Your Brain on a Magic Trick - NYTimes.com - 2 views
www.nytimes.com/...ur-brain-on-a-magic-trick.html
choice perception cognitive bias reality change blindness magic
shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 12
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a retention vanish: a false transfer that exploits a lag in the brain’s perception of motion, called persistence of vision. When done right, the spectator will actually see the coin in the left palm for a split second after the hands separate. This bizarre afterimage results from the fact that visual neurons don’t stop firing once a given stimulus (here, the coin) is no longer present. As a result, our perception of reality lags behind reality by about one one-hundredth of a second.
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Another dark psychological secret magicians routinely take advantage of is known as change blindness — the failure to detect changes in consecutive scenes.
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we are often blind to the results of our own decisions. Once a choice is made, our minds tend to rewrite history in a way that flatters our volition, a fact magicians have exploited for centuries. “If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely,” said Teller, of the duo Penn and Teller, to Smithsonian magazine. “This is one of the darkest of all psychological secrets.”
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Magicians have long used such cognitive biases to their advantage, and in recent years scientists have been following in their footsteps, borrowing techniques from the conjurer’s playbook in an effort not to mystify people but to study them.
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Scientists have found a way to induce change blindness, with a machine called a transcranial magnetic stimulator, which uses a magnetic field to disrupt localized brain regions
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Such blind spots confirm what many philosophers have long suspected: reality and our perception of it are incommensurate to a far greater degree than is often believed. For all its apparent fidelity, the movie in our heads is a “Rashomon” narrative pieced together from inconsistent and unreliable bits of information. It is, to a certain extent, an illusion.