Magens Bay --San Thomas

Thursday, November 8, 2012

The Mind and the Magician


Like some of you, I have always been fascinated by Magicians. And we all know the fact that they, by all means, have played tricks on our minds. But yet, we still enjoyed and succumbed to them :-)

Nova Science has hosted a show sometimes last year on "How does the Brain Works?" In this show, the host took us to meet couple of magicians and Neurosciencientists.  And the quest is to find 'How our minds were fooled by the Magicians?" It turned out that the way our brains work is tied closely with our eyes. 

In the example that was given, they have a magician performing with an action that one of his hands was holding a coin and another one was taking the coin over while making a curve motion. As we followed the hand with the action, our eyes fixed on the ‘curve motion," and ignoring the other hand—the hand that actually holding the coin. At the end, our minds were thinking that the hand with the motion has caused the coin to be disappeared into the thin air, but in reality that hand only manage to perform the ‘curve motion’ that got us tricked.

When our eyes are paying attention on a certain motion, one of our neurons detect these motions, and the others two are suppressing the background—objects that we don’t have our eyes on. Apparently our brains are constantly suppressing information that we don’t care much, helping us focus on the information that matters to us.

In the case of the above example, the magician has mislead his audiences to pay attention on the motion--distract our minds--while he can hide the coin with his other hand.

And if you have 10 minutes at hands, why not watch the video :-)



I hope you enjoyed this stop to visit the Mind and the Magician.

Until next stop,
 Journey of Life

10 comments:

  1. I didn't watch the video. But I wonder do we all have a little magician in all of us? Do we all have away of fooling the eye?

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  2. Magic is fascinating.. even more because it's actually just tricks and intelligence .. to me that makes it all the more interesting!

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    1. Indeed ... I always thought it was nothing but play ...

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  3. I've always thought it was very interesting how magicians can fool us. Fascinating post!

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    1. Yeah ... I have never put much thought into it until the science revealed.

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  4. I'm learning the eyes are key to a lot of things we do with our bodies. My daughter has a forward core (she's in physical therapy) and so they work on core strengthening with her. It turns out that she uses her eyes to do about 90% of her balancing instead of her core doing the work. This is all tied in to her reading comprehension being lower than average--because she uses her eyes to balance--reading a book (with eyes that don't converge) wipes her out and makes her sleepy.

    So all that said to say-- I believe that our eyes would be the "culprit" for tricking us into thinking a magic show was really magic. But they are so fun to watch. I love Chris Angel.

    Cheers, Jenn

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    1. Fascinating information, Jenn. Thank you for sharing and I wish your daughter speedy success on her therapy.

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  5. The mind is awesome and scary, too. And I have always been fascinated with magic. We know it is all a trick, and yet we are drawn and captured by what we think we see.

    Thank you for the video, Angela, it was wonderfully informative.

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    1. Yeah ...If we don't use it well ...mind indeed is scary.

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