Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic (The MIT Press)

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A memory-constrained agent (such as a human) cannot remember everything. Even if we initially give our full attention to a situation, we may nevertheless forget or misremember the details. Furthermore, as magicians know, this forgetfulness is almost certain to occur if our attention is overloaded and/or we are encouraged to reconstruct our memories from “alternative facts”.

Similarly, the so-called “father of modern science”, Francis Bacon, argued that “ Magic aims to recall natural philosophy from a miscellany of speculation to a greatness of works,” which was exactly what he was trying to do with his own project, as is clear from his definition of magic “as the science which applies the knowledge of hidden forms to the production of wonderful operations; and by uniting (as they say) actives with passives displays the wonderful works of nature.” Magic was a pragmatic or instrumentalist form of natural philosophy of exactly the sort Bacon saw as missing from scholasticism. Moreover, although Bacon often gets accused of despiritualizing nature, in texts like Sylva Sylvarum and the Historia vitae et mortis , he described a natural world overflowing with spirits with their own particular powers and appetites. Science, in this account, was the manipulation of spirits, not their elimination. An engaging and accessible read focusing on an unusual, yet surprisingly interesting connection, the one between magic and cognitive sciences.

Olson, J.A., Amlani, A.A., Raz, A. & Rensink, R.A. (2015). Influencing choice without awareness. Consciousness and Cognition, 37, 225–236. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2015.01.004 How the scientific study of magic reveals intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the mysteries of the human mind. In addition, some spells were likely able to draw in the projections of others so that even if say a lady in question were carefully concealing her affection for some gentlemen she would not be able to conceal microexpressions related to supposed love potions and their association or not with the gentleman in question. This effects compound of course so that the magician even if not skilled at consciously reading microexpressions could nonetheless get a read from his crystals as to their potential efficicay in enchanting a love potential by the way in which the lady in question responded to the association between such a crystal and the gentleman who wanted to employ it. That is, the probability of a goal (A) given the evidence (B) is the probability of the evidence given the goal multiplied by the prior probability of the goal and divided by the probability of the evidence. The framework at Section 3, on which we are building, references the prior probability distribution across goals ( Prob) appropriately in Eq. 2. However, despite the demonstrated importance of incorporating and updating priors in systems intended to model human-like reasoning ( Baker et al., 2009; Baker et al., 2011), often those updates seem not to occur (e.g., Ramirez and Geffner, 2010; Masters and Sardina, 2019a). Instead, priors are initially assumed equal, then remain frozen: which means they cancel out and can be ignored. And this is the case even in online scenarios which implicitly consider each new observation with reference to those that have gone before. The conundrum for goal recognition lies in the fact that priors handled more carefully are more consistent with human-like reasoning but may generate less accurate results. 4 As Brown (2019) warns, “We make up a story to make sense of what’s going on. And we all get it wrong”. 5

Magic, which has exploited such aspects of the visual for centuries, offers us a framework to explore perception in an intriguing way, and the potential for understanding our perceptual system by investigating how magic exploits its blindness and gaps is enormous. Practically, the goal recognition system—which in an XGR context represents human-like reasoning—assembles its own observation sequence ( o ⃗ t, corresponding to the original o ⃗) by selecting one observation at each time-step o t from the set of potential observations O t and adding it to the sequence of observations o ⃗ t − 1 selected so-far. 5.2 Passive Misdirection The ruse is a plausible, but untrue, reason, or action conveying a reason, for concealing the true purpose for doing something” which “makes it possible for the magician to do an unnatural thing naturally” ( Fitzkee, 1945). The actions involved in a ruse may receive attention at the time they take place (everyone saw the magician handle the cardboard sleeve around the bullets, the container of pens, the wine glass, the plate) but what he did with each prop seemed to have a valid purpose at the time and is likely to be forgotten once that purpose is complete. What is surprising here is that spectators, who are in a hyper-vigilant mode when watching a magic performance, are so willing to disregard and forget incidental events. This is to do with the way memories are stored and retrieved. Whereas once it was thought our memories were laid down almost like video recordings ( Chabris and Simons, 2009), available to “replay” under hypnosis, for example; we now believe that each time we recall a memory we reconstruct it from mental representations that are highly abstracted and edited down according to perceived relevance ( Loftus and Palmer, 1996). In other words, something happens in front of us but because our attention is elsewhere, we don’t register having seen it.

So, then on the one hand magicians are going to be loathe to perform perform magic that they do not intuitively think is going to work. This intuition is going to encompass a lot of factors, outside of the magician's awareness. So for example, a magician is unlikely to a spell to rid the castle of scorpions when he does not intuitively believe that the scorpions are in the decline. He could of course appeal -- and honestly so -- to the fact that his crystal were not responding in the proper manner and that the alternative magic seemed to be too powerful. Elisabeth Loftus, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine, and author of Eyewitness Testimony I hope that this discussion provides a small glimpse into some of the ways in which we are using magic to further the understanding our mind. A full discussion can be found in my recent book, Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic. The science of magic has now become a research field in its own right and the Science of Magic Association organises a biennial conference dedicated to furthering our scientific understanding of magic. The next conference will be held in July 2019 in Chicago and will bring together psychologists (e.g. Elizabeth Loftus, Dan Simons) and world-class magicians (e.g. Mac King, Simon Aronson) to discuss scientific findings and explore ways in which magic can help answer scientific questions that go beyond simple entertainment.

The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition. Magic has finally emerged from the box labelled “entertainment” and now shines a light on one of the most perplexing areas of mind studies – perception.People rarely think of magic as a way to enhance wellbeing, but such applications do exist and are, in fact, growing rapidly in popularity. Until now, this endeavour has involved a rather disparate group of techniques, but Steve Bagienski and I have recently developed a hierarchical framework to help organise many of these approaches. The magician holds a ball in his hand. He tosses it in the air and catches it, then tosses it in the air and catches it, then tosses it in the air and…but wait—it’s gone! On the other side of the debate, Peter Lamont, senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and former president of the Edinburgh Magic Circle, argues there's no question of the utility of studying magic -- whether as part of experiments into other areas or directly -- but that it doesn't need its own branch of science, or an overarching scientific theory of magic. "I don't see what we get from this, a scientific theory of effects and methods... I don't see what this gives us," he said. After really throwing the ball into the air numerous times and then simply performing the same movement in every way but without the ball, most people will see a ball fly into the air and disappear. This event is recounted in the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), a 1486 text so infamous that it has been described “ the most significant ‘witchhunting’ guide published in early modern Europe” and as “ without question the most important and sinister work on demonology ever written.” While its influence has probably been exaggerated, it contains a number of striking anecdotes (and a whole lot of misogyny). But from a contemporary vantage, one of the most remarkable things about the text is that it principally denied that witchcraft was supernatural or miraculous. According to the text: