First there's shock tinged with disbelief. A moment of wonder follows. Then, a desperate scramble to rack your brains and work out just how you've been had. There's no denying the effects of a good magic trick. From the great escapes of Harry Houdini and the surreal mental trickery of Derren Brown to the conjurors at children's parties, the appeal is universal.
"Magic's been around for a very long time and it improves over time," says Richard Wiseman, a professor of psychology at Hertfordshire University, UK. "What you're looking at when you see a finished piece of magic is a great deal of expertise, and I think psychologists have a lot to learn from that."
But, not content with just enjoying the tricks, psychologists are now studying their effects on the mind to work out how we handle the floods of sensory information coming into our brains and process it into a mental picture of the world around us. Magic is a deception, a disruption of that orderly mental picture where things seem to float in mid-air or coins and cards vanish in front of our eyes. Scientists now believe that, by mapping out how our brains are deceived, they could even help to unlock some of the mysteries of consciousness itself.
"Over the last five years, there's been a reawakening as we look at things like change blindness (a failure to see large changes in a visual scene) and at the fact that consciousness is a construction and may even be an illusion," says Wiseman, himself an accomplished magician and member of the Magic Circle. "Now there's a recognition that magicians are doing something very special."
Some of the founders of modern psychology were fascinated by magicians: throughout the 1890s, Alfred Binet, inventor of the modern IQ test, and Max Dessoir wrote about the ways in which magicians used suggestion and misdirected attention to get their illusions to work.
In 1896, Joseph Jastrow published articles in Science on the mecha-nics of some tricks by contemporary master magicians. But, aside from describing what the magicians were doing, they were at a loss to explain why magic tricks had the effects they did on the audience. As a result, interest in studying the psychology of magic faded for nearly a century.
But, as Wiseman says, a renaissance is now in full swing.
Magic is all about convincing others that the impossible has just happened. And that deception is achieved with a high degree of skill and showmanship.
"We're starting to realize that magicians have a lot of implicit know-ledge about how we perceive the world around us because they have to deceive us in terms of controlling attention, exploiting the assumptions we make when we do and don't notice a change in our environment," says Wiseman. "There is an enormous amount of really detailed instruction on how to perform magic. People are always blown away by how detailed a description you'll have."
A card trick that lasts four or five minutes, for example, might have 20 pages of detailed text to describe exactly where to look, what to say, what to do and so on. And a lot of the understanding of a trick has to be from the perspective of the audience.
While the magician's dexterity is important, the audience is also a vital participant in the deception. After all, it is in their minds that the illusion is created. "Magicians seem to be able to carry out secret actions in front of their audience without being spotted. I'm interested in why people don't perceive those actions," says Gustav Kuhn, a psychologist at Durham University.
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