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    Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions
    Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions
    Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions
    Audiobook10 hours

    Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions

    Written by Sandra Blakeslee, Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde

    Narrated by Lloyd James

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    About this audiobook

    Have you ever wondered how a magician saws a woman in half? Or makes coins materialize out of thin air? Or reads your mind? Magic tricks work because humans have a hardwired process of attention and awareness that is hackable. A good magician uses your mind's intrinsic properties against you in a form of mental jujitsu, to fool you every time, even when you know full well that you are being tricked.

    Now Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, the founders of the exciting new discipline of neuromagic, have convinced some of the world's greatest magicians to reveal their techniques for tricking the brain. This fascinating book is the result of the authors' worldwide exploration of magic and how its ancient principles can now be explained using the latest discoveries of cognitive neuroscience.

    The secrets behind magic tricks reveal how your brain works not just when watching a magic show but in everyday situations. For instance, if you've ever found yourself paying for 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. By popping the hood on your brain as you are suckered in by sleights of hand, Macknik and Martinez-Conde unveil the key connections between magic and the mind, and along the way make neuroscience more exciting and accessible than ever before.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 9, 2010
    ISBN9781400189908
    Author

    Sandra Blakeslee

    Sandra Blakeslee has been writing about science and medicine for The New York Times for more than thirty years and is the co-author of Phantoms in the Brain by V. S. Ramachandran and of Judith Wallerstein's bestselling books on psychology and marriage. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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    Reviews for Sleights of Mind

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      For insight into magic and more insight into the way your mind works, read "Sleights of Mind." The information about focus and multitasking has stuck with me the most. The data shows that I should focus on the task at hand, especially doing something unpredictable and potentially dangerous such as driving. Our minds like to perceive that driving is predictable (the roadway will be clear, other drivers will follow the rules of the road) which makes us vulnerable to unpredictably. The epilogue of practical implications from the neuroscience is a handy summary.
    • 1/5
      Better off reading other books.

      Overpromised , underdelivered.
    • 4/5
      The authors, a husband-and-wife team of neuroscience researchers, became interested in stage magic because they were curious about whether the tricks that magicians use to fool people could be useful in setting up psychological experiments. But they quickly came to realize that magicians actually have a remarkable amount of practical knowledge of how human perception works, and that there's a lot for scientists to learn from studying their art. So they flung themselves into the world of magic, learned the tricks of the trade, and, with this book, they report back on what they've discovered in the intersection between science and sleight of hand.It's a pleasantly written, very readable book, with just the right amount of personal touch. The writers are fun people to hang out with for a couple hundred pages, and clearly enthusiastic about every aspect of their subject matter. It's completely impossible not to smile when they describe the charmingly dorky brain science-themed stage act they themselves developed and performed.There is a bit less technical depth than I'd expected going in. There are, in the early chapters, some explanations about how the firings of our neurons makes up our picture of the world, but it's not all that detailed, and for the most part the book sticks to fairly broad descriptions of how perception, attention, and memory work. A lot of that stuff I was already familiar with, but it was extremely interesting to view it through the lens of magic, and to view magic in light of the science. Also interesting were the discussions of how certain kinds of magic tricks are done, and why the nature of the audience's brains allow them to work. The authors, by the way, are scrupulously careful to label each such explanation with a spoiler warning, according to the magician's code of ethics, which says that no one should learn the secrets of a trick by accident. But, personally, I find that learning how this stuff is done enhances, rather than spoils, my appreciation for the magician's art.Definitely recommended for people who are interested in human perceptions and/or magic, but want to read something that's not too technical about either subject.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely fascinating look at the ways your brain constructs your perception of reality, and the ways that magic illuminates and manipulates them. Extremely interesting and highly readable.
    • 4/5
      Great book, easy read, neuro-scientists use stage magic (illusions) to explain how the brain perceives (and often
      mis-perceives) reality.

      SPOILER ALEART: The secrets behind many tricks are revealed, but these are clearly marked in the text, so you can skip them if you which, but that would be missing the point of the book.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating and very readable. The authors' enthusiasm for the subject matter is infectious and made for easy reading. Using magic to explain neuroscience was a genius stroke.
    • 4/5
      Work on attention and distraction (gorillas in our midst, if you’ve read about that experiment) as translated through what working magicians already know about how to distract people or create visual illusions through appropriately sequenced movement. My favorite result in this book: it turns out that people susceptible to hypnosis can be hypnotized so that, when they hear a triggering sound, they see words as mere gibberish. This allows them to perform really well on the Stroop test because they see only colors, not conflicting color words; people who aren’t susceptible to hypnosis are unimproved. We still don’t know exactly what’s going on with hypnosis, but there’s something; if it’s an illusion, it’s a real one.
    • 4/5
      For insight into magic and more insight into the way your mind works, read "Sleights of Mind." The information about focus and multitasking has stuck with me the most. The data shows that I should focus on the task at hand, especially doing something unpredictable and potentially dangerous such as driving. Our minds like to perceive that driving is predictable (the roadway will be clear, other drivers will follow the rules of the road) which makes us vulnerable to unpredictably. The epilogue of practical implications from the neuroscience is a handy summary.
    • 3/5
      A passably diverting book but not quite the reveal that its authors think it is. Said authors - there are three of them, and their book verily feels like it's been written by a committee - are neuroscientists of some sort whose program is to explore the neurological foibles of the human brain. Foibles which, they declare, have been exploited by conjurers and magicians over the centuries, and only by dint of which is "magic" seen to work at all. While the authorial committee laments a lost empirical opportunity that has been there for millennia - there are, they contend, newly-found discoveries in neuroscience that conjurers have known (and exploited) since the time of Aristotle - I'm not so sure. Note, for one thing, the telltale reductionist ethos right away: supposing magicians unwittingly exploit neuroscience is a bit like claiming (as is frequently done by like-minded scientists) that a boundary fielder unconsciously performs differential equations in order to catch a ball. He doesn't, nor do conjurers intuit neuroscience, and nor, really, does the authorial committee do much to persuade a skeptical reader that neuroscience has much to say about magic in the first place, at least not that isn't more easily explained without recourse to pointy heads (as opposed to pointy hats). At best, the authorial committee is able to make neuroscience (being a real, granular physical science concerning itself with photons falling on optical nerves, neurons firing in pre frontal cortices - that sort of thing) *consistent* with the observed effects of magic on the *psychology* of an audience. Cue pat observations about the causation fallacy: That's a different and less remarkable thing (it would be far more remarkable if they couldn't reconcile the two). Yet it is increasingly common for scientists to conflate them, an over-reach which isn't useful, helpful or smart. When the trick in question involves misdirection, as nearly all magic does, or the confounding of carefully laid assumptions (the "double lift" of nearly all card chicanery, for example), it seems to me there is little of interest that neuroscience (as opposed to psychology or even plain old common sense) can tell us. This book is more interesting on magic than science, that is to say. There are a few tricks of the trade that are exposed through carefully sign-posted "spoilers", though the explanation is inevitably cursory and often not of the part of the trick that is genuinely baffling. (I can understand how a card can be misdirected away from the place I think it has been put, and this is explained: it's harder to explain how it would up inside an intact orange: this isn't.) This book is most interesting for its explanation of magic tricks which, the authors freely admit, are more fulsomely explained on YouTube. The neuroscience is less essential and certainly you will only agree with Steven Pinker's plainly hyperbolic assessment ("this is the book we've all been waiting for") if you really are easily pleased. Or fooled.