The psychology of Magic

Magicians are artists of attention control, perception distortion and decision induction and demonstrate a deep intuitive and practical knowledge of the processes that occur in the spectator's brain.

In their performances, magicians carry out impeccable psychological experiments; the main tools of a magician are neither his boxes with a double bottom nor his marked deck of cards, but the limitations and biases of the processing of other people's minds.

Neuroscience has been using all this knowledge for some time now to study the psychological processes of human beings using the methods of magic to design robust experimental procedures that study human behaviour in the laboratory.

For example, brain activation is studied during the vision of a trick or the brain processes involved in the functioning of the trick, so that magic tricks become scientific experiments.