Gadagkar, R., 2020. More Fun Than Fun: Where the Worlds of Science and Magic Collide. The Wire Science.

Gadagkar, R Gadagkar, R., 2020. More Fun Than Fun: Where the Worlds of Science and Magic Collide. The Wire Science. UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

I recently had great fun reading a fascinating book, called Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic (2019), by Gustav Kuhn. I might not have read the book but for the remarkable fact that Gustav Kuhn is both a professional scientist and a professional magician. He is a reader in psychology at Goldsmiths, a constituent college of the University of London, and has published – in addition to this book – over 60 scholarly articles on the psychology and neurobiology of magic. He and his collaborators were the first to put volunteers into an fMRI machine while they were enjoying magic. They discovered that areas in the brains of their subjects involved in monitoring and managing conflict lit up preferentially. And of course, magic, as Kuhn explains in his book, involves a conflict between what we think is possible and what we think we have seen. In other studies, he has used eye-tracking technology to observe volunteers ‘succumbing’ to magic. His credentials as a magician are equally impressive: he is the president of the Science of Magic Association, a member of the Experimental Psychology Society and the Magic Circle. A young Gustav was hooked onto magic at 13 years, when his school-friend performed the trick of making an egg appear from behind his ear, and hasn’t looked back. All science should be fun, but Kuhn and his students seem to have more than their fair share. This happens when you combine your hobby with your profession. His students learn to perform magic and show off their skills before children, fellow students and the public, all the while gathering data for their scientific papers and theses. I read the following excerpt (trimmed for length) from one of their recent papers with envy: “Sixty participants recruited on Goldsmiths University campus took part in the experiment. The experimenter was sitting at a table in the university cafeteria, with the deck of cards. The experimenter asked the participant to cut the deck wherever they wanted and put their pile next to the bottom one.”

Item Type:	Other
Additional Information:	The copyright of this article is belongs to the Author
Department/Centre:	Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Ecological Sciences
Date Deposited:	18 Mar 2021 10:02
Last Modified:	02 Jun 2022 07:04
URI:	https://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/68413

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