Magic Tricks and Page Ranking
The essence of magic and magic tricks is deception. Through a limited lens the audience can misinterpret information critical to understanding the magician’s act. Marlette DiChristina wrote, when discussing a presentation given at Neuromagic 2012, “the brain constructs our experience of reality from a truly imperfect set of biophysical tools.” Our brains are hardwired to focus our attention towards certain stimuli over others. For example, with the aid of Apollo Robbins, scientists showed that people are more drawn to curved motion rather than straight motion.
Knowing the limitations of the brain, magicians take advantage of the manner in which people perceive information. Amir Raz of McGill University commented that magicians can employ “suggestive ‘expectation effects’ produced by ‘top down’ processes [to] cause us to think something is happening when it isn’t.” With knowledge of how our brains process information, magicians can hijack our brains to arrive at certain conclusions rather than others.
Let’s consider one of the tricks discussed in the article, the French drop. The illusion is meant to suggest that a coin is exchanged between hands when in fact, it never does. Novices performing the drop will often fail to deceive their audience due to visible muscle tension and exaggerated movements. Novices provide enough leading information to the audience for their brains to link the sources of information to the conclusion that the coin never left the first hand. Although there may be alternative conclusions an audience member could arrive at, their brain chooses the most probable one, the one which scores the highest, having the most credible information backing it. Similar to how pages are ranked in a web search, our perception of the world around us comes from a set of possible realities, each of which is supported by bits of information with varying degrees of influence. Magicians understand how we process information and actively manipulate this “biological page rank” to deceive their audiences. The manner in which human brains perceive and process data is one of the foremost topics in neuroscience. Magic is another tool which can shed light on these internal ranking processes.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/15/magic-science-sleight-of-hand-brain_n_1519097.html