kuhn suspected otherwise – and decided to use
magic to prove that when magicians palm a coin or
switch cards, we are looking directly at them. He
set up in the University of Sussex students’ union
bar with a cigarette, lighter (this was before the
UK’s smoking ban) and eye-tracker, and performed
a simple illusion. “I would put a cigarette in my
GUSTAV KUHN is exploring how magic tricks can dislodge deeply held beliefs