Blogpost 3: Magic Gimik

(c) jenellematson.wordpress.com

Clowns do magic tricks to entertain their guests. But the truth is, its just all illusions. Illusions that made up by our brains, constructs what it knows by searching for useful patterns in sensory information and then connecting those patterns with a past record of their behavioral relevance. One may somehow think that clowns only fool us by doing their magic tricks/illusions but the one good thing about illusions, is that they make us realize not only that things are never what they seem, but also that our experiences of the world shape our understanding of it. But have you ever think what’s behind those magic tricks? Or even thinking beyond what we only see on those tricks?

Searching for some ideas or information about this thing, I found an article entitled, “Study Reveals How Magic Works” by Charles Q. Choi in the website, "Live Science". The article talked about how magicians help uncover how our brain works. It is mentioned that magicians really have this ability to distort one’s perceptions, to get people to perceive things that never happened, just like a visual illusion. If that’s so, ‘wow! how talented they are!’ they have this different ability that only some can do. And to think that it is one’s nature ability; others may try to study how this thing works, but it is still different if it is one’s nature talent.

The article also stated an experiment magic trick called “vanishing ball” where a ball apparently disappears. It is done by faking a throw while keeping the ball palmed in the magician’s hand. So that’s how it works, maybe if I will able to see the secret behind it while the show is going on, it’s really a big fail for them. It is said that for the experiment, two-thirds of the volunteers watching the pro-illusion version on television had a clear recollection of the ball leaving the top of the screen; thus, they have not seen its dirty, little secret. On the other hand, only one-third of the people viewing the anti-illusion version had experience how it is actually done. The author had mentioned that during their experiment, they keep an eye on how the people look unto the magic trick. Only to find out that when the people believed that they have seen the ball become invisible most claimed that the spent their time looking at the ball, where in fact, they only check out at the magician’s face. The whole experiment ended up with a conclusion that people tend to have an impression that what they see exactly is the real one, not even knowing the difference between the two. Thus, the way how people see the world is greatly outshine by how we want it to be rather than the actual thing.

At the core of every trick is a cold, cognitive experiment in perception. Does the trick fool the audience? How did they do that? Magicians never reveal their secrets but there’s always an exemption to the rule. An article entitled “Thescience of magic: it’s not all hocus pocus” written by Michele Barker in the website, “TheConversation”, uncovers the magician’s secrets and how they were able to deceived the audience. The author mentioned Alfred Binet who was able to talk with the french most marked magicians too help him figure out illusions. It is said that Binet has found out that magical illusions were perfectly done by so many little optical tricks. One of which is perceiving blindness where awareness is the key. Audience will follow a magician’s hand when he or she gestures in a curved line – but not when the line is straight. Knowing that, I just now realized that this gesture is always present in all magic shows, and never in my mind that I once thought that it’s the magician’s little way to distract our visual focus. 

Another thing is the “inattentional blindness” and “change blindness” which means that even though we see things right in front of our eyes, our minds do not register what we have seen because our attention is not there. Inattentional blindness refers to the change that happens all of a sudden while the change blindness referred to as the change occurs slowly. I can say that it’s somehow true, because it actually had happened to me, well maybe all of us experience this thing. ‘Mentally present but emotionally absent’, the phrase that sums it up.

In a neurological perspective, unspoken movement motivates brain functioning in much the same way as watching an actual movement that how you see can differ from your attention is something that magicians have long overworked. Neurologists are now reaching for the help of magicians in helping to create a more immediate human-computer compound designs and advance rehabilitation techniques for people physically impaired by neurological conditions like strokes. Truly, magic/magicians nowadays are not only for entertainment purposes, but also for medical objectives.

(c) triangulations.wordpress.com

Part of being a clown is to entertain people and one of the ways to do so, is by doing magic tricks. But keep in mind that it was all an optical illusions.There’s no such thing as magic, it was all in our mind. It's what we believe that we see rather than the actual visual point. Illusions can be fun and interesting and also reveal a great compromise about how our brain functions.