What brain-bending magic tricks can teach us about the mind

Pick a card, any card, and you might feel that you’re in control when you pull the queen of hearts from a magician’s deck. But magicians have strategies that force their audience’s choice — from packing the deck with identical cards, to fanning out the deck with just the right timing so that the choice becomes all but inevitable.

This illusion of free will is one of the many illusions and magic tricks that Gustav Kuhn, a magician turned psychology researcher at Goldsmiths, University London, describes in his new book Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic. Published in March by The MIT Press, the book explores the ways in which magic tricks and illusions can teach us about our brains. Kuhn takes the reader into the psychological underpinnings of tricks — from optical illusions that reveal gaps in perception, to failures of memory that make people think they’ve seen a ball vanish, when in fact there was no ball to see in the first place.

The book’s immersive dive into the worlds of magic and science is only possible because of Kuhn’s deep experience with both. Kuhn’s passion for magic was sparked at age 13 when a friend pulled an egg out of his ear. After a stop in London to work as a professional magician, Kuhn eventually decided to turn his attention away from the tricks themselves, and toward the minds that he was fooling during his shows. “It was always clear that if I wanted to create powerful magic tricks, I needed to understand the system that actually allows me to create them,” he says.

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