Once when I heard Daniel Dennett giving a talk, he spoke briefly on the curious nature of reality and magic. What many people would call real magic—genuinely making something disappear into thin air or otherwise behave contrary to the laws of nature—does not of course exist, and in that sense is not real. But the kind of magic that people do every day, real working magic based on adroitness, cleverness, and knowledge of human psychology, would be considered not real, because in fact the coin is not really appearing out of thin air or whatever. Funny things, words. (Or should I say, “Funny things, hominids”?)
The kind of real, everyday magic that people can in fact do is seen by some scientists as a key to certain aspects of human perception and cognition. This article from Science Daily briefly describes a paper coming out soon that explores the features of human vision and attention that are exploited by magicians. (The paper is Towards a Science of Magic, by Ronald Rensink, Gustav Kuhn, and Alym Amlani.) Check out the links in the Science Daily story that go to supplemental material, in particular this “looking but not seeing” page. It contains a link to videos that illustrate the phenomenon of change blindness: two very similar scenes are alternated in a video loop, separated by a blank frame, and it can be amazingly hard to spot the difference between them, because of the way we see but don’t necessarily attend to what is different. For most of the clips, I had to stop the loop and look at each frame separately, even though a decent-sized piece of the scenery was appearing and disappearing or shifting around in each clip.
