Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions [Hardcover]

Stephen L. Macknik (Author), Susana Martinez-Conde (Author), Sandra Blakeslee (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 9, 2010

"This book doesn't just promise to change the way you think about sleight of hand and David Copperfield—it will also change the way you think about the mind." —Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide and Proust Was A Neuroscientist

Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, the founders of the exciting new discipline of neuromagic, have convinced some of the world's greatest magicians to allow scientists to study their techniques for tricking the brain. This book is the result of the authors' yearlong, world-wide exploration of magic and how its principles apply to our behavior. Magic tricks fool us because humans have hardwired processes of attention and awareness that are hackable—a good magician uses your mind's own intrinsic properties against you in a form of mental jujitsu.

Now magic can reveal how our brains work in everyday situations. For instance, if you've ever bought an expensive item you'd sworn you'd never buy, the salesperson was probably a master at creating the "illusion of choice," a core technique of magic. The implications of neuromagic go beyond illuminating our behavior; early research points to new approaches for everything from the diagnosis of autism to marketing techniques and education. Sleights of Mind makes neuroscience fun and accessible by unveiling the key connections between magic and the mind.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Magic is the place where our senses and beliefs fail us in magnificent ways. In this exciting book Stephen, Susana, and Sandra explore what magic and illusions can teach us about our fallible human nature—coming up with novel and fascinating observations."—Dan Ariely, author of Predictability Irrational

"Steve and Susana are two of the most innovative scientists I know. They aren't content to just conduct elegant experiments (although they do plenty of those, too). Instead, they're determined to explore those places where neuroscience intersects the mysterious and the magical, from visual illusions to Vegas card tricks. This book doesn't just change the way you think about sleight of hand and David Copperfield - it will also change the way you think about the mind."—Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide and Proust Was A Neuroscientist.

"I've long wished that there was a book that explained the art of magic from the point of view of cognitive neuroscience. Magic is a goldmine of information about the brain, as well as a source of fascination to laypeople. This is the book we've all been waiting for."—Steven Pinker PhD, author of The Stuff of Thought

"This is a highly original book. Science and magic have much in common. They both take seemingly inexplicable events and provide elegantly simple answers that enthrall the observer. The authors have done an admirable job in exploring this idea and also suggest ways in which the two disciplines can cross fertilize each other."—VS Ramachandran MD PhD, author of Phantoms in the Brain

"Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde's Sleights of Mind gives non-magicians a real up-close look at the true secrets of magic. They are revealing the real knowledge jealously guarded by all great performers...I know my fellow magicians are all going to be as jazzed as I am to read about how sophisticated magical techniques and state-of-the-art brain science combine."—Mac King, headliner, Harrah's Las Vegas

"In Sleights of Mind, authors Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde persistently remind us that the human mind is a bad data-taking device. And it's this fact that enables the science of magic to exist at all."—Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of The Pluto Files

 

"The authors make easily comprehensible the effects of neural adaptation, afterimages, occlusion, perspective, saccades, inattentional blindness, expectations and the pliability of memory...Entertaining."--Kirkus

"In their illuminating book, brain experts Martinez-Conde and Macknik make their case that magicians are some of the most skilled neuroscientists around...By tricking readers into having fun learning neuroscience, the authors bring the newly minted field of "neuromagic" to center stage."--Laura Sanders, Science News

"This book offers 'a revolutionary look a the science behind magic--what leads the mind to believe tricks are real and how magicians actually use the brain's own logic to acheive this.'"--Phillip Manning, Science Book News

"Sleights of Mind makes brain science so much fun, you’ll swear the authors are as clever as Houdini."--Scientific American Book Club

"If you want to learn more about "neuromagic," take a peek at Macknik and Martinez-Conde's most recent book. It explains how they've investigated the tricks of some of the world's greatest magicians to find out how the brain works in everyday situations. It's a great read whether you're passionate about brain science, magic, or both!"--Odyssey Magazine (Editor's Choice)

About the Author

Stephen L. Macknik, Ph.D., is Director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. Susana Martinez-Conde, Ph.D., is Director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at BNI. Sandra Blakeslee is a regular contributor to "Science Times" at The New York Times who specializes in the brain sciences, and the author of several books.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1 edition (November 9, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805092811
• ISBN-13: 978-0805092813
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #79,231 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #15 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Puzzles & Games > Magic

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 54 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Now You See It! December 16, 2010

By R. Hardy HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

It is hard not to pay attention to optical illusions, and wonder how can it be that one line is _not_ really longer than the other or one circle is _not_ really darker than the other or all the other varieties that tell us our eyes lie to us. It was only a few decades ago that neuroscientists realized that the mistakes in visual processing were tools to examine how the eyes and brain process information. (It was also a reminder of the wonderful and mysterious lesson that our brains do not make perfect inner models of reality, but only use the tricks and shortcuts descended from their evolution to make useful, rather than exact, models.) In a way, magicians perform optical illusions and even behavioral illusions. You enjoy a magician's performance because although it looks as if he makes coins manifest from the air or makes a ball vanish when he throws it up, you know that such things cannot really be and yet you cannot figure out how the impression the magician makes is so strong. If we can get neurological understanding of the visual system from optical illusions, perhaps the illusions performed by magicians would offer an even broader range of tools to evaluate brain function. This was the insight of Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde. They are both directors of neuroscience labs and they are married. Because they had done research on visual illusions, they hosted a conference in 2005 in Las Vegas, and were reminded that it was headquarters for some of the best magicians in the world. They got the insight that magic could be studied to gain understanding of perception and even consciousness. They even became certified magicians. You might not be able to get through any of their scientific papers on the subject, but here (written with Sandra Blakeslee) is _Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions_ (Henry Holt), a delightful and illuminating book about how magicians in many ways take advantage of our brains' imperfect modeling of reality and what this tells us about how the brains work.

The immediate attraction to this book for many people will be that it gives magic secrets away. The authors have conscientiously marked all such explanations with a "Spoiler Alert," so that if you still want to be baffled you can skip the explanation. Of course you will be missing all the fun and insight, and it is hard to imagine anyone that would resist looking at the spoilers. Even more important is that knowing the trick doesn't make it any less of a trick; the authors still go to magic shows and still are fooled. The hardwired processes of paying attention cannot be overcome, but they can be hacked, and this is what magicians do. A magician who produces a live dove, for instance, knows that you cannot help but pay attention to the flapping of the dove. While the spotlight of that attention is on the dove, who knows what might be manipulated outside the spotlight? The authors describe with good humor and charm their attempts to become full-fledged performing magicians, and the difficulties involved. Skill with the hands is important, but not as important as you might think. "Pulling off these simple sleights requires about as much dexterity as you need when learning how to shuffle a deck of cards for the first time." The reason that a magician can so easily take your attention away from the mechanics of the trick is that we are so bad at multitasking. There has been a decade of research on multitasking, long before the authors got interested in magic. Multitaskers just don't get all the tasks done as well as those who are doing one thing at a time. Those who couple the task of driving with the task of talking on a cell phone, even if the phone is hands-free, are able to pay as little attention to the road as drunks do. There are wonderful examples in the book of magicians (or psychologists doing experiments) who do such things as literally riding around on a unicycle in a clown suit without being noticed because attention is elsewhere. Remember, too, that a good patter is not just the mark of a smooth performance; the magician who tells jokes, witty or corny, is counting on your mind to be occupied with the humor so that it can't do much else.

The authors have no concern that pushing scientific investigation of magical feats will make them any less magical, any more than Copernicus diminished the beauties of sunsets. In fact, they are doing what magicians have been doing all along: "Magicians basically do cognitive science experiments for audiences all night long, and they may be even more effective than we scientists are in the lab." And it may well be that armed with better understanding of how magic works, the authors can improve the effectiveness of their own tricks and those of other magicians. Their book reads well as a summary of a personal quest for scientific and magical understanding, and one of the best things about it is that it refers repeatedly to their website where you can see the specific magic effects themselves. Their book is a delightful tour of magic techniques; but in showing the techniques this way, abracadabra, the authors have induced the reader to learn some serious neuroscience as well.

41 of 50 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Blakeslee & Son Really Shine In This Book December 2, 2010

By Samuel M. Randolph

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

If you are familiar with the prior writings of Sandra Blakeslee and her son Michael, who provided the writing talent for "Sleights of Mind" and co wrote her last book "The Body Has a Mind of Its Own" you will love this latest product of a very talented mother and son science writing team.

Though dated, her prior book "On Intelligence" with Jeff Hawkins, was a quick and concise read that is still one of the best sources on the topic of reverse engineering of the neocortex. I was hoping that this latest project would stand up to the standards of her two prior books, and I wasn't disappointed with the quality of this project - it's just as good. Major insights are offered from a fresh perspective, and it's a speedy read that you can recommend to others.

The contributions of Macknik and Martinez-Conde are far from stuffy. They obviously have had a great time as a couple exploring their areas of expertise through the lens of magic performance, and with the kind help of experts who bring a powerful sense of depth and history to the presentation.

The material is original and it's been presented in a clear and easy to follow format with illustrations provided when needed. This book overcomes one of the objections that I had to Blakeslee's last book, which was the lack of references.

I find it interesting to see that Blakeslee has returned to the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix for this new project, which was also the source of some of the best materials in The Body Has a Mind of Its Own. For more on this back story, you may wish to refer to two interviews of Blakeslee by Ginger Campbell see brainsciencepodcast.com episodes 21 and 23 for more on that project. My take on the the chicanery that can take place in the brain comes from experiences with handedness reversals, as discussed in "Hidden Handedness" which provides yet another illustration of the principle that our brains are the true virtuoso virtual reality machines, the place where the best magic shows are always happening.

My thanks to all of the team members who worked together to produce this important book.

Samuel Randolph

22 of 26 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars It all depends June 8, 2011

By J. M. Walker

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

on what you're looking for. If you want an explanation of magic in terms of neuroscience, it's good; if you want to understand neuroscience better by understanding magic, it's disappointing.

The descriptions of the magic are a little breathless but clear.
What the magic reveals about neurocognition is presented in a short-hand way that non-specialists may find unhelpful.
Little of the authors' self-reference moves the book forward.

Norretranders, The User Illusion, is simultaneously more engaging and clearer on the neuroscience underlying consciousness.

Caveat: I read through page 54 and skimmed from there to the end.