How magicians control your mind

Fascinating article: How magicians control your mind

Magic isn’t just a bag of tricks – it’s a finely-tuned technology for shaping what we see.

I have a strong interest in understanding the mind as an evolved, organic computer — a computer made of meat, if you will. Part of the recent course I taught at UNH involved highlighting to my students the deficiencies of the mind’s ability to pay attention. The purpose of the course was to help students become better students, and one of the perennial problems that students face is how to pay attention. So the real problem is, how do we control our own minds?

Without the ability to pay sustained attention we’re like Gary Larson’s dog who hears his owner saying “blah blah blah Ginger blah blah blah blah blah Ginger blah blah.” Except that it’s more like “DNA is blah blah chemical blah blah blah blah genetic code blah blah blah cells blah blah blah blah nucleus.”

The Boston Globe article mentions a couple of studies I touched on in class, including one where half-way through a conversation the person we’re talking to is replaced by someone else and another where people focused on a basketball game fail to notice a woman in a gorilla suit walk across the court. In class we watched “The Amazing Colour-Changing Card Trick,” which is worth checking out.

As well as exploring the mind’s problems with paying attention, we also worked on strengthening our powers of attentiveness by practicing meditation. I don’t think it was entirely because of the meditation, but one student went from being so inattentive and lacking in executive control that it seemed every thought he had would express itself in words, no matter how appropriate the circumstances, to by the end of the course helping to bring other students back to the topic of discussion when their minds wandered.

These students have far more to contend with in terms of learning to focus than I did when I was their age. When they’re doing homework (say writing a paper on a computer) they’re juggling incoming IM, text messages, TV, emails, etc. By constantly shifting their attention they’ve actually lost the ability to pay sustained attention, especially when listening to a lecture or when trying to read.

I wonder how seriously they’ll take my advice on avoiding multitasking? Or perhaps more appropriately, given the addictive mature of multitasking I wonder if they’ll be able to act on my advice?

One Response to “How magicians control your mind”

1. Rob says:

   August 6, 2008 at 7:21 pm

   Magicians control peoples minds with magic. It’s true, I read it in Harry Potter. I don’t use magic to control peoples minds. I just use my mind powers.