Science and magic

For neurobiologists linkurl:Stephen Macknik;http://macknik.neuralcorrelate.com/node/16 and linkurl:Susana Martinez-Conde,;http://smc.neuralcorrelate.com/ what happened in Vegas, left Vegas and made it into the pages of their new book linkurl:Sleights of Mind,;http://sleightsofmind.com a 300-page tour through consciousness, attention, and deception via the marriage of professional magic and cognitive neuroscience.

Courtesy Stephen Macknik

For years, researchers have studied the keen eye of painters to help understand the visual system and perception. But "magicians are artists of cognition," who use attention and awareness as their preferred media rather than paint or clay, says Martinez-Conde. The idea of "neuromagic," or the neuroscientific study of magic tricks, came to Macknik and Martinez-Conde, neuroscientists at the Barrow Neurologicial Institute (BNI) in Phoenix, when they were asked to lead the 2007 Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) annual conference held in Las Vegas, Nevada. Driving down the strip on their preliminary visit to Las Vegas, magicians were "festooned...