Master Magician Kevin James performing at the Las Vegas "callbacks" on America's Got Talent.
I have no clue how he did that.

Duration : 0:1:20

Read the rest of this entry »

A new study shows that the tricks of the trade when it comes to a magician's, can confuse many people into disbelieving what they have actually seen with their own eyes.

New research proves that the traditional conjurer's claim that "the hand is not faster than the eye" is rarely true. Instead, many people do "see" how a magician has performed a sleight of hand trick but do not consciously register what has happened.

Effectively, their brain is fooled into overlooking what takes place directly in front of their own eyes. The secret, researchers believe, lies with a set of "distraction" techniques built up by magicians over hundreds of years.

Scientists have previously shown that we become consciously aware of only a small part of what we see within our field of vision. The new research suggests that magicians can manipulate which parts of what we see our brains register and what they overlook.

Distraction techniques they use include "misdirection", where a magician builds up the idea of what they are about to see so strongly in an audience's mind that they do not notice something completely different taking place.

Researchers from the University of Durham and the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada videotaped the reactions of 46 volunteers as they watched a performance of a simple sleight of hand magic trick, during which a magician dropped a cigarette into his lap. They found that more than half of the audience did not see the cigarette being dropped, despite it happening right in front of them.

Close scrutiny of the recordings showed that two of those who did not "see" the cigarette fall were staring directly at it at the time, according to the findings, published in the Trends in Cognitive Sciences journal. How to magic tricks reference:� Read the full how to magic tricks article here.....