1.Ask someone to
check and shuffle
a pack of cards.
Make sure they
understand there
is nothing odd
about the deck.4.Ask them to
deal face down -
your rear cards will
be first. Suggest
they shuffle and
deal some more,
so it feels random.Some of the best tricks involve no marked cards or disappearing
rabbits, just misdirection and a sense of theatre. Here’s one.- Fan the cards so
only you see them.
Note the two at the
rear, furthest from
you (on the far left
or right, according
to the fan here).
5.They gather
the pack and deal
again – but making
two piles, dealing
one at a time, back
and forth until
they have run out.3.Take out two
cards; put them
to one side. If the
rear cards were a
black six and a red
two, remove a red
six and black two.6.Have them turn
the top card on
each pile to reveal
the two from your
fan. Turn the two
set aside – they
are companions!people see is not related to where they are looking.”
This has big implications. “Take driving,” he
says. “We used to think that mobile phone use was
distracting because people were taking their eyes off
the road. But what this research tells us is that it’s
not about where you’re looking, it’s about your mind
being distracted. Really, we should ban everybody
from holding conversations on the phone. If your
mind is distracted, you simply don’t see things.”
Inattentional blindness is now a huge research
area. But Kuhn is even more interested in what is
perhaps a more alarming aspect of magic: how it
can easily dislodge what we think are deeply held
beliefs. “It’s usually assumed that beliefs are almost
like traits, things that are very hard to shift,” he
says. “A lot of the studies on belief are correlational,
as it’s difficult to manipulate belief in an ethical way.
But magic is all about pushing the boundaries of
what people believe to be possible, and it provides
us with a very useful tool to see whether we can
actually change beliefs. And what we are finding
now is that there are experiments that can.”lmost all magicians will tell you that magic
takes place not during the illusion
itself but in the time afterwards, when
the brain tries to make sense of what
it has seen. In the café at Goldsmiths,
where Abracademy Labs has its base,
I meet its head, Kuhn’s colleague
Hugo Caffaratti. An Argentinian-born
magician and neuroscientist, Caffaratti
is, like Kuhn, confident about magic’s
potential as a means of scientific research – a tool
for examining the messiness of real life.
“Psychology,” Caffaratti says, “is fascinated by
things such as, say, the gaps in our perception that
lead us to wander around looking for our glasses
when they are on our heads. But how do you take
that into the lab? Well, with just a deck of cards
and a little table you have millions of illusions that
play on the same gaps in our perception and can be
repeated in exactly the same way, again and again.”
Caffaratti was captivated by magic as a child.
By 21 he was admitted to the Spanish Society of
Illusionists, where he met Francisco-Amilcar Riega
Bello, known to everyone as Amilkar. He showed
Caffaratti that magic is “not about being fast with
your hands. It’s about attacking the brain.”
The Spanish school argued that magic was
entirely about exploiting what Filho calls the
“glitches” of the brain, the vulnerabilities of the
way we perceive the world and ourselves, and
which we, for the most part, are unaware of. We
perceive only a fraction of what is around us. (Kuhn
reckons it is as little as ten per cent.) Our memories
and even our core beliefs are ridiculously malleable.
And our choices – as any magician asking us to “pick
a card, any card” knows – may be much less free
than we think. Perception, memory, free will: these
are weapons in the hands of a skilled magician.
“Magic breaks the natural inferences that we
make of the world,” Caffaratti says. “When you see
a magic trick, your brain searches your memories
to see if you have seen something similar. And, if
it can’t find it, it kind of says, ‘What is this?’ A ball
that can disappear, a table that levitates, these are
not the usual categories that help us perceive the
world. So there is a delay before we perceive them.”
As a PhD student at the University of Leicester,
Caffaratti set out to prove the physical existence of
that delay, while at the same time demonstrating
magic’s potential as a neuroscientific tool. He
videoed himself performing a routine called Chop
Cup, involving a cup and a ball, which was made
famous by the British magician Paul Daniels.
“It’s an amazing routine,” he says. “The ball
appears and disappears under the cup in incredibleMAGIC MOMENT
Gustav KuhnILLUSTRATION:^ JORI^ BOLTON