StarTalk Radio - The Science of Illusion with Teller

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

Why does magic fool us so easily? Is our perception of reality just an illusion? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Gary O’Reilly explore the neuroscience behind magic with magician Teller (of Penn & Teller) and neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free.Thanks to our Patrons Jon Alvarez, Peter Dyreng, Joseph Dolan, Chesterfield Browne, Vinkey, Raymot Holmes, Kev, Kamila Kaftol, Biko Duncan, Nathan Hill, Alex Mertz, Erik Berglund Photography, Tricia Lynch, Mathaniel Spomer, Micheal Palmer, John Keltonic, Jack Williams, Eric Christensen, Melissa Palladino, Chris Ormonde, Tom Somers, Ivynelsewhere, Rafael Arenas Jr, Maurice Bakker, Flamigo Toes, Cadu Magarinos Torres, Tanner Simon, and Mike Nagavalli for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Garrett, love me some neuroscience. And you add magic to that and my conversation with Teller, as in Penn and Teller. And that's the magic trick. You got him to talk. Coming up on Star Talk, all about the mind and magic. Welcome to Star Talk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I've got with me, of course, Gary O'Reilly. Gary! Hi Neil. Gary! And Chuck is on hiatus? Yes. We'll bring him back soon, yeah? Yep, we've just given a break. Yeah, so what have you cooked up for us today?

Well, ever wondered how a magician pulls off their tricks? Is it smoke and mirrors? Is it magic? Are they in your head? But how can you violate the laws of physics? So it has to be magic, right? But you can't mess with the laws of physics? So it has to be magic, right? But you can't mess with the laws of physics. So does this mean that magicians have a deep understanding of our sensory perceptions?

Do they have understanding of complexities of neuroscience? For that, we need to get a magician to talk. That'll be his job. And we'll need an expert in the field of attentional misdirection in stage magic. That'll be someone else's job. So, Neil, if you would introduce our guest. I'd be delighted to. We have Professor Susana Martinez-Condé. Professor of Ophthalmology. I'll learn how to pronounce that one day.

To be said slowly. of ophthalmology. I'll learn how to pronounce that one day. To be said slowly. Slowly. Neurology, physiology and pharmacology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center right here in Brooklyn, here in New York City. In fact, we're in Manhattan now in my office at the Hayden Planetarium. So this was an easy date to have just coming up here from Brooklyn and where she's the director of the Laboratory

for Integrative Neuroscience. So welcome to Star Talk. Hi, thank you for having me. Yeah, and we are reminded that you were a guest 10 years ago on one of our shows and we have to dig that one out of the archives. Also an author. Yes.

Even earlier. Yeah. So you're an expert on illusions and perceptions and how the brain allocates attention in ways that leave us susceptible to illusions and magic and maybe that's a good thing. If we were not susceptible, there would be no magic. That's true.

I don't want to live in that world. I want a world without magic. A world without, that's not a good world. It's a feature, it's not a bug. Thank you, it's a feature, it's not a bug, I love it. You're an author from now 2011, a book still selling well, Sleights of Mind. Love that title.

Published by Holt, a publisher I've worked with in recent years, and more recently, Champions of Illusion in 2017. And you co-wrote an essay with Teller, Penn and Teller, because I was hanging out with Teller, and I said, I can't hang out with him unless I get something for the show. This is gonna be hard work.

So yeah, I interviewed Teller for this show so that you can tell us and inform us and enlighten us. Basically you're gonna pull off the magic trick of the year and get the magician that doesn't talk to talk. He'll talk to me. I don't know about you, but me and Teller. We're tight. Spoiler, I'm gonna hear him.

Oh yes, we have, others will hear him. Oh, yes, we have him. Others will hear him. Yes, but not live. It's from a recording. So, yeah, I like knowing what the limits of the human mind are. And Susana, this is your career. Not just neuroscience, but that aspect of neuroscience. Well, the neuroscience of illusion in general,

I think, is at the heart of my career. And illusions are so interesting to neuroscientists because illusions are this discrepancy between reality and perception. So if you understand what the brain is doing when you experience an illusion, that's really what a whole lot of neuroscience is about. Yeah, so you'll understand it,

but the person having the illusion doesn't. They think it's real in some way. Well, what happens with some illusions is that even if you know they're not real, you know your brain is tricking you, but you can't make yourself see it any other way. So there's a disconnect. There can be a disconnect in illusion.

How are you able to manipulate our senses? These in the end are our first line of defense for survival. Yes. We hear, we see, we smell. And taste and, yeah. And touch. We're so easily fooled. Are you saying if we're so easily fooled,

how did we last this long as a species? Exactly, yeah. Well again, it's because illusions are useful. There's this misunderstanding that illusions are something that we should try to get rid of. But in fact, illusions make us faster and more able to survive. You gotta explain to me how not seeing reality as it is

is somehow to our survival benefit. Well for one, seeing reality exactly as it is. We don't have the neural machinery that can do that. We just don't have the hardware or the software that would be necessary. The computing power would be disastrous. And so metabolically, and just think about reaction times. We don't need to see reality as it is.

We need to see reality as close enough so we can make it out alive. Interesting, because we can't see the flapping of the wings of a hummingbird, but if we did, that would require much more processing power in our brain and in our eyes. So we need upgrades. Upgrades.

But I guess that was not important to our survival. Exactly, maybe if you're a hummingbird, that would be important to your survival to see another hummingbird. We've created our own simulation in a certain sense. Don't say that, that's scary. I know, but that's across the road. You're saying our version of reality is our own simulation.

It is a construct, you're absolutely correct. Construct, that's the better word. It is a construct, you're absolutely correct. Construct, that's the better word. Yeah, well I like the word simulation too. Yes. And that because we're making it up, we construct more than reconstruct. We take little bits and pieces of the information

that comes in and we make up a whole lot of the rest. So we do create a grand simulation. You put it that way, it makes me wonder, we get bits and pieces of reality that if they don't otherwise make sense, we try to make sense out of it. And the sense making can be fraught with all kinds of error. The brain is a storyteller.

We tell ourselves stories about what's happening. It may have nothing to do with reality, and magic is a great example of connecting cause and effect in a way that is not true. I know, so if that's the case- That's so succinct. Of course. I have nothing else to add to this whole show.

She just- You're not getting off that lightly. Sit still. So if that is the case, then magicians for thousands and thousands of years have understood this and found ways to take us on a journey, tell a story, and use our own senses and our own brains wiring against us? Well, magicians are not using any type of neural pathways

that we don't use otherwise. So they're sort of hacking into our brains. But so do all artists. When we see a painting, a masterpiece, or we listen to music, all of these artists and creators are hacking into our brains, so to speak, to produce certain sensations, certain emotions, and magicians are great manipulators

of our attention and our awareness. What is true about someone who becomes a magician that they arrive at that place when the rest of us don't? Is it a curiosity? Is it they want to take advantage of people? Is it because they're evil? So think about it. It's the dark arts.

I think it's probably a sense of curiosity that lead people to be magicians and scientists as well. And I think that that's why we have this great potential for a collaboration because we both care from different perspectives. We both would be you and Teller himself. Yeah, we care about the workings of the mind. Yes, okay.

We approach it differently, but there's an overlap. Well, let's go to my first clip. Yeah, the first clip, basically Teller tells us he's in our heads. He's in our head, okay. And then we'll talk on the back of it. Let's see what he's got. But there is one circumstance in which we can make a mistake and just enjoy it, and

that's magic, because magic is kind of the playground for this very important thing of how we ascertain truth. But it requires you understand people better than they understand themselves. Yes, except I have time to plan this out. I have time to plot this. And I have time to really say- Plot is the right word. Plot, yeah.

I have time to say, if I were in that position, what would fool me? And so I'm doing this great service for them of harmlessly fooling them with an idea that is in some way enchanting. It doesn't have to be supernatural. It can be just funny. And sometimes it is sort of weirdly supernatural looking.

But I enjoy being in both places at the same time. And I enjoy, the other thing I love when I'm composing a thing, I love thinking from moment to moment. What would I be thinking if I were watching this right now? Where would my attention go? That's what any good educator should be doing, always having a minute-by-minute understanding

of what's going on in the mind of the student or the audience. But you do this, you take this to extreme levels because people want to believe their own senses and you find the limits to those senses and go beyond them and then people are stupefied. Stupefied. So, stupefied. So you know where those limits are. Some of them, if I knew where all the limits are, I wouldn't be a scientist

because there wouldn't be anything else to discover. Yes, on the frontier of the limits. How far can we be taken with that perceived boundaries of our senses and still be fooled? Is there that limit where, oh, that's never going to be, it's too far away from our senses for it not to be able to succeed as a trick? So if you're manipulating our senses and how you move with them, how far can you? Are there no boundaries? Well, I would say that what interests me most in terms of some of what magicians bring to the table is that it is surprising from a neuroscience perspective, some of the methods that magicians use,

they can be kind of crude and they still work amazingly. And so really our brain is not, I mean this can be done with great artistry and skill of course, but our brains are just not that hard to trick. If you get at the heart of it, we just don't think about it and we don't realize on an everyday basis, but we're being tricked all the time. So are you thinking like if there's a battleship parked in the harbor, and I just raise my hands

and the battleship lifts out of the water, you're saying, oh, you didn't really do that, that's not magic. It's too far beyond. It's too much. But we've all seen the movies where the villain does exactly that. Yes, the Bond villains.

Yes, the kind of, so, all right, using the title of your book, Slights of Mind. Best title ever, still. Best title, Slights of Mind, I love it, I Bond villains. Yes, the kind of, so, all right, using the title of your book, Slights of Mind. Best title ever, still. Best title, Slights of Mind, I love it, I love it. Why haven't we evolved to see through these? Why are we still here, this far into our evolution, falling for it? Because we don't have to,

and that evolution will not lead to optimization, but just good enough. And what we have is good enough and that you want to be making rapid decisions and have fast reaction time and be as efficient as you can with the resources you have and that what does an extra 10, 20, even, I don't know, 30, 40% give you in terms of understanding reality for what it is and that it's just not that useful at the end of it and having these illusions, in fact, this is the correlate of the brain processes

that make us efficient, like the magicians play with our attention, they manipulate our attention, we talk about misdirection. And this is a side effect of the fact that we can focus our attention, none of us can multitask, but magicians force you to multitask,

but you don't want to be multitasking, that's going to make you worse at life. So you want to be single tasking. So again, it's a feature. So let me get a more precise example here. So I'm running in the brush, and I see a lion, and it starts running after me. I'm not going to process all the information in that scene,

other than that I might die. Yes. So, and then I run away or I climb a tree. So, what information would be distracting to me in that moment? In that sort of situation, there's a lion running at you, and you see a big, blurry, heavy thing fast approaching you. You want to get away. if you're able to survive,

you may actually realize, hey, it wasn't a lion, it was actually a tiger, so what? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I could have said, I could have stayed there and say, I think that's a lion, but maybe it's a tiger. I'll let it get closer.

Yeah. I'm going to make absolutely sure. Actually, it's not clear what continent that would be on. I don't think they coexist. No, well. But they do in The Wizard of Oz. Lions and tigers and bears. And bears. So I have the capacity to see the teeth of the lion,

count the teeth, make a judgment how white they are. Is it a female lion or a male lion? I could think all of that. Is this the example of things your brain could be doing but is not doing because you have a higher singular priority? Exactly, and it would be a mistake to want to do these things and to make sure because it's just pointless and what you care about is just get away as fast as possible.

So this is the point Teller's making in that last clip. Accertain the truth. So the truth of the matter is I need to focus exactly on the furry thing with the big claws and the large teeth and not get cluttered and have distraction. This is a magician understanding our awareness and our attention. I'm guessing this is how they've worked out that if we can now maneuver around certain things, I can get this, would you call it a cognitive illusion?

So when we talk about cognitive illusions, we mean those that involve so-called cognitive processes such as attention, memory, decision-making. It all plays into magic. I often think about magic tricks as the layers of an onion. So you have sensory misperceptions and you have more cognitive effects and so on. And they all sort of work together. But in terms of truth, I'm not so sure that we can access truth even from a magic perspective or from a scientific perspective. From a scientific perspective, truth is whatever is left out after you've removed everything that is false. But truth is an ideal and your truth with your brain is going to be different from the truth from the hummingbird's brain and the tiger brain and so forth.

But still the truth. See different truths and maybe none of them is the complete truth. She just called you a bird brain. I mean she knows me so well. I only just met him. The professor's worked me out. I'm Olicon Hemraj, and I support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

So in the day before your profession became a thing, our best access to what was going on in the human brain was through the work of psychologists. You know, they'd lay you down on the couch and just ask you questions. But now you can get in there and look at neurosynapses and things, and you're synapse fluent. But in this next clip, we talk about just the overall interest that psychologists have in magic.

So let's see what Teller has to say about psychologists and our senses. Let's check it out. So are you a part-time or full-time psychologist? I certainly, we deal with psychology. Do psychologists come to you? Psychologists like magic. They're very interested in magic

and more and more work is being done by serious psychological students on magic. So of the senses, we typically think of a sight gag or you fool someone for what they see or for what they hear. These are two common senses, very important senses, but we have other senses, sense of touch, sense of smell, sense of taste. Have you guys considered exploiting those senses to your own gain as well? We have not. I mean, those are harder to do, but partly because a large audience can see,

a large audience can hear, a large audience can smell, but to rely on smell. One of the things that we do… The smell doesn't move at the speed of light. No. Nor the speed of sound. One of the things that we do, which I won't detail right now, but in our live show does indeed convince people by smell. It's just very subtle. They don't even know that it's happening.

Oh, okay. This is your live show at the Rio in Las Vegas. This is your own theater, if memory serves. This is our own theater. We've been there for more than 20 years. We're the longest running headliners in the history of Las Vegas, crazily. More than Elvis? Come on now. No. Yes, we are the longest running headliners in the history of Las Vegas, crazily. I would never have. More than Elvis, come on now. No, yes, we are the longest running headliners

in the history of Las Vegas. Not better, not better than Elvis. God, no. A testament to the perennial appeal of the trade of magic. So Susanna, can you pick up on the idea that when we think of illusions, we typically only think of what you can see or hear as an illusion. Are there famous illusions that involve our other senses?

Yeah, we do have a lot of tactile illusions, there are multi-sensory illusions. In fact, I would go and even say that in magic, if we're talking about theatrical pickpocketing, for instance, there are touch illusions that play a big role because the magician, the pickpocket, is touching the volunteer, the person that they're stealing from. And first off, some touches they're not noticing noticing and they're using other touches to direct their attention, forcing them to multitask across the senses. And the movement, the direction of the movement of a hand has another distractive element

to it? Yes, that's the visual component, but we're talking about the pattern of the magician, so that's already an auditory component. You have the visual, you have the touch, and you have the internal dialogue as well that the magician is generating because not everything is happening in the senses, but when the magician gets you to ask yourself a question, now your attention is drawn inwards and you cannot really perceive what's happening outside. So the magician will get you to power down certain other aspects while you fire up to

answer the question? Yeah, absolutely. Some magicians, I believe it was Arturo de Ascanio and Juan Tamariz talks about the discombobulating question and that's a question that the magician asks the audience and it can be something very simple like, I need a scarf, has anybody brought a scarf? At that moment, everybody's thinking, did I bring a scarf? And while you're asking yourself if you brought a scarf,

you're not paying attention to what's happening on stage. Distraction. So in my conversation with Teller, which he was kind enough to grant, I was invited to his home outside of Las Vegas, and I was just delighted to hear perspectives of someone who's been in the business that long. And for me, what I liked was the humility

and the humanity of his motives. His motives are not to make fun of you, not to, he will say upfront, I'm about to trick you, and then trick you. There are magicians where susceptible people think they're actually wielding powers, supernatural powers. They come right out because they're very big in the skeptics movement, and they want to disavow people

of whatever is the belief system they were drawn into, because there's a charlatan at the top of that pyramid that's fooling you, and since they also fool you, they don't want to ever be confused with people who are exploiting you or taking advantage of you. And so I deeply appreciated that aspect of his act with Penn, of course. Penn and Teller.

Are we hardwired? If we can't work out something, then we can't trust it? Is it as simple as that? Our nature is to, well, I can't trust that because I can't understand it, work it out. I don't think that we typically dig so much beneath the surface. I think that we tend to accept.

You use your smartphone, can you figure it out? You trust your smartphone. I think that we tend to accept things at face value, and I think that that's why it's so important magicians like Teller and Penn and others that are active in the skeptic community, because magic, I think, as science, those can be great tools, but magic, of course, with its entertainment value,

can be so great to promote critical thinking, especially in younger people. Oh, promotion of critical thinking. Something that science is based on. It's based on, yeah, but the magician who also cares about that, such as Penn and Teller, you come out of that just a little more enlightened, a little more of a critical thinker than you started.

Because that's part of their mission statement. Yeah, and that's the magic trick. You don't even know that you're learning critical thinking. Well, I like that. If I can teach you and you don't even know you're teaching, that's a magic trick. I'll take it. Got another clip coming up.

Oh yeah, what's that? For me, Teller, when he's talking to you, if you use the stage scenario, just pulls back the curtain just a bit, and you can see there's something, but you don't quite see what it is. And he mentions in this clip about shortcuts. So let's play the clip.

Okay, let's see. And he'll try and explain what it is he's thinking. Many times what we're doing is taking things that are very beneficial shortcuts that we always use and saying, well, you know, if you don't pay careful attention, that shortcut can mislead you. I mean, a standard thing. and saying, well, you know, if you don't pay careful attention, that shortcut can mislead you.

I mean, a standard thing, we use shortcuts all the time. If you see something done and then I produce another one, I produce another one, and I produce another one, and now you're saying, oh, he's just got the coins in his hand. And at that moment, I pluck the coin in a way that shows you that my hand is empty and I keep doing it. So that your shortcut of saying he's doing it the same way every time is not making it easy for you. It's not making it easy for you to follow because I'm taking advantage of it.

What a devil. What would a neuroscientist phrase that as? If we, it's just, okay, I'm just like predictive text. I'm predicting that because the balls get thrown up and it does it twice in third time, the hand moves but there's no ball. But I assume that I've predicted that that's happening. So we talk about filling in processes. And the filling in processes can be at a very sensory level

like the fact that in a retina we have a big hole in a retina which is where the optic nerve leaves the eye. But our- It's a hole where it's not sensitive to light. Or to any information in front of you. We are blind. This is called a blind spot, literally.

We have no photoreceptors there, but we don't see, and every time that we close one eye, we should see a big hole near the center of our vision. But we don't because our brain takes the information from outside the hole and uses it to fill in what should be there. see a big hole near the center of our vision, but we don't because our brain takes the information from outside the hole and uses us to fill in what should be there. Damn.

So. Damn. But that's a very sensory process, but sort of like the same concept applies to more cognitive processes, and we use this in everyday life all the time. Like you're my friend and you introduce me to your good friend, I don't know this person, but now I like this person

because I like you and that person is your friend. Exactly, so we apply this all the time. If A likes B and B likes C, then A likes C. Yeah, we do this without realizing. But that's different from this case where you assume it's true because it's repeated in front of you. And so it's not just a one-off assumption.

It's an assumption that has legitimate foundation for making. As Susana says, you're filling in. So you can stop allocating your attention because you already know what's going on. This is not going to further increase your survival, going back to evolutionary issues. But now I know that I'm going to pay attention to something else now, something that I don't know already.

To me, the foundations of propaganda are, it's information that you kind of are interested in and then gets repeated. And then later on you just assert it as truth because you've seen it repeated. And it didn't even have to be demonstrated to be true, it just had to be stated as true. That's a susceptibility, isn't it?

Yes, absolutely, and even I believe that there are studies even showing that even knowing that it's false, the act of repetition generates certainty. It unravels the knowledge that it's false. The familiarity effect. Yeah, that's what it's called. Okay. So is that a similar thing to if you were reading some text and there's a word in there

and you're about to get to it but you don't see it correctly and you assume it is something else. So you miss really what it's being said, but it plants, there's another word that your brain puts in front of you. You probably don't do that because you concentrate exceptionally well. It's just, bird brains like me.

We've never taught how to read. Not properly, obviously. You've seen these texts where you have the word the repeated twice, and you don't see the repetition because you sort of skip over it. Especially if it ends one line and begins another line. So is there a term for that in the neuroscientist world when we do this?

Blind spot. Possibly, yes, simple as that. Perhaps. I'm just thinking of it being the awareness of a magician to think, I'm going to set you up with one, two, and then the third one is not going to be what you think it is. The assumption and the fact is that, as you've said already, we do not pay enough attention. There is a general brain principle which is, which we call redundancy reduction. And the brain often operates to remove redundancy.

And from a very simple visual perspective, we know, for example, that corners have more information than straight lines. Straight lines have more information than the inside of things, if we're talking about just a plain surface. So even when we construct a visual percept, our brain is using information from the corners, from the edges, not from the insides, because that's all redundant.

I've seen it all, I know what's there, I don't need to process it. So redundancy reduction, I think that's the general principle that you're going for. Thank you, yeah. So this whole idea, I think, I didn't have your official term for it, but I think I came up with my own phrase

in conversation with Teller. And? Let's find out. All right. Magic works because people are lazy. Are sensorially lazy in that we make assumptions that are just not true in your case, but they're true for every other case we experience in life.

And the example that I gave earlier, when you see something done a second time, you think it's done the same way as it was the first time. And that's absolutely practical, right? For everyday use, you don't want to have to think about every intersection that you drive your car through as a completely different experience. You couldn't live.

No, you have to use these shortcuts. And evolutionarily, that probably helped us survive. Absolutely, no doubt about it. But those are also things that, those are cracks that you can play with in magic. And the fun of magic is partly being amazed, the fun of magic is also partly figuring it out if you can. You know, it's okay to be thinking that way.

There are certain magicians over the last, I don't know, 40 years who have gone, oh, don't try to think about how magic is done, just set aside your intelligence and become as a stupid child. No. No, I don't agree with that. That's right.

Nobody does, nobody wants to do that. The fun part is trying to figure it out. And failing at that. If you succeed, you're happy. And if you fail, you're happy. There's a no-lose situation on magic. So magic's all about being happy. That was a brilliant take on it.

What's interesting, Neil, is you see a magician who wants to make you happy, isn't here trying to make you feel, but is so conscious of our mind and where the cracks are. And how they- He used the word crack. Yeah, come forward.

I mean, how many sensory mind little chasms and cracks do we have that people like Teller can just wander through? All of them. That many. That's one big chasm is what you're saying. Yes, and all artists have to be, a successful artist has to produce some kind of emotion,

all great artists have an emotion, and you have to have that intuition. You know, we just recently published a paper out of my lab in which we were left wondering, these changes, these in Rubens, when he was... The painter Rubens. The painter Rubens. So Rubens was for nine months of his life,

he was actually copying paintings of Titian in Spain. He was there as a diplomat, but that's another story. But he was making copies of Titian, but introducing his own changes. And the way that he changed the composition, we found out in the lab that he's drawing observers' attention much in the way that a magician might. And we got left to wonder, well, did he do this on purpose?

Or he intuitively knew what he was doing, or he actually knew it? How did he arrive to this understanding of the human mind to be able to manipulate the attention of the observer, you can ask the same questions about magicians. You do this with sensors on people's eyes and what they focus on first? We did this with eye tracking, yes. The depth perception and the placement of certain figures in certain areas or is drawn to the center.

You see some art. But moving to vanishing points. Yeah. What Rubens was doing was more sophisticated because he was using the gaze direction of the characters in his paintings. So, you know, we call this joint attention. Like if I look up, you're gonna look up to see what I'm looking at. But magicians do this too.

Magicians say, if I want the audience to look at me, I'm going to look straight at the audience. If I want the audience to look at an object, then the magician will look at the object themselves. But Rubens was doing this with the directions of the gazes in his painting. There's a famous painting, Adam and Eve, and everybody's gaze is pointing at Eve's face. And guess where people look at when they watch the painting. How do you get inside people's heads to do your research? Or is it all from the exterior? Do you put in probes and things? But my nightmare of the neuroscientist is you just find any way you can to get inside people's

brains. Well, we do a lot of eye tracking and we also do occasionally fMRI, but we're very interested in eye movements because the oculomotor system spans the whole brain, like from the frontal lobes to the brain stem, cerebellum, you name it. So it's virtually impossible. I have never found the situation in which neurological condition or impairment or brain state doesn't affect the pattern of your eye movements. So the eyes are very much in the sense of eye movements, the windows to the mind in this case.

So when you talk about the windows in the mind, I mean, I've read magicians talk about change, blindness, where you organize an event and the brain doesn't quite cope, and then there's something called after discharge. Is this the same thing that this is being manipulated? Well, these are different kinds of phenomena. Change, blindness, that's a type of attention, illusion. Basically, there's a change, and that often there's an interruption, a before and an after,

but you don't notice the change. So you're blind to the change that has happened and it tends to be a very obvious change that you would think beforehand. I would catch that for sure when that is not the case. But why so? I mean, maybe as a scientist, things that are different especially interest me.

So if I see something different, I'm all on it. Like I will not miss. No, I don't know what- Well, you think you don't miss. I don't know how many changes I've missed. Can I have this? If I didn't. I don't know how many changes I've missed,

but I'm pretty good at continuity in movies. Okay? But that's exactly what we're talking about. These continuity errors that you would see in movies, that's what change blindness is. Well, except that, I wouldn't notice the continuity error if I had changed blindness. So there's someone in the scene,

and they were carrying some kind of thing over the shoulder. And there was another scene instantly later and he's on its other shoulder. Now I didn't remember noticing that, but the fact that it was different, you say, wait a minute, something's wrong about this scene. I went back, yep, the continuity missed it. So I'm picking up the change.

That seemed like the opposite of what you're saying. Yeah, well a lot of people don't, and for sure, in any magic trick there's gonna be some people that catch it, but the majority won't, and also magicians, they rely on change. You say I'm not the majority. So it's hiding in plain sight. Yes, but change blindness is only part of it,

and I think it's actually a relatively small fraction of the attention and manipulation that magicians do. They rely, I believe, far more on inattention or blindness than change blindness, which is, as the name indicates, you don't see it because you're not paying attention or you're paying attention to the wrong place or the wrong time. You've been misdirected.

So this is what they always said, that the male magician always has a beautiful woman on stage with him and everyone's looking at the beautiful woman at any time he needs you to so that he can slip something else on the other side. The magician will orchestrate your gaze to the said beautiful young lady. Yes.

Actually one of the ways that magicians say will orchestrate your gaze to the said beautiful young lady. Yes. Actually one of the ways that magicians say is the most effective way to just misdirect the audience is to bring a volunteer on stage because that becomes all of us. Yes. And that the audience attention is going to be focused on the volunteer. I've seen more of that lately than the old style scantily clad woman on the volunteer 100% of the time. And I've seen more of that lately than the old style, you know, scantily clad woman on the stage. And even humor, Johnny Thompson, the great Thompson, he died a few years ago, was one of the magicians

that we collaborated with. He used to say that when the audience laughs, time stops, and the magician can do anything. Oh, that's the secret to the universe. If you want a time travel, just get the universe to laugh. Time stops. Exactly. So, right, let's go to our next clip and strangely enough, manipulation.

And tell us thinking about manipulation. Am I accurate to characterize what you do as knowing where a person's sensory limits are and then stepping beyond them and manipulating them in ways they don't even know. Is that a fair way to characterize? Primarily, magicians do not use things that are beyond everybody's normal experience. For example, if something is floating on stage and you don't see how it can be floating. Floating in the air. Yeah. experience. for you to think of spider web. So all of these things are very familiar to us. Look at the edge of your MacBook Air computer, right? It looks really thin, but look at the whole computer

and it's three or four times thicker than that. We judge the thickness of something by its edge. Magicians know that and make use of that, but this is not something that is an obscure principle. We hold things in our hands all the time. Magicians do that all the time. They call it palming. It's a use of something that you know about every day, but that is placed in a context where it's hard to recognize.

So, is he in saying all of that, using these so-called everyday items, does that create a comfort zone for the audience? If I brought something weird, strange, abstract, oh, that's got to be the bad guy, that's got to be the trick. But by using these everyday items, we fall into a comfort with this? It's a false sense of familiarity. You think you're familiar, you assume you're familiar, but in reality it's a different situation

that presents in everyday life. I was in a theater in the Pacific Northwest, and I might have even been in Portland, where each chair had a little cage underneath. All right. And I said, what's this for? And they said, oh, that's what the gentleman would put his top hat upon watching the show.

And that's when I read up on this and learned that the reason why the magician pulls a rabbit out of a top hat is because they got the top hat from someone in the audience. But now no one has top hats. So they have to bring their own. So if I get your top hat, in the audience. But now no one has top hats, so they gotta bring their own. So if I get your top hat, in the day, that was a familiar object, not today.

But I actually own a top hat, I had to get one. Just to kind of pop open, I had to. Because I just wanted to see. I want to feel, which is what that was like. But in that day, that was a familiar object. And then you reach in and pull a rabbit out of it, and then clearly the random person didn't have a rabbit in their hat,

so the magician produced the rabbit in the hat. But now they have to show you the hat and show you that there's nothing in it. Right, right. And that's why James Randi, the amazing Randi, used to say that in magicians that claim to have supernatural powers and they were bending keys and spoons,

the power of that illusion was that these are everyday objects, but we don't go around bending spoons and keys in our house because that would render them unusable. So that's a bad idea to bend your spoon and your keys. And so you have sort of like the false assumption that they're very hard to bend, but they're not, we just don't do it. How we interact with our familiar objects sets limits

on what we think is even possible to be done to them. Yes, exactly. Cool, okay. So you're studying this stage magic. Is there any way that what magicians have been doing and now do at such a sophisticated level, enabling your field of research to say, we could take that and use it for the benefit of others,

not in entertainment, but say people who might have ADHD or some other problem. So you're asking, are they learning anything from magicians? Yes. That's what you're asking. That was the shorter version. Okay. Yes. Are we learning anything from magicians?

Well, the neuroscience of magic, it's still young. I would say yes, we are learning from magicians, but this is early stages. We are not going to find, you know, next year a cure for Alzheimer's based on what magicians are showing us. But just in terms of magicians, they manipulate attention, memory, decision-making,

all sorts of cognitive processes manipulate attention, memory, decision making, all sorts of cognitive processes that they can get impaired and they do get impaired in a number of ways, from trauma, from aging, from disease, and so on. And so understanding what's happening in the brain better when these processes are manipulated is going to hopefully lead us to better paths of treatment and just diagnosis and so on. Is it possible for the person who's experiencing the magic

to have a permanent change within them, possibly for the good? I think magic, like any form of great art, can have a long lasting effect. But the act of the magic itself, the magic trick and the reveal and the surprise, I believe that the very fact that this is temporary is part of the charm, just having this wonder,

this surprise, we wouldn't be able to sustain it. And remember, anything that gets sustained in the brain, the brain ignores. So just the anything that gets sustained in the brain, the brain ignores. So just the fact that it's ephemeris, that we can't hold that feeling, I think that makes it more powerful. That's a good answer. It is. That's why our guest is here.

That was a damn good answer. You said we're only just beginning to explore how magicians are working with our attention and our awareness. Is that because over the past however long they weren't trusted, they were seen as what Neil called charlatans before? I think there's a number of reasons. I think in general it tends to be difficult for artists and scientists to collaborate because we just moved in different spheres. Generally, we don't have a common language.

I think it's becoming easier because now we're all much more connected than we used to be. But also in terms of magic, perhaps magic has been historically less accessible to science than say visual arts, because there's a secrecy inherent to magic that is not solved for other art forms.

Yeah, very good point. I'm not telling you how I'm doing it. That's right. So don't ask. Yeah, I'm not even gonna write it anywhere. I'm gonna tell it by word of mouth to my progeny. So I wanna try to bring some final focus to this. There's your preconceptions as a human being,

what is natural for everyone. But then a person could have social, cultural preconceptions that will bias them to see a trick in one way versus another. And I came to tell her with just a question about the skeptics movement, because there are many people who believe something is true, and how do you demonstrate that it's not?

They famously had a show on Showtime called Bullshit, where someone made a claim and they would just show that it's not true. So I'm intrigued how people think about fixing a preconception you might have if that preconception is false. But let's see what Teller has to say. So Teller, what's the association between magicians

or your style of magic and the skeptics movement? After Houdini tried to get in touch with his mother with spirit mediums, he became disillusioned at that and began to become angry about it. And that anger has continued through a number of generations of magicians. We all know Randy, whose anger on that was very high. But other people like, I think John Abel Maskelyne was also a spirit exposure. It is very unpleasant to see your art form turned into a crooked operation that hurts

people. Well, when you say hurts people, don't people believe they're being served by charlatans who enable them to think they're communicating with the dead? Does it bring any solace to the people at all? It may for some, but there's something that's very disturbing about someone taking... The most important thing, the most important memories I have of my parents, I wouldn't want to see those disrupted, destroyed, poisoned by being cheapened to the kinds of things that people are told by their spirit mediums.

But so much of the world's religions have something to say about what happens to you when you die. That's a thing. I mean, somehow the human state of mind, I don't want to say it requires it, but it certainly desires it. And this is just another branch of that exercise, isn't it? You're just teasing me, aren't you? You don't believe that for one second. No, no. People pray to their dead loved ones. I mean, probably billions of people do this, right?

And probably billions of very evilly earned dollars come out of it. Yeah, okay. There is something wrong about teaching people a false view of the universe. There's just something fundamentally wrong about it. So what I found interesting was right at the end they said, a false view of the universe.

Hmm. That surely must resonate for you. It does. I'd like objective reality, please. interesting, right at the end they say, a false view of the universe. That surely must resonate for you. It does. I'd like objective reality, please. But did you expect it to come out of the mouth by a teller who doesn't speak, but of a magician? Did you think in a conversation with a magician? That's why he's a principled magician. He has a worldview of what role magic should play

in all our lives. Listening to that, you hear a certain anger, but it's all calm. He's not ranting and thumping and ang. It's a calm anger because it's his own people who are the Charlatans and taking advantage of that. And because he's been dealing with this for so many years. Yeah.

Well, Susanna, this has been a delight. So do you have a footprint on the internet? Yes, you can Google me, you'll find me. It's not hard. It's not. And what's your, so Susana Martinez Conde, just Susana with an S, S-U-S-A-N-A, Susana. We will totally find you.

So the lab you direct, the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience, that has a webpage as well. Okay, so we can track your work there. Love it. And let me remind people of your two books, the one with the best title ever, Sleights of Mind. You like that, don't you?

Love it by Holt, the publisher. They published my book, Starry Messenger. So they should. And more recently, a book, Champions of Illusion. What was that book about? We forgot to talk about it. Champions of Illusion is about some of the best illusions that have competed and won in the best illusion

of the year contest, which I host every year. Oh, very good. That's for another episode. Okay, all right. All right, well again, thank you for being a guest. Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun. All right, Gary, always good to hang out with you.

Pleasure, my friend. All right, this has been yet another episode of Star Talk Special Edition, the mind, brain, and illusion. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, as always bidding you to keep looking up.