Burstingthemagicbubble..docVIP

Bursting the magic bubble First theres shock tinged with disbelief. A moment of wonder follows. Then, a desperate scramble to rack your brains and work out just how youve been had. Theres no denying the effects of a good magic trick. From the great escapes of Houdini and the surreal mental trickery of Derren Brown to the conjurors at childrens parties, the appeal is universal. Magics been around for a very long time and it improves over time, says Richard Wiseman, a professor of psychology at Hertfordshire University. What youre looking at when you see a finished piece of magic is a great deal of expertise, and I think psychologists have a lot to learn from that. But, not content with just enjoying the tricks, psychologists are now using their effects on the mind to work out how we handle the floods of sensory information coming into our brains and process it into a mental picture of the world around us. Magic is a deception, a disruption of that orderly mental picture where things seem to float in mid-air or coins and cards vanish in front of our eyes. Scientists now believe that, by mapping out how our brains are deceived, they could even help to unlock some of the mysteries of consciousness itself. Over the last five years, theres been a reawakening as we look at things like change blindness [a failure to see large changes in a visual scene] and at the fact that consciousness is a construction and may even be an illusion, says Wiseman, himself an accomplished magician and member of the Magic Circle. Now theres a recognition that magicians are doing something very special. Some of the founders of modern psychology were fascinated by magicians: throughout the 1890s, Alfred Binet, inventor of the modern IQ test, and Max Dessoir wrote about the ways in which magicians used suggestion and misdirected attention to get their illusions to work. In 1896, Joseph Jastrow published articles in Science on the mechanics of some tricks by contemporary master magicians. But,