In a brightly coloured shipping container in east London, Rubens Filho is asking me to pick a card. “Any card,” he says, fanning the pack out face down. “And don’t worry, you can show me. That’s not the point of this trick.”
I pull out the seven of spades, and show it to him; he gets me to sign my name on it with a marker pen. Then he slides it back into the middle of the pack, puts the cards back into their box and puts the box on the table in front of us. “Now,” he says with a grin, “the magic begins.” Filho is 51, tall, handsome and infectiously enthusiastic about the power of magic tricks and illusions. Born in Brazil, he’s been a keen magician since adolescence. He came to Britain in 2012 to work in advertising, before, in 2015, setting up Abracademy, a startup dedicated to bringing magic – and in particular the skills needed to perform it – to the rest of us. “I think magic has a such a positive twist,” he says. “It brings this soft approach that’s hard to explain, this role of creating something beautiful.”
But he is also fascinated by the relationship between magic and neuroscience and psychology, and set up Abracademy Labs, an offshoot of Abracademy, to explore this connection. “Magic has lived in the ‘glitches’ of the brain for a long time,” he says. “How you see things, how you form beliefs, how you experience wonder. And it has the capacity to create wonder by creating something that people can’t explain. You just say ‘Wow,’ and then comes: ‘How do you do that?’ So we explore what happens when we experience something like that. We’re very interested in going deep, deep down into the brain.”
On this summer afternoon at Abracademy’s base in Hackney’s Container Park, Filho has been trying to create something beautiful, and new. We stand on either side of a small felt-topped table – the cards, tucked away in their box, between us – and Filho is a little nervous. There’s music playing from the office MacBook, one of his colleagues is filming the whole thing, and a couple of others are looking on. It turns out they have been rehearsing the trick most of the day.
“Now, there are three ways we could get your card out of the box,” he says. “We could use telekinesis and draw it out… but we’re not going to do that. We could make it rise up to the top of the pack… but we’re not going to do that either. Or…” he looks me in the eye, that grin turning into an expression of puzzlement. “Do you hear that? Do you hear anything?”
To be honest, at first I don’t. The music, the cameraman bustling around, the fact that I’m not really sure what I am listening out for, confuse me for a second. And then, a faint buzzing behind me, as if Container Park has a wasp problem. It’s getting louder and it’s a little alarming. “Look behind you,” says Filho, with mock amazement. “What’s that?”
And there, flying gently towards me from the far end of the room, is a drone, with my signed card hanging from it by a wire. The room collapses into laughter and applause, and a big sense of relief. “We really weren’t sure if it was going to work,” he says.
For much of human history, science and magic were practically the same thing. In the late 19th century, pioneers in the new discipline of psychology, for example, were intrigued by stage magicians and seance psychics and their ability to play with the minds of their audiences. And magicians returned the favour, snapping up scientific innovations in optics or electromagnetism to improve their acts.
That all changed in the 20th century. “From about 1910 there was very little study of magic,” says Gustav Kuhn, 44, a reader in psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and professional magician. “That was probably because of the rising influence of behaviourism, which didn’t really accept the idea of studying internal constructs. Magic is all about experiences; behaviourists were more interested in actions and reactions.”
It was only in the 1960s that psychologists began to take a fresh look at magic, but even then it took time for the two sides to start speaking again, says Kuhn, because of magicians’ reluctance to give away the tricks of their trade. Television had turned magic into big business, and few magicians wanted to discuss what went on behind the scenes. Besides, what would they gain from it? “A lot of magicians think that science can’t contribute much to what they do,” he says. “For me, there was always a very close link between magic and psychology. To be a good magician you really need to understand how the brain works.”
He’s not alone. Of the seven people who make up the committee of the Science of Magic Association, which Kuhn helped found in 2016, six are practising magicians. Jay Olson is using magic to explore the placebo effect and the power of suggestion at McGill University in Canada; Tony Barnhart, assistant professor of psychological science at Carthage College, Wisconsin, is investigating how magicians seem able to control our attention through “beats” in time; and Cyril Thomas, at the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon, France, is researching how magicians’ patter helps prevent people from working out how a trick is done.
Kuhn grew up in Switzerland and moved to Britain in 1993 to work as a magician. But he found he couldn’t support himself through magic, and “fell into” academia. “At the time there was very little interest amongst psychologists in magic,” he says. “But I was lucky to meet some researchers at Sussex who were using eye-tracking technology to study how attention can be misdirected. And soon I realised that magic provides us with a really useful tool to study some of these perceptual areas.”
It’s an awkward fact of human existence that much of the time we don’t see something that is literally happening in front of our eyes. But, says Kuhn, that isn’t because we are stupid, it’s because the brain is a brilliant economiser of resources. “It's purely about efficiency,” he says. “We have to filter out information to save energy, otherwise we would get overwhelmed. Rather than just processing all the information, the brain selects the stuff that’s really important. So we can be looking at something right in front of our eyes, but the information doesn’t go any further and reach our conscious experience.”
You can try this by looking at the wall opposite you. Unless you have been thinking about redecorating, you will notice marks that, until now, you were unaware of. It’s not that photons from those marks never landed on your retina. They almost certainly did. It’s just that the brain discarded that data as unimportant.
Magicians have understood this phenomenon for centuries. In many illusions, the sleight of hand is not hidden at all. It’s simply that we don’t notice it. But most magicians will tell you that they achieve this “misdirection”, as it is known in the trade, by getting their audience to look away at the crucial moment as the rabbit is popped into the hat.
Kuhn, from his experience both as a magician and a psychologist, suspected otherwise and he decided to use magic itself to prove that, many times at least, when a magician palms a coin or switches two cards, we are looking directly at them. He set himself up in the University of Sussex students’ union bar with a cigarette, a lighter (this was before the UK’s smoking ban) and an eye-tracker to record where an individual in his audience was looking, and performed a simple illusion.
“I would put a cigarette in my mouth,” he says, “go to light it and then suddenly notice it was the wrong way round.” He mimes a gesture of astonishment. “So I take it out and, at the same time, move my other hand, which is holding the lighter, down to table level and drop the lighter into my lap. I then move that hand up to my line of sight, snap my fingers and, hey presto, the lighter had disappeared.”
So far, not that great a trick, as Kuhn is the first to acknowledge. But from a perceptual point of view, the magic was just about to happen. At the same time as snapping his fingers, he simply let go of the cigarette with his other hand, so it fell into his lap. He then stared at that hand as if the cigarette had vanished into thin air. “What we found,” he says, “is that most people would not see the cigarette falling and that included some who were looking directly at it. We had shown that what people see is not related to where they are looking.”
To Kuhn, this has big implications, beyond smoking in student bars. “Take driving for example,” he says. “We used to think that mobile-phone use while driving was distracting because people were looking at their phone and taking the eyes off the road. But what this research tells us is that it's not about where you're looking, it's about your mind being distracted. Driving while talking on the phone really distracts you and impairs your performance, whether it’s hands-free or not. Really, we should ban everybody from holding conversations on the phone. If your mind is distracted, you simply don’t see things.”
There is now a huge amount of research taking place on inattentional blindness, as this phenomenon is called. But Kuhn is currently most interested in what is perhaps a more alarming aspect of magic: how it can easily dislodge what we think are deeply held beliefs.
“It’s usually assumed that beliefs are almost like traits, things that are very hard to shift,” he says. “A lot of the studies on belief are correlational, as it’s difficult to manipulate belief in an ethical way. But magic is all about pushing the boundaries of what people believe to be possible, and it provides us with a very useful tool to see whether we can actually change beliefs. And what we are finding now is that there are experiments that can.”
Almost all magicians will tell you that magic takes place not during the illusion itself but in the time afterwards, when the brain tries to make sense of what it has seen. In the cafe at Goldsmiths, where Abracademy Labs has its base, I meet its head, Kuhn’s colleague Hugo Caffaratti. An Argentinian-born magician and neuroscientist in his thirties, Caffaratti is, like Kuhn, confident about magic’s potential as a means of scientific research – a way of looking at the messiness of real life, rather than at the artificially constrained situations that are often the settings for psychological research.
“Psychology,” says Caffaratti, “is fascinated by things such as, say, the gaps in our perception that lead us to wander around looking for our glasses when they are on our heads. But how do you take that into the lab? Well, with just a deck of cards and a little table you have millions of illusions that play on the same gaps in our perception and can be repeated in exactly the same way, again and again.” Like Kuhn, Caffaratti was captivated by magic as a child. By the time he was 21 and a student of telecommunications at Barcelona’s Ramon Llull University, he was admitted to the Spanish Society of Illusionists, where he met the person who would permanently change his attitude to magic, and science: Francisco-Amilcar Riega Bello, known to everyone as Amilkar.
Amilkar was (and still is) a very well-regarded magician, especially in his native Spain – “A mysterious man,” says Caffaratti, “you could tell he was on a higher level”. He had studied with Juan Tamariz and Arturo de Ascanio, two world-class magicians who had begun to stress the importance of the psychology of magic. “What they were saying,” he says, “is that magic is not about the eyes, it’s not about being fast with your hands, it’s about attacking the brain.”
The Spanish school argued that magic was entirely about exploiting what Rubens Filho calls the “glitches” of the brain, the vulnerabilities of the way we perceive the world and ourselves, and which we, for the most part, are unaware of.
We perceive, for example, only a fraction of what is around us. (Kuhn reckons it is as little as ten per cent.) Our memories and even our core beliefs are ridiculously malleable. And our choices – as any magician knows who is asking us to “pick a card, any card” – may be much less free than we think. Perception, memory, free will – each of these is a hot topic for psychologists, but a nuclear weapon in the hands of a skilled magician.
“Magic breaks the natural inferences that we make of the world,” says Caffaratti. “When you see a magic trick, your brain searches your memories to see if you have seen something similar before. And, if it can’t find it, it kind of says, ‘What is this?’ A ball that can suddenly disappear, a table that levitates, these are not the usual categories that help us perceive the world, and we need to do some extra processing to take them in. So there is a delay before we perceive them.”
As a PhD student at the University of Leicester, Caffaratti set out to prove the physical existence of that delay, while at the same time demonstrating magic’s potential as a neuroscientific tool. He videoed himself performing a routine called Chop Cup, involving a cup and a ball, which was made famous by the British magician Paul Daniels.
“It’s an amazing routine,” he says. “The ball appears and disappears under the cup in incredible conditions. You put the ball under the cup, lift up the cup and and it's not there. You put the ball under the cup again and it's in your pocket. Now it's underneath the cup. Now it has disappeared again. It’s a great illusion and the important thing is you can repeat it again and again.”
Caffaratti connected subjects to an electroencephalography monitor, which measures electrical activity in the brain, and showed them the video. He was looking for traces – known as the event-related potentials (ERPs) – of the perceptual processes that are at play when we perceive magic.
ERPs are changes in voltage that indicate that the brain has responded to a specific stimulus (in this case, the appearance or disappearance of the ball). What Caffaratti found was that the unexpected outcome of the magic trick elicited strong ERPs that were significantly delayed compared with those triggered by an event that wasn’t magical.
When subjects were shown a series of “normal” events – the ball placed under the cup, for example, and still there when the cup was lifted – their brains showed a particular ERP, known as P300, approximately 300 milliseconds after the event. “But when the magic trick happened,” he says, “a P300 was elicited about 50 milliseconds later. We were seeing that, when it’s magic, it takes more time.”
What the results showed was that an “impossible” event, such as a magic trick, takes more time to be processed, compared with something the brain is familiar with. And the fact that what was physically the same object – in this case, a magician’s ball – elicited different responses, depending on when it appeared “magically” or not, helped confirm a long-held idea in psychology that our perception, the way we make sense of the world, relies not only on the raw data coming in from our senses, but also on our pre-existing knowledge of the world, stored in our memory. Caffaratti had shown what happens when searching that second stream draws a blank. In effect he had lifted the lid on the neuroscience of wonder.
I am sitting in the back row of a lecture theatre in Kuhn’s psychology department in Goldsmiths. It’s the summer holidays, and the department is having an open day for prospective psychology students. About a hundred 17- and 18-year-olds trickle in, neatly dressed in school uniforms and mostly ignoring the biscuits and juice laid on just inside the door. They’re here to hear about life as a Goldsmiths undergraduate, but first they are going to be the subjects of a psychological experiment.
Kuhn stands up and explains what is going to happen. He says the department is often approached by people claiming to be psychics. Usually it tells them to go away: this is a place of science not superstition. But someone had come to their attention recently who seemed worth a second look, and he is with us today. We’re going to see him in action, but first Kuhn would like us to complete a questionnaire. He passes a four-page handout down the aisles and asks us to complete page one – a series of questions that ask us to rate on a scale of nought to seven how much we believe in “supernatural” phenomena such as reincarnation, poltergeists, communicating with the dead and so on. Once we have filled it in, he asks us to turn to page two.
Here we are presented with a short paragraph about what we are about to see, and which Kuhn asks us to paraphrase in the space underneath, to ensure that we have read it properly.
Half of the room, he tells me later, is informed that the man we are about to see claims to have psychic powers. The other half is told that he is a skilled magician and that everything we’re going to witness is an illusion. Then the show begins.
Up on to the stage steps a young man. The lights dim and he takes us through a wonderfully entertaining psychic routine. He correctly guesses, to oohs and aahs from the crowd, how hidden dice, thrown by members of the audience, have landed. He asks questions of random people in the theatre and is able to tell them surprisingly intimate details about their lives. And as a finale, he brings someone up on stage and relays a message from her deceased grandfather that makes her reel in astonishment, as the audience gasp and clap with approval. The show is over, our psychic takes a bow, and pretty much everyone is wide-eyed with disbelief.
Or rather, as Kuhn has set out to show, with belief. Because now we have to fill in the same questionnaire – reincarnation, poltergeists, communicating with the dead and so on – as before. And the results are surprising. Again and again, when Kuhn does this experiment, it doesn’t matter what someone has been told in advance about the performance, afterwards, people tend to believe more in the supernatural than they did before the show. And these are prospective psychology students.
“What we have shown,” says Kuhn, “is that you can change someone’s belief through a really strong demonstration of something that people previously thought impossible – or maybe not impossible, but very unlikely. You can move them down the continuum quite a long way.”
The next half-hour is spent on a debrief. The psychic is introduced as Matt Tompkins, a semi-professional magician and researcher in experimental psychology at Oxford; the dice are revealed to be rigged; the questions are general enough for Matt to work out something from his target’s answers (a mentalist trick called “cold reading”); and the woman who was stunned to hear from her grandfather is revealed as a stooge who had briefed Matt on what to say before the show.
Kuhn is troubled by results like this. “Magic is all about giving people false explanations for what you have done physically,” he says. “Mentalism does this a lot, pretending to read people’s minds, when obviously that’s impossible. But our research shows that these types of performances really do change people’s beliefs and that puts me in a difficult position. On the one hand I work as a scientist trying to inform people and debunk myths about the brain; and at the same time I am using magic to misinform them. So that has led me to a point where I feel there are, ethically, a lot of magic tricks that I would like to do – but cannot.”
Despite the research being done by people like Kuhn and Caffaratti, not everyone agrees that magic has, as yet, shown it has a big role to play in advancing our knowledge of psychology and neuroscience.
“I wouldn’t say that psychologists have really learned something radically new that they didn't know before,” says Richard Wiseman, professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, and himself a magician. “I think a lot of magic tricks are very good illustrations of stuff that psychologists already know.” Kuhn, though, is unperturbed by such reservations. “When I started this work in 2004, 2005, a lot of fellow scientists laughed a little bit,” he says. “They said it was kind of quaint and cool, but can it actually tell us anything of interest? And I think now we are showing they are wrong.”
He points to the large number of papers he and his colleagues have published that use magic illusions to throw light on the workings of the mind, including research that has shown that we vastly overestimate our ability to spot things in our environment; that what we perceive is a projection into the future of what is actually happening in the real world (to allow for the time the brain takes to process information); and that we can, surprisingly easily, manipulate someone’s decision-making processes and even their most deeply held opinions without them noticing. And in a world of fake news, he says, magic’s strong connection with deception will help us understand more about the mind’s limitations when it comes to working out what is true or not.
For Kuhn, the scientific study of magic today is in a similar place to the study of consciousness in the 80s. “Any academic going into psychology then,” he says, “and saying they were studying consciousness would have been told that consciousness can’t really be a serious science because you can’t really measure it. Now it’s one of the coolest topics in science.”
And he has certainly shown that we all – scientists and lay people alike – need to be a little less confident of what we know to be “true”. As we file out of the lecture theatre into the late-afternoon sun, two prospective psychology undergraduates behind me are still talking about the show.
“I know what he said about the dice and stuff,” said one, a girl of about 16 or 17, “but I still think there was something weird about that guy. He could read minds.” “Definitely,” said her friend, a boy about the same age. “That definitely exists.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
