The Tricks of Art and the Art of Tricks

I have noticed a bit of air play given to magic lately.  The first item I found was a paper published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience - Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research (http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nrn2473.html).  The article was written up in various electronic print media (is that an oxymoron?) including the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/science/12magic.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&ei=5070&en=190e4385d2978d97&ex=1219204800&emc=eta1&oref=slogin)

According to the paper, magicians often have a “deep intuition for and understanding of human attention and awareness.”  Neuroscientists can learn from magicians some “powerful methods to manipulate attention and awareness”. They could use these methods in the laboratory to study “the behavioural and neural basis of consciousness itself, for instance through the use of brain imaging and other neural recording techniques.”

One reference in the paper is to Prof Richard Wiseman’s “amazing colour changing card trick” which is on You Tube and also on his website http://www.quirkology.com/UK/index.shtml.  It is given as an example of change blindness.  This is different from inattentional blindness, an example of which is the experiment where people are asked to pay attention to something (people in white shirts passing a basketball) they may miss something. One version of the test is here  viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html.

Magicians would call both these things “misdirection” There is a lot more information in the paper and, if you are interested in making magic, it is worth reading.

This set me off onto searches to do with the mind and magic.  I came up with this site that had a video of “Brain Magic”: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/keith_barry_does_brain_magic.html.  This is a talk from TED.com - standing for Technology, Entertainment, Design, a site which looks good but which I had never heard of before. It dates from 2004 but was posted in July 2008.

This is a good talk with some demonstrations of “brain magic”. I understand the very first trick and there is a spoiler explanation on TED about how to do the bottle trick.  There is a method for the cup and spike trick although I don’t know it.  I do know, however, that it is dangerous and can go wrong.  But I am clueless about the blindfold driving the remote touching and the other hypnosis-type effects.  It’s well worth a look.

When I followed up on this topic of mond and magic, I found The Magic of Conciousness Symposium held by the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and the Mind Science Foundation in Las Vegas in 2007.  There are some great videos of demonstrations by outstanding conjurers.  You can see them and download them from this site: http://www.neuralcorrelate.com/smc_lab/.  I especially like the pickpocket sleight of hand of Apollo Robbins and the style of James Randi.

Avid followers of the media may vaguely recall that a baby humpback whale was killed by veterinarians at Pittwater, Sydney last month. It was said the whale had been abandoned by its mother and was starving.

A legitimate query at the time was: Why didn’t they ask the Japanese who have expertise in these things?  Now that the blood has cleared from the water and the poor whale calf has, presumably, been autopsied, dissected and turned into cat food, it is time to ask again:  Why were not urgent telegrams despatched to the Institute of Cetacean Research in Japan?

Anyone with a passing interest in the activities of the International Whaling Commission would be aware that the ICR is THE premier whale research organisation in the world.  Surely they could have helped.  First, all their scientific research should have given some clue as to how to save the poor little thing.  Second, if all else failed (as it did) then they could have harpooned the sucker.

Instead we were left with the unedifying spectacle of an Australian vet harpooning a baby whale with a syringe. That is not the Australian way. We might well ask, have we lost all sense of dignity and fair play?