Here is our weekly review of some of the best blog posts around:
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David Blaine Street Magic Parody - This is pretty funny. There are more parts to this too.. more about "David Blaine Street Magic Parody", posted with vodpod.
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Indian magician’s street-magic show catches on - That wouldn’t be happening unless people wanted to see good street magic. That point is like an ambitious card routine in this blog, as of late: It keeps jumping to the top. Bindass has posted a few clips from the show. ...
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OT: Magic, Perception and Reality - Scientists and Magicians Describe How Tricks Exploit Glitches in Perception. In a paper published last week in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, a team of brain scientists and prominent magicians described how magic tricks, ...
The mind games of how to magic tricks
When it comes to a decent living room magic show, we normally excercise a deliberate a degree of diversionary tacticsin the form of crashing crockery, loud cabooms, fire effects, cards flying through the air and lots of other extravegant diversions. " In the past lots of magicians used the smoke and fire for misdirection as a psychological boost to emphasise that something magical had just happended." but as magic has grown the props them selves have not. By simply exploiting the process of how the brain works in relation to distracion, enables magicians to mask a whole host of classic tricks such as card or coin palming. Most good magicians will know how to employ these.
The journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience published a paper last week, describing how magic tricks actually take advantage of glitches in the brain makeup regarding how we internally construct a model of our outside world from moment to moment of what we perceive as our own objective reality. The used several prominent magicians to validate that was was indeed the case.
The researchers belive that this study could in fact accelerate their research into how the brain deals with perception. The researchers say that "Magicians alter how the brain objectively perceives reality by minipulating how scenes are interpreted.
Within the eyes, the visual cortex is attentive to sudden changes in the environment, both when something new appears and when something disappears. When an object suddenly disappears this causes what neuroscientists call an after-discharge: a ghostly image of the object lingers for a moment.
This type of illusion is used to great effect by the Great Tomsoni. He had his assistant appear on stage in a white dress and tells the audience he will magically change the color of her dress to red. Initially he shine a red light on his assistant and her dress, the red light then flicks off and the main house lights go on and his assistant is now in a red dress. His secret however is that in the slit second after his red light goes off the red light image will still linger in the in the audiences brain for approx 100 milliseconds and it will still be covering his assistant. This gives them just enough time for the white dressed to be stripped away which reveals the red dress beneath.
