The art and science of the impossible -- Part I. The basics -- Living in illusion: the human brain and the visual pathway -- The conception of reality: we are our memories -- Part II. The mechanisms -- We build an illusion of continuity -- Magic and contrast: the key to it all -- We filter and process only what is useful to us -- Perceiving is a creative act, but everything is already in your brain -- To remember is to rebuild -- The undervalued unconscious brain -- The magic of decision-making -- Part III. The results -- The magic experience and its audiences -- Wrapping up: scientific research and magic.
Summary:
"Magic is the art of creating impossible effects that violate our expectations, games that conclude with the apparent transgression of natural law. As spectators, we find magic tricks-and the state of true cognitive dissonance that they create-tremendously provocative. Why is our brain caught by surprise? The human brain is a very advanced organ, its capacities highly adapted to our environment and lifestyle. But its capacities are not unlimited. Restricted by limited space and energy, the brain cannot possibly process the vast amount of information that we receive continuously through the senses, and the transmission of information that we do receive is relatively slow and must overcome several bottlenecks. To overcome these restrictions, the brain has developed extraordinarily effective strategies to create a sense of reality from limited information. Magic has learned to "hack" these strategies, essentially playing with our unconscious processing. In this book, neuroscientists Jordi Camí and Luiz Martínez explore how magic accomplishes this feat. As magic is fundamentally an art, presented in playful contexts, it has not received sustained attention from scientific disciplines-but as Camí and Martínez show, magic is an excellent entry point into the inner workings of the brain. In twelve chapters, Camí and Martínez explore the ways in which magicians manipulate attention, memory, perception, and decision-making, and what these tricks can tell us about these processes themselves. Early chapters offer an introduction to basic neuroscience and what we know about how the brain creates reality, and later chapters delve more deeply into how magic both sheds light on and impacts how we perceive and act. Throughout, Camí and Martínez draw on their own research and raise fascinating questions that have yet to be explored. This book was originally written in Spanish. The Spanish edition was published in February 2020 (RBA Books)"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.