What do you think?
Rate this book
Los engaños de la mente
Cucharas que se doblan sin tocarlas, sillas que desaparecen ante nuestros ojos, mujeres serradas por la mitad que siguen moviendo las piernas, monedas que se multiplican en una mano vacía, cartas que se mueven por sí solas dentro de la baraja… Está claro, los espectáculos de magia juegan con nuestra mente. Pero ¿cómo? Stephen Macknik y Susana Martínez-Conde, que dirigen sendos laboratorios neurocientíficos en Phoenix, han convencido a un selecto grupo de magos de todo el mundo para que les permitan estudiar algunas de sus técnicas, revelar sus secretos e investigar las implicaciones de sus descubrimientos en el campo de la neurociencia. Un libro tan hipnótico, brillante y entretenido como el mejor truco.
400 pages, Paperback
First published November 2, 2010
246 people are currently reading
5084 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 183 reviews
February 23, 2022
Q:
Chronic multitaskers “are suckers for irrelevancy,” says Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass. “Everything distracts them.” They can’t ignore things, can’t remember as well, and have weaker self-control. (c) Too true!
Chronic multitaskers “are suckers for irrelevancy,” says Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass. “Everything distracts them.” They can’t ignore things, can’t remember as well, and have weaker self-control. (c) Too true!
Read
April 12, 2019Absolutely fascinating explainer of how our brains, and specifically the way vision works, allow us to be fooled by magic. The key takeaway here is that we pay far less attention than we think and see far less than we think. Goes into a lot of details on tricks, so avoid if you don't want spoilers. I have read a few books on the psychology of magic but tbh the neuroscience is far more enlightening.
February 19, 2012
I really enjoyed this book. It was a combination of two interests that I've had for a long time, but haven't really focused on: Magic and neuroscience.
My degree is in cognitive science, which is really what this book focuses on. I'm fascinated to see many of the concepts that I studied in school illustrated with examples of how magicians exploit these concepts in real life. Stephen and Susana don't so much explain *how* tricks work (though there is a certain amount of that - all with an indicating spoiler alert so that you don't accidentally learn if you don't want to)... this book focuses on *why* tricks work. Essentially explaining how magicians hack the cognitive processes of their audiences to perform small miracles.
As an amateur magician/magic fanboy, I was extremely excited to hear some of the great magicians explain to scientists what they did and try to go through the scientific discovery process to figure out why. Some of my personal heroes such as Teller and the Amazing Randi, participate in discussions and offer their views on the psychology of how their magic works, leading to hypotheses for scientists to test. It's a great view of collaboration between magic and science.
I don't necessarily think that this book is for everyone. I have very specific interests in this book due to my education, and personally interest in magic. If someone wants to learn magic, there are other fine books to learn from, or the power of the internet. If you are a hard core neuroscientist, then it might be of interest to see how magicians use many of the principles that you are investigating in real life... but you certainly won't find anything earth-shattering here.
But for the sweet spot of someone who has interests in both neuroscience and magic, this book is a gem.
My degree is in cognitive science, which is really what this book focuses on. I'm fascinated to see many of the concepts that I studied in school illustrated with examples of how magicians exploit these concepts in real life. Stephen and Susana don't so much explain *how* tricks work (though there is a certain amount of that - all with an indicating spoiler alert so that you don't accidentally learn if you don't want to)... this book focuses on *why* tricks work. Essentially explaining how magicians hack the cognitive processes of their audiences to perform small miracles.
As an amateur magician/magic fanboy, I was extremely excited to hear some of the great magicians explain to scientists what they did and try to go through the scientific discovery process to figure out why. Some of my personal heroes such as Teller and the Amazing Randi, participate in discussions and offer their views on the psychology of how their magic works, leading to hypotheses for scientists to test. It's a great view of collaboration between magic and science.
I don't necessarily think that this book is for everyone. I have very specific interests in this book due to my education, and personally interest in magic. If someone wants to learn magic, there are other fine books to learn from, or the power of the internet. If you are a hard core neuroscientist, then it might be of interest to see how magicians use many of the principles that you are investigating in real life... but you certainly won't find anything earth-shattering here.
But for the sweet spot of someone who has interests in both neuroscience and magic, this book is a gem.
October 2, 2019
This book was awesome, amazing, fantastical, & magical! Magicology? Yes, please! Neuromagic? Yes, please? The husband & wife team of authors essentially explain in scientific facts the secrets behind the magic we see everyday. Appearing coins, a psychic, the magician whom can predict whichever card me choose at "random" (note the ""), a floating assistant.
What is the secret? Ourselves. Optical illusions, sleight of hand, attention receptors in our brains, etcetera. The most interesting part is that even when we know exactly what we are looking for, we are still fooled. Why? Because it is the way our brains work. For example, we are told exactly how a magician chooses that Ace of Hearts. We watch him carefully the next time, in order to see it. Yet we see nothing amiss. From our angle, it will always appear as if he is drawing from the middle of the deck. Although we know the truth, we cannot see. Why? Because our brains can only focus on one area at a time. We are essentially operating with blinders on. And the magicians know this. Maybe not in scientific terms, but they know enough to take advantage of the audience's vulnerable areas.
My one primary problem was with the structure. Obviously more adept with academic writing than narrative storytelling, the authors nevertheless often referred to themselves in the third person; at times it felt more like reading an uninteresting chronicle of their adventure in establishing this academic niche, a diary of sorts. Irrelevant, unnecessary thoughts, ideas, insights were added in that were in contrast to the rest of the well-structured, academic writing (i.e., when the couple auditioned for The Magic Castle, Hollywood's elite magician's group) Likewise, their use of glaring icons to delineate whenever they were about to "reveal magician secrets" became annoying very early on, deterring not only from the flow of reading but from the overall pleasure of reading. While I understand their need for a disclaimer considering their invcemrnt with overly secretive magicians, the one time was enough. We, as readers, are mature enough to choose to read this only if we are interested in learning about it all. I highly doubt someone not interested in these said secrets would even consider the title, let alone sift through the ridiculous amounts of these sections, ranging anywhere from a couple sentences to several pages.
Always skeptical & never a believer in true magic, I especially loved this title for its ability to finally out into words; into scientific fact that I was right. Here is the evidence that magic does not exist. At least in a pure way. But does that make magic any less fun, any less fascinating to observe? On the contrary! Now that I know how it plays with our brains, true superpowers in this universe, I find myself all the more amazed. Now it is no longer a vague illusion, but something I can begin to understand, & therefore appreciate!
Another thing I loved about this is how it applies to each of us in all areas of our lives. For example, readers learn how important it is to focus diligently on one thing at a time (multitasking is a myth; our capacity to perform is always somewhat, even minimally, diminished when we do more than one thing; our brains are simply not created for it).
I look forward to following these two neuromagicscientists on their website for further updates. Their website, by the way, is an ideal accompaniment to the reading: http://www.sleightsofmind.com I highly recommend exploring it!
What is the secret? Ourselves. Optical illusions, sleight of hand, attention receptors in our brains, etcetera. The most interesting part is that even when we know exactly what we are looking for, we are still fooled. Why? Because it is the way our brains work. For example, we are told exactly how a magician chooses that Ace of Hearts. We watch him carefully the next time, in order to see it. Yet we see nothing amiss. From our angle, it will always appear as if he is drawing from the middle of the deck. Although we know the truth, we cannot see. Why? Because our brains can only focus on one area at a time. We are essentially operating with blinders on. And the magicians know this. Maybe not in scientific terms, but they know enough to take advantage of the audience's vulnerable areas.
My one primary problem was with the structure. Obviously more adept with academic writing than narrative storytelling, the authors nevertheless often referred to themselves in the third person; at times it felt more like reading an uninteresting chronicle of their adventure in establishing this academic niche, a diary of sorts. Irrelevant, unnecessary thoughts, ideas, insights were added in that were in contrast to the rest of the well-structured, academic writing (i.e., when the couple auditioned for The Magic Castle, Hollywood's elite magician's group) Likewise, their use of glaring icons to delineate whenever they were about to "reveal magician secrets" became annoying very early on, deterring not only from the flow of reading but from the overall pleasure of reading. While I understand their need for a disclaimer considering their invcemrnt with overly secretive magicians, the one time was enough. We, as readers, are mature enough to choose to read this only if we are interested in learning about it all. I highly doubt someone not interested in these said secrets would even consider the title, let alone sift through the ridiculous amounts of these sections, ranging anywhere from a couple sentences to several pages.
Always skeptical & never a believer in true magic, I especially loved this title for its ability to finally out into words; into scientific fact that I was right. Here is the evidence that magic does not exist. At least in a pure way. But does that make magic any less fun, any less fascinating to observe? On the contrary! Now that I know how it plays with our brains, true superpowers in this universe, I find myself all the more amazed. Now it is no longer a vague illusion, but something I can begin to understand, & therefore appreciate!
Another thing I loved about this is how it applies to each of us in all areas of our lives. For example, readers learn how important it is to focus diligently on one thing at a time (multitasking is a myth; our capacity to perform is always somewhat, even minimally, diminished when we do more than one thing; our brains are simply not created for it).
I look forward to following these two neuromagicscientists on their website for further updates. Their website, by the way, is an ideal accompaniment to the reading: http://www.sleightsofmind.com I highly recommend exploring it!
November 10, 2019
An enjoyable non-fiction book that explains the neuroscience behind magic tricks. It is entertaining but did get a little repetitive as a lot of the tricks seemed to be variations on a theme. The author seemed to keep switching between first and third person too which wound me up.
November 4, 2017
As far as popular science books go, this is way light, the authors are neuroscientists, but the book could be easily written by an amateur. OK, theoretically one could say that about most books for non-specialists, but there's something in many popular science books, perhaps the clarity of language and thought, that suggests the author is indeed an expert. Not here.
Practically, to describe the book, in every section it goes more or less in the following way.
There's a brief self-referential story about the authors, sometimes involving this or that random scientific, social or entertainment event they arranged (with some scientific pretext). We learn about the authors' website, the husband's projects, the wife's Spanish background and pregnancy as well as other such things. In fairness, there's a loose pretext which connects to attention or perception usually, and the personal parts aren't extensive, usually a few lines or sentences, but they occur very often and are dispersed throughout most sections of the book.
Then, there's a description of the magician (looks, demeanour, etc). My favourite description: "he looks like a cross between the seductive French president Nicolas Sarkozy and the swashbuckling actor Errol Flynn". Seductive Sarkozy? Perception is indeed an overly complex issue!
Then, there's a description of the magician's typical act, an explanation of how it happened, and finally the neuroscience behind it.
It's a good structure, but it's spoiled by two things. Firstly, there are at least a few lines on more than half of all pages repeating the same things. That is, how amazing that magic and neuroscience share things, how magic can teach neuroscience, how for centuries artists were ahead of science and scientists were learning from painters, etc. On top of that, there are breathless, in awe descriptions of the magician's talent, how he's an instinctive expert in this or that neuroscience/cognitive phenomenon, etc. I'm not exaggerating about the frequency (I don't think so at least, I didn't count), sometimes the point is made subtly, sometimes not. But at the end, at least five or ten percent of the book consists of these vague, generic, "how amazing" repetitions. The point was clearly made in the intro, I got it.
Secondly, some explanations are somewhat interesting, but most are anticlimactic. This is partly the fault of the magic parts (many tricks sound boring when you explain them) but usually it's the neuroscience sections' fault. Most of the explanations seemed to me to rephrase common sense to scientific sounding terms. I copy paste a part below which explains how a standard pickpocketing routine is done. It goes on a bit after that, I could rephrase most of the excerpt to the five words "the magician distracts your attention", without missing too much.
Should say, two stars might be too low, it's an interesting book, but that "what the neuroscience of magic reveals about our brains" title plus the authors' stated intentions and background makes me rate this as an educational popular science book. As a a light book on magic and psychology, I'd have given three stars.
Excerpt.
Already neuroscientists have learned that attention refers to a number of different cognitive processes. You can pay attention to your television show voluntarily, which is one process (top-down attention), or your baby's crying can draw your attention away from the television, which is a different process (bottom-up attention). You can look right at what you're paying attention to (overt attention), or you can look at one thing while secretly paying attention to something else (covert attention). You can draw someone's gaze to a specific object by looking at it (joint attention), or you can simply not pay attention to anything in particular. Some of the brain mechanisms controlling these processes are beginning to be understood. For example, you have a "spotlight of attention", meaning that you have a limited capacity for attention. This restricts how much information you can take in from a region of visual space at any given time. When you attend to something, it's as if your mind aims a spotlight onto it. You actively ignore virtually everything else that's happening around your spotlight, giving you a kind of "tunnel vision". Magicians exploit this feature of your brain to maximum effect.
As mentioned, humans have the capacity for overt and covert attention. When a soccer goalie watches a soccer ball fly toward the goal, she's overtly attending to the ball. But that cagey forward on the opposing team, who is trying to make a shot toward the goal, may intentionally divert the goalie's attention from the ball by looking away from the goal, as if to non-verbally communicate "hey, look, I'm going to go over there next", when in fact the next turn will be in the opposite direction. The move is called a "head fake" in sports, and the idea is to trick the goalie into directing attentional resources to the wrong location. The forward, all along, may have looked toward the fictitious region of interest, but was instead covertly attending to the goal so as to plan her shot.
Practically, to describe the book, in every section it goes more or less in the following way.
There's a brief self-referential story about the authors, sometimes involving this or that random scientific, social or entertainment event they arranged (with some scientific pretext). We learn about the authors' website, the husband's projects, the wife's Spanish background and pregnancy as well as other such things. In fairness, there's a loose pretext which connects to attention or perception usually, and the personal parts aren't extensive, usually a few lines or sentences, but they occur very often and are dispersed throughout most sections of the book.
Then, there's a description of the magician (looks, demeanour, etc). My favourite description: "he looks like a cross between the seductive French president Nicolas Sarkozy and the swashbuckling actor Errol Flynn". Seductive Sarkozy? Perception is indeed an overly complex issue!
Then, there's a description of the magician's typical act, an explanation of how it happened, and finally the neuroscience behind it.
It's a good structure, but it's spoiled by two things. Firstly, there are at least a few lines on more than half of all pages repeating the same things. That is, how amazing that magic and neuroscience share things, how magic can teach neuroscience, how for centuries artists were ahead of science and scientists were learning from painters, etc. On top of that, there are breathless, in awe descriptions of the magician's talent, how he's an instinctive expert in this or that neuroscience/cognitive phenomenon, etc. I'm not exaggerating about the frequency (I don't think so at least, I didn't count), sometimes the point is made subtly, sometimes not. But at the end, at least five or ten percent of the book consists of these vague, generic, "how amazing" repetitions. The point was clearly made in the intro, I got it.
Secondly, some explanations are somewhat interesting, but most are anticlimactic. This is partly the fault of the magic parts (many tricks sound boring when you explain them) but usually it's the neuroscience sections' fault. Most of the explanations seemed to me to rephrase common sense to scientific sounding terms. I copy paste a part below which explains how a standard pickpocketing routine is done. It goes on a bit after that, I could rephrase most of the excerpt to the five words "the magician distracts your attention", without missing too much.
Should say, two stars might be too low, it's an interesting book, but that "what the neuroscience of magic reveals about our brains" title plus the authors' stated intentions and background makes me rate this as an educational popular science book. As a a light book on magic and psychology, I'd have given three stars.
Excerpt.
Already neuroscientists have learned that attention refers to a number of different cognitive processes. You can pay attention to your television show voluntarily, which is one process (top-down attention), or your baby's crying can draw your attention away from the television, which is a different process (bottom-up attention). You can look right at what you're paying attention to (overt attention), or you can look at one thing while secretly paying attention to something else (covert attention). You can draw someone's gaze to a specific object by looking at it (joint attention), or you can simply not pay attention to anything in particular. Some of the brain mechanisms controlling these processes are beginning to be understood. For example, you have a "spotlight of attention", meaning that you have a limited capacity for attention. This restricts how much information you can take in from a region of visual space at any given time. When you attend to something, it's as if your mind aims a spotlight onto it. You actively ignore virtually everything else that's happening around your spotlight, giving you a kind of "tunnel vision". Magicians exploit this feature of your brain to maximum effect.
As mentioned, humans have the capacity for overt and covert attention. When a soccer goalie watches a soccer ball fly toward the goal, she's overtly attending to the ball. But that cagey forward on the opposing team, who is trying to make a shot toward the goal, may intentionally divert the goalie's attention from the ball by looking away from the goal, as if to non-verbally communicate "hey, look, I'm going to go over there next", when in fact the next turn will be in the opposite direction. The move is called a "head fake" in sports, and the idea is to trick the goalie into directing attentional resources to the wrong location. The forward, all along, may have looked toward the fictitious region of interest, but was instead covertly attending to the goal so as to plan her shot.
March 27, 2011
Great book on how the mind perceives the world around it. We are constantly filling in the gaps. Making the pictures into movies. Whatever you call them "Magicians" have been tricking our brains into filling in the the gaps they want by directing our attention to to create the intended illusions.
Understanding these gaps can give you a new appreciation for everything you see. As well as understanding how much of the world you don't see.
Understanding these gaps can give you a new appreciation for everything you see. As well as understanding how much of the world you don't see.
February 13, 2013
The bits about how tricks are done were interesting, but the book seemed a bit padded out.
July 16, 2014
Excessive prestidigitation, insufficient neuroscience. meh.
1.5 stars
1.5 stars
March 22, 2016
Better off reading other books.
Overpromised , underdelivered.
Overpromised , underdelivered.
May 26, 2013
Wow - entertaining and fascinating coverage of human perception and how easily we're deceived by ourselves and others, even when we're expecting it!
The authors collaborated with magicians (Penn and Teller, among others) and master pickpocket, Apollo Robbins, to study and explain how and why their tricks work. The authors discovered along the way that many magicians have had a better intuitive understanding of how the mind works than many neuroscientists, and they train to become magicians themselves.
The narration was excellent, although I'd recommend a print edition of the book if you want to skip over the numerous "spoiler alerts", since that would be difficult to do with an audiobook.
I highly recommend this as a first book on neuroscience or cognitive science for the layman, especially if you're a fan of magic and/or non-technical explanations of how the mind works!
The authors collaborated with magicians (Penn and Teller, among others) and master pickpocket, Apollo Robbins, to study and explain how and why their tricks work. The authors discovered along the way that many magicians have had a better intuitive understanding of how the mind works than many neuroscientists, and they train to become magicians themselves.
The narration was excellent, although I'd recommend a print edition of the book if you want to skip over the numerous "spoiler alerts", since that would be difficult to do with an audiobook.
I highly recommend this as a first book on neuroscience or cognitive science for the layman, especially if you're a fan of magic and/or non-technical explanations of how the mind works!
August 13, 2021
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.
A few selected highlights...
One of the smarter magicians (note: they are all smart! They have to be.) observed:
On memory, this reinforced what I already knew:
I loved this assessment of psychics: "We concluded that if magicians are artists of attention and awareness, psychics are poseurs of false wizardry."
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.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 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.
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.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.
[...]
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 loved this assessment of psychics: "We concluded that if magicians are artists of attention and awareness, psychics are poseurs of false wizardry."
September 17, 2021
Neuroscientists have a slight problem; they lack skill in experimentation. How can you construct an experiment on concentration or attention without telling the subject what it is? Stephen L Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde are a married couple that happens to be neuroscientists. They thought about this issue and came up with a solution in Las Vegas.
Presdigitators such as Penn and Teller deceive their audience openly. An audience to a magic show knows that real magic isn't happening. The real trick is to manipulate the audience's perception.
Sleights of Mind is a book on how magicians manipulate your visual system and brain to make you believe their tricks. The book focuses on the attention system aspect of magic. The authors explain certain acts to the reader, but each one of those has a spoiler alert so that you may avoid the section entirely.
Sleights of Mind is enjoyable and informative. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
Presdigitators such as Penn and Teller deceive their audience openly. An audience to a magic show knows that real magic isn't happening. The real trick is to manipulate the audience's perception.
Sleights of Mind is a book on how magicians manipulate your visual system and brain to make you believe their tricks. The book focuses on the attention system aspect of magic. The authors explain certain acts to the reader, but each one of those has a spoiler alert so that you may avoid the section entirely.
Sleights of Mind is enjoyable and informative. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
June 26, 2018
Would recommend to anyone with only a casual understanding of how and why magic tricks work, explains illusions using neuroscience, helps understand people's behaviour in general. Well structured and balanced.
Agatha Heterodyne's paraphrase of Niven's law: “Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science!”
Agatha Heterodyne's paraphrase of Niven's law: “Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science!”
July 8, 2012
Sleights of Mind is a book about two neuroscientists (a husband and wife research team) and their attempts to learn and use magic tricks to further the ways that we can understand how the brain works, culminating in their attempt to join the Magic Circle. The authors stake the claim to be the first ‘neuromagicians’, but in truth all magicians are neuromagicians as all of them are using thousands of years of folk psychology to perform tricks that take advantage of our less-than-perfect, short-cut loving brains. Without experiments in a lab, magicians have, in their own way, discovered how to take advantage of our limited attention span (both in time and space with things like change and choice blindness), the placebo effect, false memories, priming, habituation and our propensity towards confabulation. Magicians have laid the groundwork for how to trick the brain and neuroscience is only very recently starting to get to grips with why the tricks work.
There’s a strong sceptical, anti-pseudoscience theme running through the book; it’s not just about card tricks and illusions, but also hot and cold psychic reading, how pseudoscience and misinformation evolve and spread and - and it chucks in a discussion of free will, too. Each chapter covers a type or theme of trick, which the authors then dissect and explain with the help of an impressive list of world-famous magicians, including James Randi and Penn & Teller. At first I found the little spoiler alerts that flag the beginning of the explanation of each trick a little annoying, but they later explain that it’s their way of sticking to part of the magician’s code which states that the secrets of a trick should never be accidentally revealed; if you want to learn the neuroscience but not necessarily how the trick is done then you can skip the spoilers and still get a lot of this book, which now that I think about it, is great.
One of the best things about the book is, recognising that descriptions of tricks don’t do them any justice, that provide references to lots of videos on their site which show and explain some of the tricks they discuss. They’re a lot of fun if you have a few hours to kill and want to learn whilst being wowed and entertained.
There was little less neuroscience than I was expecting, so I’m not sure there’s much in it for people that are already aware of how the most common illusions work, but I’m not sure that the book is any less interesting for it because I got to learn a lot about the things like the history of magic instead (Harry Houdini became a skeptic after Arthur Conan Doyle’s wife tried to contact his dead mother and made a complete hash of it), and there are lots of interesting looking referenced listed in the notes which I guess I can follow up.
The book is also written is littered with personal references (like leaving their sleeping son, Iago, in his stroller whilst they go talk to a magician), which in some ways makes it a little more accessible than the average book on neuroscience, but I found it a tad distracting and irritating. The narrative also jumps quite frequently from being in the first plural to third person singular, which is sometimes necessary given that there are two authors, but still jarring.
The writing is charming and self-aware (“What he calls personal space, know scientists know as peripersonal space. (Scientists can bever resist a good game of Pin the Greco-Latin Root on the Simple Word.)” and I’m glad the person I met at Oslo Skeptics recommended it to me. Even if you read the book in its entirety it won’t spoil the next magic trick you see; your brain is still easily fooled even if it knows it’s being fooled and knowing how the trick works but still falling for it makes it even more magical.
There’s a strong sceptical, anti-pseudoscience theme running through the book; it’s not just about card tricks and illusions, but also hot and cold psychic reading, how pseudoscience and misinformation evolve and spread and - and it chucks in a discussion of free will, too. Each chapter covers a type or theme of trick, which the authors then dissect and explain with the help of an impressive list of world-famous magicians, including James Randi and Penn & Teller. At first I found the little spoiler alerts that flag the beginning of the explanation of each trick a little annoying, but they later explain that it’s their way of sticking to part of the magician’s code which states that the secrets of a trick should never be accidentally revealed; if you want to learn the neuroscience but not necessarily how the trick is done then you can skip the spoilers and still get a lot of this book, which now that I think about it, is great.
One of the best things about the book is, recognising that descriptions of tricks don’t do them any justice, that provide references to lots of videos on their site which show and explain some of the tricks they discuss. They’re a lot of fun if you have a few hours to kill and want to learn whilst being wowed and entertained.
There was little less neuroscience than I was expecting, so I’m not sure there’s much in it for people that are already aware of how the most common illusions work, but I’m not sure that the book is any less interesting for it because I got to learn a lot about the things like the history of magic instead (Harry Houdini became a skeptic after Arthur Conan Doyle’s wife tried to contact his dead mother and made a complete hash of it), and there are lots of interesting looking referenced listed in the notes which I guess I can follow up.
The book is also written is littered with personal references (like leaving their sleeping son, Iago, in his stroller whilst they go talk to a magician), which in some ways makes it a little more accessible than the average book on neuroscience, but I found it a tad distracting and irritating. The narrative also jumps quite frequently from being in the first plural to third person singular, which is sometimes necessary given that there are two authors, but still jarring.
The writing is charming and self-aware (“What he calls personal space, know scientists know as peripersonal space. (Scientists can bever resist a good game of Pin the Greco-Latin Root on the Simple Word.)” and I’m glad the person I met at Oslo Skeptics recommended it to me. Even if you read the book in its entirety it won’t spoil the next magic trick you see; your brain is still easily fooled even if it knows it’s being fooled and knowing how the trick works but still falling for it makes it even more magical.
January 10, 2011
An excellent if — obviously — idiosyncratic addition to the Popular Cognition genre.
Macknik and Martinez-Conde, spouses and neuroscientists, began to examine how magic works for the insights into cognition, and were seduced by the craft, which after all has been implicitly accumulating knowledge about how our minds work for centuries. In hindsight, the attraction in obvious: as they describe, magicians are artists whose manipulate not form and color, but attention and cognition. Just as a painter implicitly relies on how our vision works to produce beauty on the canvas, a magician implicitly relies on aspects of cognition that are only now available for study.
Tricks of magic involve many of the same “flaws” in cognition that are explored in other books, such as Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and Gilovich’s How We Know What Isn’t So. But Macknik and Martinez-Conde draw our attention to what was implicit in some of those earlier arguments: these aren‘t flaws, just understandable compromises that sometimes have peculiar side effects. Our brains only have a limited energy budget, for example, so it is perfectly comprehensible that the organ would simply stop paying attention to things we consistently ignore. So people can drive down a street and not notice that bicyclist until a terrible accident — they literally didn’t see them because they’d implicitly trained their brains to pay attention only to cars. Back on the savanna, our ancestors could save precious calories by only focusing on what mattered: the bright red of ripe fruit, the rustle of leaves that might indicate a lioness, the smooth but camouflaged surface of a python dangling overhead. They probably wouldn’t have seen the bicyclist either.
The only problem the authors here face is that the discussion of magic tricks and how they are done is so engrossing that the background cognition and neurology feels boring in comparison. It’s like the intermittent reinforcement that hooks gamblers: you’re so looking forward to that next “hit” of revealed magic that the intervening pages seem less interesting, more quotidian.
Nevertheless, a very fun and interesting book, and quite a worthwhile addition to anyone that enjoys PopCog.
Macknik and Martinez-Conde, spouses and neuroscientists, began to examine how magic works for the insights into cognition, and were seduced by the craft, which after all has been implicitly accumulating knowledge about how our minds work for centuries. In hindsight, the attraction in obvious: as they describe, magicians are artists whose manipulate not form and color, but attention and cognition. Just as a painter implicitly relies on how our vision works to produce beauty on the canvas, a magician implicitly relies on aspects of cognition that are only now available for study.
Tricks of magic involve many of the same “flaws” in cognition that are explored in other books, such as Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and Gilovich’s How We Know What Isn’t So. But Macknik and Martinez-Conde draw our attention to what was implicit in some of those earlier arguments: these aren‘t flaws, just understandable compromises that sometimes have peculiar side effects. Our brains only have a limited energy budget, for example, so it is perfectly comprehensible that the organ would simply stop paying attention to things we consistently ignore. So people can drive down a street and not notice that bicyclist until a terrible accident — they literally didn’t see them because they’d implicitly trained their brains to pay attention only to cars. Back on the savanna, our ancestors could save precious calories by only focusing on what mattered: the bright red of ripe fruit, the rustle of leaves that might indicate a lioness, the smooth but camouflaged surface of a python dangling overhead. They probably wouldn’t have seen the bicyclist either.
The only problem the authors here face is that the discussion of magic tricks and how they are done is so engrossing that the background cognition and neurology feels boring in comparison. It’s like the intermittent reinforcement that hooks gamblers: you’re so looking forward to that next “hit” of revealed magic that the intervening pages seem less interesting, more quotidian.
Nevertheless, a very fun and interesting book, and quite a worthwhile addition to anyone that enjoys PopCog.
October 21, 2019
Interesting insights on how deception works on the stage and in the brain.
October 13, 2019
Even if you just want to know how magic tricks are done, this is a great book, but to learn the WHY on top of that takes this book to the next level. Brilliant! It explains in a simple way (using science and examples) why magic works so well on the human brain, covering a wide variety of trick types, everything from slight-of-hand to clairvoyance and the different neuro-shortcuts that skilled magicians take advantage of to make the world appear magical.
Along the way is wonderful insight into our lovably lazy brain that does everything it can to take shortcuts but pretends it doesn't. We are astonishingly easy to fool and this book explains why! One of those books where I look at the world a little differently (and magic tricks a LOT differently) after reading.
Along the way is wonderful insight into our lovably lazy brain that does everything it can to take shortcuts but pretends it doesn't. We are astonishingly easy to fool and this book explains why! One of those books where I look at the world a little differently (and magic tricks a LOT differently) after reading.
January 11, 2015
I heard about this book from a friend in the transmedia business (many of whom seem to fancy themselves as modern-day magicians, or even alchemists), and thought I'd dive into it. Two neuroscientists take on the task of explaining how our mind, especially the information processing aspects of our visual and cerebral equipment, actually get used by A-list magicians to achieve their sleights of hand, hence the title. We learn a lot about where and how the receptors and processing occurs, and many "secrets" of the magic trade, all of which are somewhat tiresomely bracketed by "spoiler alert" graphics. The style is tedious, and I stopped wanting to know more, but I'm glad I checked it out. Inexplicably, I'm not a magic junkie, so I guess if you are, you'd love this book more than I did.
January 14, 2012
Magic is one of those popular topics amongst skeptics that I just haven't been able to get that excited about. I thought perhaps this book would change that, but it didn't. Whilst I found a lot of the neuroscience aspects really interesting, and found the simplicity of most magic tricks stunning, in the end I just couldn't really engage in this book like I do with other popular skeptical books. I thought the authors both had excellent writing voices that made the book far more interesting than it would have been to me otherwise, but as far as making me interested in magic, it missed the mark for me. Probably more my lack of interest than the authors' abilities.
January 31, 2013
Un libro que une ciencia y magia. Nos desvela los mecanismos de nuestro cerebro gracias a los cuáles la magia puede engañar a los sentidos, ¡incluso conociendo el truco!, y que puede hacernos dudar de la perfección de nuestra mente. Pero es el pequeño tributo a pagar por poseer un cerebro evolutivamente tan desarrollado. Los mismos procesos que nos han hecho triunfar agilizando la manera en la que aprehendemos la realidad pueden jugarnos a veces malas pasadas.
Me ha parecido tremendamente interesante, además de muy completo con todas las referencias a páginas webs sobre el tema.
http://micaminoblanco.blogspot.com.es
Me ha parecido tremendamente interesante, además de muy completo con todas las referencias a páginas webs sobre el tema.
http://micaminoblanco.blogspot.com.es
Want to read
June 25, 2015Now 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.
July 24, 2014
Este libro es un compendio de la relación que hay entre la magia y nuestra mente. Muchos de los trucos que utilizan los magos en realidad son engaños a nuestra mente. Y ellos lo saben. Así que los neurocientíficos se han ido a hablar con un montón de ellos para saber cómo son algunos de sus trucos y nuestra mente se los pasa. Y así el libro va explicando cómo actúa nuestra mente en nuestro día a día a través de los juegos de magia.
June 7, 2016
One of the most fascinating books I've read in a long time. I love classic stage magic an am interested in how mystery fiction and magic use misdirection in similar ways. But I'd never before thought about the science of why we're able to be fooled by stage magic. Since I'm not a scientist, I appreciated the conversational style of writing to give readers an eye-opening look at how magicians *really* fool us.
July 10, 2019
This took forever but was so worth it. Love all the information and how the brain works. I read this because one of the writers/producers of Leverage said they read this book in one of their commentaries to explain the NLP that the characters use... so interesting!
Also appreciated the book's ending of how to apply to our daily life as well as the links and resources.
Also appreciated the book's ending of how to apply to our daily life as well as the links and resources.
September 29, 2019
Fascinating stuff for anyone with even a passing interest in magic.
January 20, 2015
One of the best books that I have read that I would not widely recommend, it deals more with the secret of illusions than with brain function but is still enjoyable. Some parts were very interesting, but the writing is often corny, much like the patter you would hear at a magic show.
March 18, 2013
Entretenido aunque desvela pocos trucos y la parte científica tampoco deslumbra. 7/10
February 6, 2016
Una pasada de libro. Comprender como funciona nuestro cerebro a partir de los trucos que los magos utilizan para engañarlo.
October 10, 2024
Boy, was this book perfect for me, falling at the intersection of two topics I find fascinating.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 183 reviews