I read the excellent article in the latest edition of Wired magazine (the actual dead-tree version), but you can find it on the interweb here: Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion.
This was a wonderful article that touches on the fact that magic works because our brains contain “blind spots’ that keep us from seeing what’s really going on in front of us. Check out the excellent article Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience and coauthored by Teller, Stephen Macknik, and Susana Martinez-Conde, researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix.
This article aside, I find it utterly refreshing to observe the way that Penn and Teller bring a new angle to something so old. I love it when someone comes up with a new angle, a new twist, something that no one else in the magic community is doing..they provide us answers. Answers to how illusionists for centuries have be tricking the mind into seeing the impossible.
The Penn and Teller experience feels like that great website that finally takes a great service that was once only available through a paid subscription and sets it loose upon the world…for free. You know someone had to do it.
But you know the best part about all this, the part that I like the most? It doesn’t matter! Not to me, and certainly not my brain. Because even though I know what’s happening behind the scenes, I still can’t believe what I’m seeing.
Even when we know we’re going to be tricked, we still can’t see it.
