Dr. Indre Viskontas mentioned this book in her Teaching Company Great Courses lecture series Brain Myths Exploded: Lessons from Neuroscience and I was all over it. Magic and neuroscience? The authors did a great job talking about how magicians (consciously and often unconsciously) take advantage of the way the brain works to fool and entertain you.

Magicians understand at a deeply intuitive level that you alone create your experience of reality, and, like [one magician], they exploit the fact that your brain does a staggering amount of outright confabulation in order to construct the mental simulation of reality known as “consciousness.”

They studied magic from the perspective of neuroscience, in addition to their own studies holding a Magic of Consciousness symposium in 2007

The idea behind [was] to show these researchers that magicians have much to teach them about the subjects of their life’s work: attention, perception, and even the holy grail, consciousness.

Examining the various sleights of mind and explaining each of them from an anatomical and physical frame, they offer a lot of insight into both. And in the end, they say

We’ve given some answers as to why you (and we) are so gullible: our brains create sensory afterimages, our memories are fallible, we make predictions that can be violated, and so on. But as we reflect on the reasons, we are drawn to one that stands above all others in explaining the neurobiology of magic—the spotlight of attention.
[...]
A crucial take-home lesson from this journey through neuromagic is that when you are confronted with the uncertainty of a complex decision with lots of variables, you cannot always anticipate what will turn out to be most important factor, because of the suppressive and enhancing effects of your own attention. To overcome this, you must cast your attentional spotlight over each detail of the decision in turn, even if some initially appear insignificant or ephemeral.

And after all the study "The more we learn about magic, the more interested we become as consumers." Me, too. One complaint about the book is the less than useful Notes section. No references in the text. Stumble across it at the end, and they are the oh so annoying sentence snippet with the accompanying note. Not even a page number to try to locate said snippet. Disappointing enough to ding a star. Not really. But almost. I liked the SPOILER ALERTs each time they explained a magic trick. Some I knew, but can't do without the thousands of hours of practice. Some were enlightening. And even though I "was all over it", I did set it aside while moving, and turning over at my old job, and vacationing, and ... well, I got back to it and was all over it again.

A few selected highlights...

One of the smarter magicians (note: they are all smart! They have to be.) observed:

“Much of our life is devoted to understanding cause and effect,” Teller says. “Magic provides a playground for those rational skills. It is the theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality but that, in our hearts, ought to. It is rather like a joke. There is a logical, even if nonsensical, progression to it. When the climax of a trick is reached, there is a little explosion of shivery pleasure when what we see collides with what we know about physical reality.”

On memory, this reinforced what I already knew:

Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, and an authority on the malleability of memory, is famous for having shown in the 1990s that some psychiatrists and other mental health professionals implanted so-called repressed (and later recovered) memories in the minds of their patients.
[...]
Our colleague Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University who studies memory and emotions, says that he used to think a memory was something stored in the brain and accessed when needed. But a researcher in his lab, Karim Nader, convinced him otherwise. Nader demonstrated that each time a memory is used, it has to be re-stored as a new memory in order to be accessed later. The old memory is either gone or inaccessible.
[...]
Thus your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it.

I have never been chosen for jury duty, but if I am ever interviewed, I'll be asking if the lawyers know about Dr. Loftus.

I loved this assessment of psychics: "We concluded that if magicians are artists of attention and awareness, psychics are poseurs of false wizardry." ( )

These people named their kid ' Iago ' ( what does neuroscience have to say about that ) { Interesting but despite their claim in the introduction, I doubt this kind of stuff is going to be what solves the problem of consciousness and cracks the neural code. But every bit helps ! ) ( )

Better off reading other books.

Overpromised , underdelivered. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )