Gustav Kuhn || The Science of Magic

It's great to have Gustav Kohn on the show. Born in Switzerland, Cohn discovered his passion for magic at the age of thirteen, and much of his teenage years were dedicated to the art of illusion and deception. At the age of nineteen, he moved to London to follow his dream of becoming a professional magician, but his career took a dramatic change after he discovered a keen interest for psychology uh oh. Gustav went on to study psychology at Sussex University, and towards the end of his PhD, he

noticed a direct link between magic and psychology. His unique background in science and magic allowed him to build bridges between these two domeans, which helped him establish a science of Magic. Colnan is a reader at Goldsmith University of London and director of the Magic Lab, who stands for mind attention and general illusory cognition. He's one of the pioneering researchers in the science of magic, and he's one of the founding members and president of the Science of

Magic Association. His latest book is called Experiencing the Impossible, The Science of Magic. Gustav so great to talk to you today. Hello, Hi, you sound very excited to be on the show. Yeah, okay, yeah, well, thank you for being on the show. This is the first time we've represented magic, and personally, I'm very excited to have this conversation with you because I was really to magic as a child, and he used to do like apartments and things like that, only that you know, like Glenn Children's

parties and never really got invited back. But yeah, actual performances, yes, yes, I'd pour rabbits out of hats and oh wow wow, all sorts of things. But I you know, I was just fascinated with it. I wonder to what extent it influenced my interest in psychology. There's a link there, right, There's something that let you up when you discovered psychology

and what's the overapp there? What's the ven diagram? Yeah, well, in some ways it's a bit of a weird link because it took a lot longer than I expected it would take because I don't know what you were like when you were performing magic. But I was interested in anything that could improve my performances, and I read lots of really weird books, from palm reading to body language, and of course psychology as well, because magic is really

all about psychology. Magic is a process that happens in spectator's mind, and to create a powerful magical illusion, you really need to understand how humans think and behave, And so I've read a lot of psychology or pop psychology your books as a teenager, and it was really my passion for magic, and that sparked my interest in psychology.

So I went to study psychology at university. But I was rather disappointed because none of the psychology that I came across at university had anything to do with magic, and not to talk to people about magic. They thought it was interesting, but there just simply hadn't been any

research done on this. And I then went on to do a PhD in consciousness and it was only towards the end of my PhD that I actually properly realized this link between psychology and magic because a lot of questions that psychologists are interested in, it's just consciousness, belief, attention, free will. Well, these are all principles that magicians have learned about over generations. And that was really the spark

for me to establish a science of magic. And it really started by simply trying to understand how magicians can missdirect people's attention. Yeah, I mean, if you look at the perception literature, it's all about illusions. Well, yeah, I mean it's a lot of it is, and there's lots of indirect links. I mean, if you think about the perception of literature, but even developmental psychologists as well, because a lot of the developmental paradigms that I used are

actually simple magic tricks as well. So developmental psychologists perform magic tricks for infants and young children, and they measure how they respond to them as a way of really understanding how their brain works. And rather than performing magic just for kids, we actually perform magic tricks for adults, again as a way of understanding how human cognition works. Wonderful, So you still perform in all or did you ever perform? Yeah? I used to perform semi professionally. My big aim was

to become a professional magician. I grew up in Switzerland. I at the age of nineteen I moved to London to start my career really as a professional magician. I failed quite badly in that I just simply couldn't find enough work, and that's what then led me back into academia again. Really, so it's like those who can't teach what's the expression, those who can't do it teach it or something? Yeah, well it was maybe this is not quite as much on yourself, not quite as direct as that.

I think it's also I realized that actually I became more interested in studying more about the human mind than just simply performing magic. Is that kargditive dissonance. I don't think it is. I think it's also it was I came to London and at the time where magic just simply wasn't actually that popular. I don't think magic is really popular in the UK at the moment, but at the time it was very difficult to get paid work.

I was also trained as a busker, but in London, busking was banned in most places at the time, so again that made it very difficul or to make a living. I have two questions. One was busking and two why was it banned as a busking? Well, busking is street performing. As student of Chimpcillini, so I was trained as a street performer, and why it was banned, I don't know. I never really fully understood this. There were any very few places in London where you're actually allowed to busk.

So let's back up a second and define the word magic, because you talk about that a little bit in your book, and I was wondering if we could put some parameters around that, like what's not magic? Well, magic is one of these really tough terms to define, like consciousness or lots of other things, and I think it's a very ill defined term and a quite a poorly understood term

as well. What's interesting about magic from a performance point of view is that magicians spent a lot of time writing about how you can actually create magic, but they don't spend that much time actually trying to understand what the concept did say means. So very little is really known about the concept of magic itself in a performance context. And again, here. I mean, this is where it gets a bit murky. The kind of magic that I'm interested

in is performance magic. So this is the magic that where magicians use tricks and deception to create the illusion of the impossible. And that's different to some people who genuinely believe in magical miracles. So the magic that I'm talking about is really the entertainment magic. So to understand magic, I think of magic as really all being about conflict. It's about cognitive conflict, deep and signed our brains between the things you believe to be possible and the things

that you just experience. So I mean you were talking about how you made the rabbits appear from hats up bar Mitzvahas there's a beautiful example where consciously and logically you know that rabbits can't simply materialize inside a hat. As you're pulling that rabbit out of that hat, that's exactly what you're experiencing. And so magic creates a very interesting cognitive conflict between the things that you're experiencing and

the things that you believe to be possible. That's what I think of as magic, and we need magic in a world. I mean, if nothing was magical, wouldn't life be pretty boring? I think so, I think. I mean again, this is one of the interesting questions that we've been starting to look at as well as well. Why are people so drawn towards magic? And I think when we talk about the science of magic, there's a lot of focus on the deception and the illusions and the tricking.

There's a lot of positive sides about magic as well, in that magic can the list a wonder, can listen a whole range of really powerful positive emotions, and it can make the world just a happier place as well. Ah. I love that because I mean that's the particular link that you've scientifically investigating, the link to well being. How

is magic link to well being? So there's a lot of programs, a lot of magicians have been using magic as a way of enhancing people's well being, and we've become very interested in trying to make this link between magic and the enhancement of well being. And my PhD student Steve Baganski, he's dedicated his whole PhD towards understanding this. And I think magic can be used to enhanced well

being in different ways. One of the most powerful ways is really through teaching people to perform magic, and we actually do this at Goldsmiths where we train a lot of our students up in magic. They participate in magic workshops right at the beginning of their course where they learn a whole range of magic tricks, and we find that this has got a really positive impact on their

lives in that it enhances their self esteem. So the report that actually learning magic makes them feel better about themselves, and it also enhances their reported well being as well. So after participating in these workshops, they report they actually feel better about themselves as well. So learning how to perform magic increases well being, Yes, it can. I think

it can in certain ways. Now, what we're interested in and the thing that Steve is particularly investigating, and say who Steers aren't going to know exactly who Steve is, So Steph Aganski is one of my PhD students in the Magic Lab who's really focusing on this well being

aspect of our research. But yeah, I think magic has got a lot of really powerful components because for one, one of the reasons why we're interested in magic is that very few I mean, you're an exception in that you've got a very deep background in magic as well, but most of our students have never pulled the rabbit out of the hat, so they're all starting at the

same point in terms of their expertise in magic. And although it takes thousands of hours of training to become a professional magician, it's actually quite easy for people to learn simple magic tricks. And what we find is that magic is a great tool whereby we can teach someone a skill that previously they thought was just completely impossible. So you watch a magician performing a trick, so for example, he may cut a piece of rope in half and

then magically restore that. You watch that, you're very curious about it. You feel I have no idea how it's done. And our participants generally think that it's impossible for them to be able to do this, And within a relatively short amount of time we can actually teach them to perform these types of tricks. And performing these tricks in front of other people gives them lots of really positive feedback, and I think that's what makes them feel better about themselves.

And also there's this feeling like a sense of control, right like you hear a lot of magicians talk about their early childhood. It is like being bullied or being outcast in some way, And doesn't it kind of make you feel like you're doing one up on others? I think so. I mean, I think it means interests an interesting point really the whole bullying, because when you talk to a lot of magicians, a lot of magicians claim that they got into magic because they were struggling at

school or they were the outcasts in some ways. And I think magic can give you that special skill that you can do something which others can't do. And I mean, I know from I never got bullied at school, but I definitely being able to perform magic that opened doors that would have been closed otherwise. And I think that can be a really useful thing, again in terms of helping people who may not necessarily feel very good about

themselves or have all lack social skills as well. I think because being able to perform magic gives you a script of how you can conduct a social interaction, and it gives something that people can talk about and it makes you interesting as well. So again I think that's another really interesting aspect of magic. Yeah, it's just an observation I've made about magicians. Yeah, there's also obviously well being benefits to experiencing magic, right, not like it being

the one doing it, but just being in the audience. Yeah, so I think there's a Again, there's not that much is known about the impact that experiencing magic, so simply watching magic as a spectator can have on people's well being. But there's some research by Eugene Zubotsky who showed that

watching magical content content can increase people's creativity. So these were studies that were carried on children where children got to see video clips of Harry Potter extracts, and some of these extracts included magic, the others non magical, and the kids who actually watched the magical content they scored high on creativity. How is creativity like division? Thinking? Sorry,

like division thinking? Like how many uses? So the so I think one of the So they used a drawing task and an alternative use as task as well, whereby the kids are given a word or concept than they have to come up with lots of different creative uses for that concept. So those types of tasks, Well, that's cool, that link to creativity. Why do you think there was that link to creativity? Personally? I think magic is all about what it's about experiencing the impossible, and it pushes

the boundaries of what's possible. So you watch some so you imagine like when you watch someone doing some mind reading and they consciously you think, you know that mind reading isn't actually possible, and yet suddenly you're experiencing something that previously you felt was just completely impossible. And I think that can potentially enhance people's wide than your thinking, and that's what can enhance people's creativity as well. WHOA,

what was that? That was just a bit of I think it's just some fireworks in the back right now. I'm in London and it's just started a bit dark. Okay, sound like good shot. But anyway, we'll just overlook that. So, oh, this is great. I'm glad you touched on. You know, creativity is my like I get a giddy whenever one

of my guests uses the word creativity. You know, there's just research showing that just experiencing, I mean, there is like systematic research showing that weird experiences increase creative thinking. Like they've done experiments where they put you in a virtual reality environment and if you walk towards a table and it's defined the law of gravity, so thinks you're supposed to get bigger as you get closer them, but

they get smaller. You know, people just completely changing all the things people are used to in their daily life, and you find that they do better on creativity tests.

I'll send you some of those papers. Okay, that'd be great. Actually, I mean that links really with sort of some of the ideas that we have about magic as well, because of course magic is really all about, Yeah, you're entering a world where new things are possible, and I think there's a there's a there's a link to childhood as well. I mean, I'll see it. I've got three young kids

and their sense of creativity is just absolutely amazing. And quite often when we talk to people after they're watching some magic tricks, they report that it feels it reminds

them of their childhood. And again, I think we haven't done much research on this yet, but I do strongly believe that when you're watching very strong magic, it can elicit emotional experiences that are very similar to childhood experiences, and it can evoke this sensation where you're in a world or really lots of things are possible, again, I mean if I look at my kids when they're playing, their pretend to play is so creative, and I mean I'm so boring compared to them because I have all

these strict rules, these areas about what is about what is possible? And so again, I think it's possible that watching and experiencing magic elicits these kind of emotional experiences that can just break down some of these barriers and make you more creative. Love that anything that I'll make us more creative. I'm a big proponent of that. So you mentioned misdirection earlier. I think misdirection is just like

one of the biggest things and the magician's toolkit. There's been these elaborate setups and things like I'll watch like a show and be like, wow, that was just impossible, and then I'll like google like have that magician do that? And they're all these like forums and threads. You can sometimes actually find out that the truth and some of

the things are the most banal. Like it's a whole elaborate thing, but it all came down to just the magician at one point was just I turned my head and looked at they said like, look at this amazing thing over here, and then and then they just put the whole elephin there and we didn't see it. But do you see, I'm saying, like some of it it seems so elaborate when it just came down a really simple misdirection. Yes, I mean I think, I mean, I fully agree in that misdirection is really central to all

of magic. I published a paper a few years ago which tried to conceptualize and categorize all different principles in misdirection, and by doing so I suddenly realized and actually fact all magic is missdirection in that it's almost impossible to think of any miss any magic trick without misdirection. But I think there's a lot of misconceptions really about what missdirection is as well. When you look up the term missed direction and Wikipedia or any dictionary generally simply talks

about attention. It talks about distracting someone's attention to prevent them from seeing certain things happen, and attentional misdirection is

an important component. A misdirection is far more complex in that it involves cognitive processes across a whole wide range of spectrum, so manipulating what you're at tending to is simply one misdirection process, because you can use misdirection to manipulate how what you remember about an event, and you can also use misdirection to manipulate how you reconstruct an

event and actually reason about an event. And so the way that we think of misdirection now is really linking it to our cognitive understanding of the human mind, which looks at the encoding process. So that's the perception of something, the memory of the event, and then you're reasoning about the event as well. So there's a lot more that goes into it. Yeah, there's a lot. So it's I mean, you can think about misdirection as manipulating what you're seeing.

But of course when you're watching a magic trick and afterwards you try and work out how it's done, mistakes can happen at lots of different levels, so you may not necessarily have seen what's happened, so it can that can prevent you from actually working out how it's done. Or maybe you saw it but you simply didn't remember it, so that's where the memory processes can kick in. Or you can actually remember all of the details about the magic trick, but you see cannot actually work it out,

and so that would be the reasoning process that's being misdirected. Nice. So I'm curious, like, does magic have a neural basis? Like what if we looked at in the brain of the person as they're being misdirected, Like, what would we see? What is your own research on Well, I think everything's got a neural basis. I know, as long as you're alive. It was a leaning question and as long as you accept that all cognition happens, right, Well, this is the

question you posed in your book. But I think there's a back. This is nearly this is about ten years ago or more. We started a project that tried to study the neural basis of magic in terms of and here by magic I mean watching simple magic tricks. Now, I was lucky to collaborate with a friend of mine, Ben Paris, who was working in a big lab where they had access to neuroimaging, which allowed us to use functional neuroimaging to try and study the brain activation whilst

people are watching a magic trick. Now, at the time we were this is I mean, I have to say this is quite a while ago. Neuroimaging has moved on a lot in the last ten years, but this was a time where you could still get really excited about just identifying a brain area that would be responsible for particular task or so. And our dream was at the time to just find this one spot in the brain that will be responding to magic, and we already came up with the name of calling it the magic spot.

This kind of show was a little bit how naive. We were kind of like about this reception, and so we created lots of video clips of me performing magic tricks. A lot of this was actually filmed. We didn't have much funding for this. A lot of this was filmed in my bedroom of me performing magic tricks. And we had control conditions as well. So for example, I would make a coin disappear, but in these kind of studies you needed control condition as well. So I would use

a coin and do something unusual with it. I can't remember what it was. Maybe I would have brushed my teeth with it or shoved it in my ear or

something like that. And we then scanned people's brains whilst they were watching these magic tricks and compared compared the neural activation to when they're watching something that was simply unusual The results were really very surprising in that we got fairly localized activation that was responsible for the perception of magic tricks, which was in the also actual prefun to cortex and then air. We are known as the

ACC of the SEC conflict resolution exactly. And now at the time we were a bit disappointed because we were trying to find a more specific area. But then, of course it turns out that the ACC is responsible for this conflict resolution, which fits very nicely now with this idea that magic is really all about cognitive conflict between the things that you're experiencing and the things that you

believe to be possible. So although we were a bit disappointed at the time, actually, now the way that we're thinking about magic, a lot of this neuroimaging works makes a lot more sense. Oh for sure. I mean, obviously there isn't like a magic part of the brain. Like this is a process that we go through a lot in our daily life, and magic plays off of these deeply evolved brain areas. Yeah, and I think that's a

really important point. I mean, magic is unique in that it can create this sense of wonder, but of course a lot of the cognitive process that are actually involved in magic happened to us all the time, I mean all the time, exceptual illusions. We are constantly being fooled by all of these illusions. It's just that during the day to day life, you just don't realize that you're

being fooled by the illusions. And again with this cognitive conflict, I mean, maybe there is something unique to magic, or maybe it's really very similar to other kinds of conflict that we are still really at the beginning of trying to discover. So do we all experience the same magic. It's very difficult to under to really know what someone else is experiencing. But I don't think we do. And

there's several reasons for one. I mean, if we think about so in terms of magic, like if we now think of magic as being about this conflict, this conflict relies on two main factors. The first one is what you are perceiving, and the second one is what you believe to be possible. Now, of course, we all have different beliefs about what is possible. If you think about an extreme example with kids. Now, kids have got very different beliefs about the world, and so things that seem

impossible for us may actually seem possible for them. So if you think about the concept like early early on infants, they don't have the concept of object permanency. And what this means is that for them, objects that go out of sight may also disappear. And of course you and I know that if an object is simply included by something. So if you've got a cup of coffee on your table and your box of rice crispies is including your view of your cup of coffee, you know that cup

of coffee hasn't disappeared. It's still there even though you can't see it. Now, this is known as object permanency. End, there's a process that doesn't kick in until quite later on in life. And so that's really at this object permits is at the center of a lot of magic tricks where you make an object disappear and you really surprise and amaze by that. Now you're amazed by this because you know that objects don't simply disappear in everyday life.

A young child won't have that concept and so for them, simply making an object to disappear won't elicit that type of cognitive conflict. And indeed, if we look developmentally, children have a very different experience of magic tricks to adults. But I think even for us adults, we all have different beliefs about the world, and since magic is about creating this conflict between your experience and your belief, you will probably experience a magic tricks very differently to the

way I do it. And again, like anecdotally, we know. I've realized this when think about mind reading. I have performed mind reading effects for people who genuinely believe that these things are possible, and they actually experience the mind reading magic trick as being very different to someone who's more skeptical about this. So I think that's on one level, But then with this conflict, it's about the belief and

your experience. And again, the more we're learning about how the human brain works, the more we've come to realize that all of our experiences of the world are really very different as well. And so given that we all experience the world differently, that also implies that we should be experiencing magic very differently as well. Yeah, but I mean, isn't the magician banking on the fact that their audience is not experiencing it differently? I guess you're hoping that

your audience is a bunch of newbies. What you do to a certain extent. I mean, I think as a magician, you do try to create this illusion in everyone, but you'll never have Yeah, the audience will never respond. Everybody's different. Everybody will respond differently to a particular effect. Now, in certain circumstances, these differences may be smaller, about in others they may be bigger as well. Well, I'm just so interested in different types of magic, and there's a particular

type that that they interest me on. These what are they called the like the mind illusionists? Yep, mentalism. So interested in mentalism. I saw a show in Vegas not that long ago that just really did well in my mind. I just can't understand how he and I talked to the people efforts like were you planned? They're like no, he literally guessed the name of the obscure name of my ex girlfriend. And I just don't understand how they do it. Can you tell me how they do it?

I'm currently in enough trouble with the magic circle if I'll tell you how the magic circle muscle of you. Well, I'm carrently being investigated by the Exposure Committee and there's a chance that I'm being expelled from the magic stir. Oh my gosh, that sounds horrible telling people that I missed that magician's miss direct your attention. It's pretty much as sippy as that. Yeah, you have a whole theory about the Beasian theory of mister action. And they're like,

that's so nerdy, that's you must be expelled. I'll have to be expelled for that. But I mean, I'll try to with a lot of this research. I mean, I love magic and I don't really want to give away any of the secrets. But and in this case, I have no idea how this has done. And I think mentalism, I mean, mentalism is a really fascinating area of magic and it's probably one of the most popular eras of

magic as well. And I think what's really interesting about mentalism is that it blurs this boundary between real magic and trickery. So when you're watching a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, most people know it's a trick. Like you don't think that the magician has got genuine magical powers. You realize is that what you are seeing

is an elaborate illusion. With mentalism, this isn't a slightly different area, because once someone starts reading your mind, we become much more likely to actually accept what you are seeing as being genuine or real, and in particular, when mentalists start using psychological principles as well. So I don't know in the States whether I mean in the UK, Darren Brown is a very popular to mention him. I mean, he's one of my favorite magicians. You know him personally,

are your friends with him? I don't know him personally, but I do really really like a lot of his a lot of delusions and of course he so Darren Brown, he created a new type of magic, which he calls mind control. And so rather than claiming that he's reading people's minds, he claims to be using psychological principles to read someone's thoughts. So he may claim that he's reading your body language or micro expressions, or use elaborate psychological

priming to influence your decision making as well. And what's interesting about this is that when people watch these types of illusions, they genuinely believe that that's what he's doing, when actual fact, it often involves simple magic tricks. I mean I'm saying simple. It's not simple because they're really very clever magic tricks. But it's a similar kind of magic tricks that other magicians may use when they claim

that they're reading your mind. So what Darren Brown is doing, he's giving you a psychological pseudo explanation as to what he's actually doing. Now, we've done a lot of work research on this to show that people genuinely believe that this stuff is real. That what's even more worrying is that it doesn't really matter whether you tell people that

they're watching a magician or psychologist. So even if they tell them, actually, you're watching a magician who's using tricks, people still genuinely believe that the kind of principles that they claim to be doing are actually real. And this is what makes mentalism so interesting in that it really blurs the distinction between real magic or what people think

of as real magic and trickery. And obviously there's individual differences there and how people perceive that you might have the Dieharden sinx when you tell them, well, that like changes something in their brain and the way they perceive it. Yeah, So we've been over the last five years or what we've been carrying out a big research project, not just on these mentalism effects using psychological explanations but also using

spiritualist explanations. So what we're interested here is why people believe in genuine magic and things that normally will be impossible. And so in these experiments, we get a magician to come and perform some magic for our students, and they use this form of mentalism. So we create a fake spiritualist experience whereby the magician may read a person's or read personal information about the person and then do a really specific reading where we get them to find out

about their deceased relatives. Now all of this is done using tricks. I mean, it's very clever tricks and very powerful tricks, but it is tricks. But half the participants were initially told that they're going to be watching a magician, whilst the other half we're told that they're watching a genuine psychic. That what's very interesting is that this manipulation, so this framing, whether we tell them it's a magician or psychic, has very little impact on how they interpret

what they've just seen. So we have people who we've told you're watching a magician who's using tricks and is still genuinely believe that the person's gott got real spiritual powers. But what we find is that people's interpretation of what they're seeing is very strongly linked to their prior beliefs. As you suggested before in that that die hard skeptics, well, they will attribute what they're seeing down to trickery, whilst the mother the believers are more likely to attribute what

they've seen to genuine spiritual powers. Have you looked at open as to experience as a personality moderator? We haven't in this context. No, we have in other context looking at people's enjoyment for magic, but rather surprisingly, we don't actually find any correlation between openers to experience and people's enjoyment for magic, which is something I would have predicted would predicted that too. I don't find any correlation between any of them age tits. What's good news for your

as a researcher. That was very disappointing, but of course in some ways it is also very encouraging that it suggests that actually magic seems to tap into something that's really very rather universal universal. So what is the magician's force? The magician's force is a principle that magicians used to influence your decision making. So, for example, you may be asked to pick a card that might have a playing cards, I'll shoffle the cards and I'll ask you to pick

a card. I then say, I'll read your mind by an actual fact rather than reading your mind, I forced that card, which means that I knew beforehand which card that you're going to be choosing. And the magician force is a general principle. It's a principle bit like misdirection, whereby magicians have got lots of different psychological tricks and principles that they can use too many plate your decision making.

But what's important about this is that the decision making is being influenced even though you are not aware of this influence. So you feel that you've made a free choice, yet in actual fact that choice has been forced. Oh wow, So have you been studying that personally? Yeah? So again. So one of my other PhD students, Alice Palla, she's dedicating a whole PhD towards trying to understand the psychological mechanisms that underlie them, the psychological for these psychological forces.

And again, a psychologists were really interested in this because if we think about it like free will, as a central concept to humans. Say, you're manipulating free will, and there's been, there, there's been. One of these holy grails of psychology really is to find powerful ways of manipulating people's decision making processes, to think about subliminal perception or

other forms of priming. And although these principles work, their effects are generally really very very limited, which makes it quite difficult for us to actually study these processes in the lab. What we're finding with the Magician's Force is that we've got these really powerful principles which are highly reliable, and yet people are completely oblivious to the fact that their choice has been manipulated. And this provides us with great tools to study concepts such as free will and

our people's center of agency. Yeah, I worry about people who use magic for not good, you know, for evil. I mean you have a lot of you do you have a lot of people studying up on like hgnosis and things like that trying to manipulate people. Yeah, I mean I think there's a real worry with a lot of these. I mean there's sort of like I mean,

you mentioned hypnosis. I think the whole the way, if you think about the whole the impact that fake news and a lot of these other forms of misdirection which work on a much a bigger scale have and are being exploited by politicians and other organizations. Think that is quite worrying, and I guess I mean this is one of the reasons why we're interested in a lot of this research is to find ways to protect ourselves from

this as well. So we've just started a project which is funded by the Australian government, which is actually looking at whether we can implement some of these magic techniques into artificial intelligence, So whether we can actually use magic principles to prevent us sort of like to prevent us from being cheated by bots and other artificial intelligence devices. Yeah, there are intelligence is an interesting one. Once they can get the competitional power to really blow our minds, hopefully

magicians will never come absolutely. You know, it feels like the presentation part is a big part of it, right, the human charisma part two it, Yeah, the whole the showmanship within the magic performance is really essential. Follow agreed. I know that you do talk about the link between magic and human machine interaction in your Yeah, is there anything else you wanted to say about that topic? While

we're on it. Well, that's an interesting link and one that probably a lot of people wouldn't have necessarily have thought. I was like, so cool. But of course, again mentioned really right at the beginning. One of the reasons why I'm interested in magic is because I think it relates to so many things that we just take for granted

as well. We've spent quite a lot of time talking about perception and free will, but a lot of our human computer interaction also relies on very similar illusions as well. So as we are now having this conversation over skyper can see all of these different icons. Well, of course this is all an illusion. I mean, I can see a picture of your face there, but you're not actually really there. Similarly, when you're taking a file and you throw it into your trash can, well the file hasn't

actually been deleted. This is all a very elaborate illusion. And as human computer interaction designers, well, the challenges that they face are really quite similar to the kind of challenges that a magician face because in some ways they've got As a computer programmer, you need to create a code that provides the illusion that you are actually interacting with a real object. As well underdeed. I mean, if we look at technological advances, a lot of these advances

have been made possible by creating these powerful illusions. So when you're reading it, you might read a book on your iPad and you just have to swipe to move over to the to turn the next page. Well, these swiping actions create the illusion of you actually turning a physical page. And I think a lot of the principles that magicians have been developing within their magic performance context can be implemented to enhance our human computer interactions as well.

Such an interesting this interesting how that develops in the coming years. Yeah, I mean this is something that has been moving quite quickly as well as our graphical interfaces are increasing as well. And so another one of my PhD students, Shringy, she's actually directly looking at how we can implement, for example, forcing principles in a gaming environment to increase the user experiencing user experiences whilst gaming as well. Yeah, that's very similar principles I play there. Yeah, so how

can we advance the magic endeavor? Well, this is something that I've spent the last fifteen years or more trying to convince scientists really to take magic more seriously because I think it allows us to studied human mind from a very unique angle and such a provisors with a great tool to sut of human cognition. We've moved quite far. Really. At the beginning, a lot of magicians, a lot of scientists just saw magic as just a bit of fun.

And I think but now we had a point to where magic is taught and undergraduate courses as well as become part of textbooks as well. It's become a fairly

established field now. I think in terms of the magicians, I've had a more frosty reception really and much more skeptical, which I've been really quite surprised by in that when I tell magicians about using science to enhance the endeavor, they often come back to me and say, well, you know what, we've been performing these magic or magicians not necessarily then personally, but magicians have been performing these magic tricks for centuries, if not millennia, and as such they've

got a massive head start really on our psychologists now. Personally, I mean, I can't disagree with this. And one of my motivation for using magic as a tool to study the mind has been because we can tap into all of this useful quad knowledge about how the brain works. But whilst magicians are very good at knowing what kind of tricks work, they don't necessarily understand why they work.

And I think that's where science can really help us, because as scientists and psychologists, we have got pretty good blueprints now of how the human mind works, and that can potentially allow magicians to create much more powerful illusions. But even I think that using the psychological or sort of like the scientific method can be used to enhance magic, because I mean, magic is a weird field in that, unlike most other art forms like music or fine art,

or dance or drama, there's no magic schools. Magic is something that is learned through these informal structures, and most of the knowledge that magicians have accumulated relies on introspection. It relies on an informal introspection about doing, prying out performance, evaluating that performance just through person some experiences, and then writing these writing these ideas down and some of these

ideas are probably correct, but others aren't. And I think if we really want to advance magic, I think we need to use more objective and more systematic scientific principles to really study whether these principles actually work or not, and I think that's where science can help as well.

But at the moment, I think this is a very revolutionary idea, and it'll still take a few years for magicians for some board, but we've actually started a new research project in our lab which is directly using science as a way of enhancing magic, and hopefully magicians will take this on board. Oh that's so cool. So you can actually influence the field of magic itself, not just magic,

influencing psychology. Yeah, I think that would be quite a nice way way to give certain things back as well, because most of our research, and I think this is all of the misunderstandings come from as well, most of our work uses magic as a way of understanding the human brain. And we're not we're not we're not We're not trying to enhance magic, And so magicians often look at this research and well, this isn't really a pull of me. I can't really see how I can directly

use this knowledge to improve my magic. And of course the reason and why it doesn't work is because that's not what we in terms of you, and so what we're trying to do with the project is really illustrate how science can be used to enhance the magic endeavor. Yeah, I love it and I wish you all the best of this endeavor. Is there anything else you wanted to

mention about the research you're currently working on. No, I guess the thing to mention is that it's a it's a very fairly new or it's a fairly new field of but I've been amazed how in the last fifteen years or so, it's just it's standing so dramatically, and we now have people from all over the world who are using magic as a way of understanding a whole

range of psycho processes. And you mentioned the science of magic association at the beginning, so I think anybody who's interested in this do check out the Science of Magic Association. And we hold regular courses. The next one is going to be in Chicago, which brings together magicians and psychologists. So we've got Elizabeth Lofts and Dan Simon's who are keynote speakers from the psychology side, and really eminent magicians as well, Malin McKean and Simon Aaronson. And these are

great conferences. They're bothly as well, and they really try to bridge this gap between science and magic. Oh that's great. Yeah, I'm a big fan of Daniel Simmons. Well, thanks again for being on the Psychology Podcast and talking about this topic that we haven't represented yet on the show. Thank you very much, Scott. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast.

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