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The illusionist brain : the neuroscience of magic / Jordi Camí and Luis M. Martínez ; translated by Eduardo Aparicio.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Camí, Jordi, 1952- author.
- Martínez, Luis M., 1969- author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Magic tricks.
- Optical illusions.
- Neurosciences.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (249 p.)
- Place of Publication:
- Princeton, New Jersey ; Oxford : Princeton University Press, [2022]
- Summary:
- How magicians exploit the natural functioning of our brains to astonish and amaze usHow do magicians make us see the impossible? The Illusionist Brain takes you on an unforgettable journey through the inner workings of the human mind, revealing how magicians achieve their spectacular and seemingly impossible effects by interfering with your cognitive processes. Along the way, this lively and informative book provides a guided tour of modern neuroscience, using magic as a lens for understanding the unconscious and automatic functioning of our brains.We construct reality from the information stored in our memories and received through our senses, and our brains are remarkably adept at tricking us into believing that our experience is continuous. In fact, our minds create our perception of reality by elaborating meanings and continuities from incomplete information, and while this strategy carries clear benefits for survival, it comes with blind spots that magicians know how to exploit. Jordi Camí and Luis Martínez explore the many different ways illusionists manipulate our attention—making us look but not see—and take advantage of our individual predispositions and fragile memories.The Illusionist Brain draws on the latest findings in neuroscience to explain how magic deceives us, surprises us, and amazes us, and demonstrates how illusionists skillfully “hack” our brains to alter how we perceive things and influence what we imagine.
- Contents:
- Cover
- Contents
- 1. The Art and Science of the Impossible
- The Art of the Impossible
- Where We Will Go in This Book
- The Grammar of Magic
- Your Journey with Us
- Part I: The Basics
- 2. Living in Illusion: The Human Brain and the Visual Pathway
- We Live in Illusion
- The Brain, Its Cells, and Its Structure
- Neurons
- Neural Networks
- The Visual Pathway
- The Photoreceptors: Cones and Rods
- What the Brain Sees
- The Beginning of Art
- Color and Luminance
- The "What" and "Where" Pathways
- The Expression of Emotions and the Act of Seeing
- 3. The Conception of Reality: We Are Our Memories
- Perception of the Outside World
- The Creative Processes of Our Brains: Feeling, Attending, Perceiving
- How the Brain's Memories Work
- Sensory Memory
- Short-Term Memory
- Long-Term Memory
- Emotions
- Feelings
- Emotional Memories
- Part II: The Mechanisms
- 4. We Build an Illusion of Continuity
- The Limits of the Brain and the Illusion of Continuity
- The Particularities of the Field of Vision
- The Various Types of Scanning Movements
- The Image Fusion Process
- The Illusion of Continuity and Cinema
- The Illusion of Continuity and Sound
- The Illusion of Continuity: A More General Process
- Change Blindness
- Prestidigitation: Is the Hand Faster than the Eye?
- Slow Magic
- 5. Magic and Contrast: The Key to It All
- The Funny Thing about Magic
- Contrast and the External Life of a Magic Effect
- We See Relatively, Not Absolutely
- Contrast Detectors
- Contrast Depends on Context
- Contrast in Magic
- Avoiding or Reducing Contrast in Magic
- Strategies and Resources during the Presentation of a Magic Trick
- Presensory Manipulations
- 6. We Filter and Process Only What Is Useful to Us
- The Attention Filter
- Attention and Awareness
- The Concept of "Misdirection" in Magic
- Focal Attention
- Exogenous Capture of Attention and Open Diversion
- The Power of Nonverbal Communication
- Managing the Gaze
- Priority Movements
- Endogenous Capture and Covert Deviation
- Divided Attention
- Temporary Control or Continuous Direction of Attention
- Music as a Tool to Transmit Emotions and Synchronize Attention
- Deactivation of Attention in Magic
- The "Deconstruction" of a Magic Trick
- 7. Perceiving Is a Creative Act, but Everything Is Already in Your Brain
- To Perceive Is to Interpret
- The So-Called Inverse Problem of Vision
- Bottlenecks in Brain Processing
- The Brain Is Slow
- Human Beings Anticipate the Future
- Magic as the Art of the Unexpected
- Developing Hypotheses Automatically: Amodal Perception in Magic
- 8. To Remember Is to Rebuild
- The Function of Memories
- Explicit (Declarative) Memories
- Stages of Long-Term Memory Formation
- Memories Recorded in Especially Emotional Circumstances
- We Need to Forget in Order to Remember
- The Reconstructive Character of Memory Evocation
- Notes:
- Description based upon print version of record.
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 213-226) and index.
- Description based on print version record.
- ISBN:
- 9780691239156
- 0691239150
- OCLC:
- 1311336792
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