Instant Genius - Do you believe in magic? – Gustav Kuhn

Episode Date: April 3, 2019

Abracadbra! Prestidigitation! We know that these words hold no intrinsic power, but when we hear them, we are instantly transported away to a land of magic and wonder; where the impossible becomes reality right before our eyes. So why, as rational human beings, are we instantly drawn to magic, and what makes us delight in seeing a rabbit pulled from a hat, despite knowing full well that we are being fooled into thinking it was never already there in the first place? Those are the sort of questions expert in cognitive psychology, magician, and author of Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic (£20.00, MIT Press), Gustav Kuhn, is currently trying to solve at his Magic Lab at Goldsmith’s University. In this week’s Science Focus Podcast, he talks to sciencefocus.com editor Alexander McNamara about why we believe in magic, what actually happens in our brain when we watch tricks, and how understanding magic can help us make sense of a world filled with fake news and misinformation. Image © Getty Images Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Yeah, when you're actually using powerful magic, it doesn't really take that much for people to genuinely believe that it's possible to contact the dead. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team, with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store.

Ebracadabra, press to digitation. We know that these words hold no intrinsic power, but when we hear them, we're instantly transported to a land of magic and wonder, where the impossible becomes reality right before our eyes. So why, as rational human beings, are we so drawn to magic? What makes us delight in seeing a rabbit pulled from a hat, despite knowing full well that we're just being fooled into believing it was conjured out of thin air?

Those are the sort of questions magician and cognitive psychology expert Gustav Kuhn is currently trying to solve as Magic Lab at Goldsmiths University. In this week's ScienceFocus podcast, he talks to ScienceFocus.com editor Alexander McNamara about why we believe in magic, what actually happens in our brains

when we watch tricks being performed and how understanding magic can help us make sense of a world filled with fake news and misinformation. Just wondering a few words to kick things off by telling us what exactly is magic? Well, magic is a really strange and unique emotional experience

where you simultaneously experience something as being real and unreal at the same time. So I've performed magic for many years now and one of my favourite trick is a levitating paperball where I take a little paperball I scrunch it up, I put it in between my hands, and then the paper ball magically starts to levitate in thin air. Now, as you're watching this, you are experiencing a very interesting

cognitive conflict, because on the one hand, you know that things can't levitate in midair. That's just simply impossible. Yet, at the same time, that's exactly what you're experiencing. And so this creates a cognitive conflict in our minds between the things that we are experiencing and the things that we believe to be possible. But I think these experiences aren't necessarily unique to magic because if really think about it, it doesn't really make sense. Like, why would we experience something as being real when we know it's not? Well, it turns out that like with a lot of these magical principles, they also apply to

everyday life. So imagine a situation where you're walking out on a glass platform really high above the sky. So I've recently done this at the shards where you walk out on a glass platform and you know that you're completely safe because otherwise I wouldn't go there. I know the glass will hold. I've got a lot of trust in the engineers that have put this structure together. Yet it still feels uncomfortable. You look down and it just doesn't feel right. You feel I just want to get I want to get off this structure. And that, I think, is a very similar cognitive conflict that we experience in magic as well. Because as you're walking out on the platform, you know it's safe.

So rationally, you know it's safe, yet it doesn't feel safe. And I think magic elicits a very similar experience where you're experiencing something as a real, the paper ball is levitating, but rationally, you know that's impossible. And I think that's really at the crux of magic. And so all of these things that we do, so whenever we see like the levitating ball or so for a card trick or anything like that or someone being topped in half, it's all having the same effect on our brains when it's happening? Well, we don't know yet. We published a paper about 10 years ago where we actually measured people's brain activation using an fMRI scanner. So fMRI allows us to identify and localize errors in the brain, don't particularly activate.

whilst you're doing a particular task. And we use a whole range of magic tricks. These weren't great magic tricks. These were all tragic tricks that we recorded in my bedroom and me making maybe a ball disappear or something levitate or a car to change. So a whole range of different tricks that have one thing in common

in that you're experiencing something that is impossible. Now, the results were really intriguing because what we found was that there was very specific activation in the area known as the interior, ACC and the dorsal actual prefrontal cortex. Now, these are areas that are also activated when we experiencing other kind of conflict. So conflict happens often to us. So, for example, there's lots of attention or processes that happen automatically or imagine in a situation where you're walking home, but you need to go and buy a pint of milk on your way home. Now, the automatic part of your

brain just goes into automatic pilot and you'll just walk home the normal route. But that normal processing is in conflict with your task of having to buy a bottle of milk. And so that creates a cognitive conflict. And it turns out that actually those general cognitive conflicts, they activate very similar parts of the brain as do magic tricks. And so this gives us really strong scientific evidence that the crux of magic is really about experience. in cognitive conflict. So there's the difference between what I expect to see in reality and what is actually happening?

Yes, exactly. So in a card trick, well, you know I can't read your mind yet, that's exactly what you've experienced. Or in the example of the levitating paper ball, you know balls can't levitate yet that's exactly what you've experienced. So that creates this conflict. You know, you say that you can't actually read my mind. Why does that feel, why does the joy of a magic trick then be that you are reading my mind?

and that's how you can tell I've got the six of hearts in my hand. Well, I think we still don't really understand why we enjoy these kinds of conflicts, but I guess maybe it's the same reason why people enjoy watching a horror movie or they enjoy walking out on these platforms. I mean, I paid quite a lot of money to go up on the shards to walk out to actually get that experience. And I think if you're experiencing this in a safe environment, those conflicts can actually be experienced as a very, aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable experiences. And on that, it's enjoyable to sort of believe that it's

happening, even though that we know we're being tricked or we're being fooled and somehow if something is going wrong, why do we still, you know, fundamentally can't not believe what is happening is really happening? Why is that in our brains working that way? So, magicians create their illusions not because they've got supernatural powers, or at least the ones I do, don't. Instead, what they're doing is they're really, they're hacking your brains. Now, years of experience, taught magicians how to exploit loopholes in our cognitive processing. So, for example, they have learned how to use misdirection to manipulate what you are tending to, or they can use memory strategies to manipulate what you're remembering. They've even got strategies that can actually manipulate

the extent to which you feel you've got control over your own actions and manipulate the sense of free will that you have. And so magicians create these illusions. by exploiting these loopholes. So if you think about misdirection, if I can control the amount that you consciously perceive, well, once I've got control over this system, it's not that hard to actually make objects appear as if they've disappeared.

Because once I've got control of that system, I can basically manipulate your entire conscious experience. Now, as human beings, we trust our own experience. We trust the things we see, we trust the things we remember, and we trust the reasons as to why we've done certain things. But as we're learning more about the human brain, we're realizing that a lot of these insights, they're wrong because in actual fact, most of our experience is really just an illusion. It's a very compelling illusion, and it's an illusion that magicians can manipulate. And so the techniques that magicians use to manipulate your conscious experience are very similar to kind of tricks that the human brain plays on you in your day-to-day life. And because we trust our own experiences when you're seeing something with your own eyes, you believe that that's true.

It takes quite a lot for you to actually doubt that experience. I mean, in my book, experiencing the impossible, I look at the whole range of these erroneous assumptions. that we really make about our own psychological capabilities. So, for instance, you're talking about misdirection there. How are we being misdirected? What are the things that magicians do that fall our brains into thinking that something else is happening somewhere? So misdirection is a very complex process, and misdirection is at the heart of magic. I believe that every single magic trick really relies on misdirection.

Now, typically people think of misdirection about simply being about distracting your attention. And as I mentioned before, if I can take control over what you're attending to, I can actually control what you perceive. So, for example, I can use lots of different cues. Magicians will often use their gaze. So if I'm looking at something, most people will look at that same location. So if I want to draw people's attention away from my left hand, I simply look at my right hand. I can add other cues as well so I can snap my first. fingers, I can move my hand, I can use lots of these different cues to misdirect your attention

from my left hand to my right hand. And if everybody's attended to my right hand, nobody will be processing any of their information from my left hand, and they'll simply be blind of whatever is occurring over the left side of my body. And so that will be an example on which attentional misdirection can be used to manipulate what you see. And more important, probably what you miss. But misdirection is not just about perception. We can manipulate how you actually remember something. So we trust our memories. But just because you're actually remembering something doesn't mean that that's what you've actually experienced. And the reason for this is that memory is a reconstructive process. And what you're really remembering is not necessarily what

you've experienced, but what you've believed to have experienced. So again, as a magician, I can hack. into your memory system and just tweak certain parameters within that system. And that will actually allow me to create false memories so that you completely falsely remember something. I mean, let me give you an example. Let's think of a card trick. So imagine a card trick in which I shuffled the deck of cards. I asked you to pick a playing card and then I'll tell you what the card is.

There's lots of aspects of that trick that are really important for it to work. The main one is, for example, that it's me who's shuffling the cards rather than you shuffling the cards because I can use sleight of hands to manipulate these cards. However, by using memory misdirection, I can actually get you to remember a different course of events. So I can actually get you to remember that you shuffled the cards rather than me shuffling the cards. And by doing so, it'll make it very difficult for you to ever work out how the trick is done. And there's a lot of other similar kind of techniques that Mr. direction uses to manipulate your experience and memory of the past.

It seems like there are so many sort of little simple things, obviously not simple, because you master the art of being a magician. But then there's these lots of little tricks that add up and build up to create the whole magical effect. Yeah, I mean, as a scientist, I try to reduce everything. I use a very reductionist approach. And we often study a lot of these principles in isolation because we're interested in And a lot of our work, we're not necessarily interested in improving magic.

We use magic as a way of learning more about how the mind works. But of course, in a whole magic performance, a skilled magician will put lots of these different techniques together. And if they all combined, that can create really astonishing effects. Indeed, I mean, that's exactly what's used to get you to experience things that you yourself know that is completely impossible. So your studies have used magic to help us un- understand the brain a bit better.

What sort of surprising things have you found that magic has taught you that you didn't really expect before? We run out in the magic lab at Goldsmiths, we've got a whole group of scientists who you're looking at different aspects of magic. A lot of my early work has looked at missed our action. I'm particularly interested in how magicians can get you to miss things that are really right in front of your eyes. And to do so, we use eye tracking technologies. These are devices that allow us to precisely measure where someone is looking whilst we misdirecting their attention. And the really surprising findings from there have been that

just how little people are actually aware of in their environment. Again, intuitively, you think that you notice most of the things that are going on around you, yet in actual fact, we can use misdirection to get you to miss things that are really right in front of your eyes. I literally mean in front of your eyes because by measuring your eye movements, we've learned that you can be looking at something yet you still simply don't see it. And of course, this has got important implications for things like driving, where driving whilst talking to someone on a mobile phone is very dangerous. And it's dangerous not because you're not looking at the cars in front of you, but it's because your attention is being misdirected. And indeed, this is really what tells us.

this is what tells us that actually driving with a hands-free set is just as dangerous as driving with a hand-held set because your attention is being misdirected. A lot of the other work now is looking at forcing. So forcing is a principle by which magicians can influence your decisions. So for example, in a card trick, I'll ask you to pick a card, and whilst you feel you've just made a random selection, I force that card upon you. So that's a principle of forcing. And magicians, manipulate your decision making like this. And again, the results have been really, very astonishing, and they highlight just how the sense of free will that we have,

in most situations, we feel it's us or our control of our actions. And yet what this research is really showing is that this sense of control that we feel over our actions may indeed just be an illusion, because it's very easy to manipulate your decisions without you actually noticing this. this really raises the bigger question of whether the sense of free will that we have for everything may in fact just be an illusion. There's a lot of other work as well that we look up beliefs as well. So you were asking before about why do we experience these magic tricks as being real?

Well, some people do genuinely believe that magic is real. Mentalism is a form of magic that involves mind reading. So in these situations, I might use trickery to reveal intricate detail. about your past life or contact the dead. Over the last five years or so we've been staging these spiritualist demonstrations where we get a magician to contact the person's dead and we use magic tricks to read their aura or get information about their lives. And what's really astonishing is that a large proportion of our students actually believe that what they are seeing is genuinely real. And again, we think that in today's society that's really driven by science and

technology, people should be much more skeptical about these types of phenomena. Yeah, when you're actually using powerful magic, it doesn't really take that much for people to genuinely believe that it's possible to contact the dead. And for me, these findings have been really rather unsettling because even when it makes you tell people beforehand that they're watching a magic trick rather than a real psychic perform, they still genuinely believe it's real. And I think this has got greater implications in terms of how fake news and misinformation can actually influence people's beliefs. Because what it really illustrates is that we really struggle to distinguish between

reality and fantasy. And magic is a prime example, really, because magic is all about misinformation. And what a lot of this research is really illustrating, that misinformation has a very profound impact on what people believe to be possible. And it allows us to really blur this distinction between the impossible and the possible. So that's really interesting. It's interesting the way how, if you say you've got your students that you're working with, and they just, even though you tell them this is a magic trick, they still believe it's happening.

Yeah, it's astonishing. I mean, the first movie started this, I thought this is never going to work. Surely they know that I'm a magician and they'd be much more skeptical, but they genuinely believe that it's real. On that point of skepticism, do you think that this research showing that we need to be more skeptical about the things that we see, even the things that we believe are hard facts as they were,

that there's magic and illusion going on there, perhaps? Yeah, I mean, I think that's an important implication that a lot of this research has. So if we think about memory, for example, I mean, people like Elizabeth Loftus have done some amazing work illustrating just how susceptible our memory is to illusions. And of course, this has got very important implications for eyewitness testimony in court. In court, we still rely on people's testimony

and just because someone is convinced that that's what they've remembered, or we assume that that's true. Yet a lot of the research and false memories illustrating that a lot of these memories are very fallible and they can be easily manipulated. Now, in my book, I explore lots of these limitations, And although I think we've become aware of the limitations on memory, a lot of these limitations apply to a whole range of cognitive processes. They rely on perception.

So just because you've actually seen something with your own eyes doesn't necessarily mean that it's reality. Most of the things that are going on in our environment, we're just simply unaware of. And as we're learning more about how the brain works, and I think magic, provides us with some really amazing illustrations of just how powerful a lot of these illusions actually are. We're learning that actually it's really our brain just making a lot of the stuff up. We trust our senses, yet it's our mind that's really making up what we are perceiving. And so I think we need to be more skeptical and much more careful really about how we interpret our own beliefs about what we've perceived, what we remember,

and even maybe for the reasons why you've actually done something, because a lot of this is really just an illusion. And it's our brains that are the ones that are really falling us by filling in the gaps, as it were. Yeah, it's our brains. I mean, we are our brains. So we are doing this. And of course, I mean, I don't want you to come away from this thinking,

oh, well, I've got all of these mistakes. The reason why these illusions happen is because our brain uses very clever tricks or algorithms to solve very complex problems. perception is incredibly difficult. It requires vast amounts of cognitive resources. And so resources, they mean neurons. Those neurons need to be placed somewhere in our brain. And we've pretty much reached capacity in terms of how many neurons we can fit into our brain. And so the only alternative really is to grow huge heads. But evolutionally speaking, that's not a great strategy to go down.

And so instead, the brain has gone down to strategy of, developing clever tricks. And these tricks work really well because they allow us to do stuff incredibly efficiently. I mean, we can walk around our environment without bumping into things. We can drive. We can juggle. We can remember things really quickly. And the reason why we can do this is because our brain has developed clever tricks and shortcuts that allows us to do this efficiently. But of course, whenever you're relying on tricks, that can lead to errors. And these errors, most of the time you're not noticing the errors, but your brain is continuously deceiving you. And what magic really does is it points out the discrepancy between a reality and your own

experience. And I think this is why magic is such a powerful way of really highlighting a lot of the mind's limitations. It's a really interesting way. I just find that fascinating the way how we're using magic to really understand better the limitations in our brain. Yes, because magicians have used this for so long. And I think a lot of these principles, it's quite hard to imagine them. I mean, I'm a visual scientist, and I've studied vision for nearly 20 years now. And yet, it's still hard for me to fully grasp just how little we see and just how subjective my experience is.

and I'm just a surprise by a lot of these illusions, even though I've studied these processes. And I think magic is a very powerful illustration of just how wrong a lot of these processes are. It really brings this to saying you won't believe your eyes to the forewerely, doesn't it? You really shouldn't, because we shouldn't believe our eyes because what you're seeing is really what you're believing. So it's the other way around.

It's these top-down processes that really influence what you're actually seeing. Is that one of the reasons why we're so, you know, we get a thrill from magic. You know, there's that, as you say earlier, there was the cognitive dissonance, but that, you know, there's something in our brain that is saying, this is interesting because it's different.

I think so. I mean, I think there's a lot, we only, I mean, I think what's important to note is that although magic has been around us for hundreds of years, we actually know very little about the psychological mechanisms that really underpin our experience of magic or the actual reasons why these illusions work.

And I think a very interesting question is, why do you enjoy magic? Because it's a weird thing. Because, of course, when you're watching a magic trick, you're being lied to all the time as a magician. I mean, when I'm performing, I lied to you. Yet we find it very pleasing. We enjoy the experiences. And I think there's several reasons why we enjoy it. One, we can think about in terms of very low-level cognitive mechanisms

in that you're experiencing something that's impossible. you're experiencing something that is different as well. And we know from developmental psychology, even young infants, if you show them an event that doesn't make sense to them. So if you show them an event in which an object disappears, infants spend much more time looking at that situation than a situation that actually confirms with their beliefs. So this is a standard task that is used really in developmental psychology.

And what this tells us is that we are driven towards things that we don't understand yet. And that's an evolutionary advantage of doing so, because if you're curious and attracted to things that you don't understand yet, that will encourage us to actually explore these situations and it will encourage us to learn about new things. And so I think there's an evolutionary drive really to be driven towards magic, because magic is all about the impossible. So I think that's on a very low level. But I think there's lots of other more higher level reasons as well, while we enjoyed. We enjoyed a mystery.

We enjoy exploring worlds where everything is possible. I mean, it connects us to our childhood. I mean, if I think about my adulthood, I mean, I've got three kids who love magic. And their fantasy and imagination is amazing in their play and the joy that they have about magic. And I think as we get older, everything becomes much more restricted. And maybe magic really allows us, gives us, provides us a forum in which these different ideas can be exploited and relift as well. And I think it connects us really with some of these childhood experiences. Is there a reason, I'm interested about the idea of the childhood belief in magic?

Is there a reason why, you know, as we grow older, we change the way we believe in magic? So I know that when I was young, I saw a magic trick and I was like, that's amazing. and just took it as absolute fact but then I was a bit older. I was a bit more skeptical about it but still took a great thrill in it. Is there a reason why that's happening? Yeah, I mean, on one level,

of course, you interpret things very differently as well. So as you're learning more about the world, you've got a better understanding of how tricks work. So often it is actually a lot harder to fall an adult than it is a child. I mean, there's big developmental differences. there really. But I'm not sure whether that enjoyment really fully

disappears. I think it's just harder to find it. I mean, I remember there's a magician called Juan Tameris is one of the greatest magicians who's ever walked this planet. And quite often when I see magic tricks, because I perform magic and I know quite a lot about

magic, I can often work out how it's done or sometimes magicians will trick me, but it's more like a puzzle. I can't necessarily work out how it's done, but I know that there's probably a way in which it could be done. However, with Juan Tumras, I remember that moment really clearly where he came to our conference

and he performed magic, that just completely astonished me. And it's not just I didn't know how it was done. I genuinely felt like I was seeing real magic. Now, I know it's not real magic because he doesn't claim to be a real magician, but in my eyes, that was real, it was real magic. and it really connected me with a lot of these childhood emotions that I had where magic was real and was possible. And so I think there's probably a part in our brain

that still experiences these emotions. It's harder for us to experience them as adults, but I think it's still there. And it may just take better magic, stronger magic, to really elicit these emotional experiences. And then verging on there, is there a point where magic will seem so supernatural there, our brains just can't, can never work that out.

Well, yeah, I guess they probably do. I mean, I think, again, there's a hard for me to judge really as a magician. But, but yeah, if you, I mean, the interesting thing will be how we experience that conflict. Like, is it, can you have magic just too strong that people don't enjoy it anymore? I mean, as I say, the science of magic is very much in its infancy. And these are all really interesting questions that will hopefully explore in the near future as That was Gustav Kuhn talking about the power of magic. His new book, Experiencing the Impossible,

The Science of Magic, is available now. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast. In the latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine, we ask, what if the Big Bang wasn't the beginning? We speak to Sir David Attenborough about his new TV show, and we explore how robots are being used to reveal how ancient animals moved. And as always, there is much, much more inside. And please, don't forget to rate and review the episode

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