Sleights Of Mind: What The Neuroscience Of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
Books on neuroscience are easily ponderous, academic and/or boring to a fair extent. This is the contrasting with the absolute interest and fascination of the huge topic. Writing style can make a difference, so that one can prefer Pinker to Damasio or viceversa because of literary ease; or content phrasing in, say, a biographical framework may add a noticeable human touch to the text to make it easier to dig through. As far as rationale and motivation, this book is far better than all of the above. Here the authors use a honest and insightful premise, quite humbling for scientific tell-you-what attitudes. They start by the idea that magicians have matured through a remarkably long history and heritage a deep, working if mostly intuitive knowledge of how the mind and its perceptive apparati work. So, they use magic to dig into neuroscience -- they became magicians in order to understand why and how tricks are effective, where lie the origins of perpetuating perceptive illusions, what mechanisms they possibly underlie. It's like studying renaissance painters to understand perspective, athletes to illumuinate physiology -- craftmen as forerunners of scientific systematic knowledge. In turn, their effort make the appreciation of magic in its multiple declinations richer and deeper, in spite of the opinion of several professional magicians.The narrative follows broadly the progression of the authors across magic fields through the encounter with and lessons from many world-renown magicians. This makes the exposition light and flowing, though somewhat fragmented and maybe shallow at times, when compared to alternative tracts -- a minor bug compensated with sound references and note discussion at the end of the tome.The bigger picture the authors transmit is that the perceptive human system is tailored by evolution and is surprisingly good at the work it does even or mostly unconsciously - that is, survival in an unpredictable world. This entails expectations and inference-ridden automatisms of responses which are prone to induce illusions when unattended. And that's what magic exposes and thrives. Magic as a diagnostic and exploratory tool - beside fun. The book dwells in several topics throughout - memory, attention spotlight and limited elaborative resources, multitasking - and exhudes the most interest in the discussion on free will through the apparent freedom of choice settings, and whether exposing the neurological basis of magic will destroy its fascination. To me, exposure of tricks does not harm magic in the same way that knowing how to play a piece of music does not remove joy from assisting a live performance of that very piece from a professional. This line of reasoning actually transcends the limit of magic and art in general and needs to be applied to science in general - supposed understanding of mechanisms does or should not coincide with extinction of the original wonder, curiosity and fascination toward the object of the enquiry but rather reinforce it and make it fuller. An absorbing read. I love the fact that magicians use our own foibles against us - and even when we know they are doing it - and how, they still thrill us. The most amazing brain quirk they talk about is "sight blindness". This has been brought up in other books as well, but never so blatantly exploited as by magicians - who make a coin "disappear" while holding it right in front of us in their opposite hand! We do not see what we don't expect to see. Or, as Sherlock would say - "You see, but you do not observe." Just amazing. Many gems of insight in this book. Loved it.
What do You think about Sleights Of Mind: What The Neuroscience Of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions (2010)?
Not that exciting, but pretty interesting, and I like learning about how magic tricks work.
—tibbygirl660
Just fantastic. If you're interested in magic and neuroscience, check it out.
—Geety
interesting and well-written but nothing too profound
—Conrad2
