The Magic Cafe Forums - New academic paper on the psychology of magic

Thanks, it's a good article with plenty of interesting references and ideas.

I have one comment about their central tenet.

The article states:

Quote:

The factor we have in mind is the intuitive experience of and reasoning about hidden things. It is obvious that the hiding of objects plays a central role in magic. When objects magically materialize, it is mostly because they were kept well-hidden just before, and when they magically disappear, it is mostly because the magician suddenly hides them (Gibson, 1982). What is not so obvious, though, is that the experience of hidden things is much more strongly determined by automatic perceptual and cognitive heuristics beyond our conscious control than we intuitively believe and that these automatic processes constrain our conscious thinking and impede our problem-solving abilities.

I think what's in the last sentence IS obvious, and I've written about part of it here before - although I'm not sure I mentioned it impeding our problem-solving abilities. If our mind isn't automatically making predictions about the world around us, we couldn't realize that something had either appeared or vanished to begin with.

The child psychologist, Piaget, studied babies attention to objects going out of site, and determined that "object persistence" is learned. Productions and vanishes contradict what we "know". Object-tracking is clearly an unconscious process, because we do it effortlessly without thinking. I don't have to be thinking about something to be astonished if I'm looking at it, and it suddenly disappears.

Michael Daniels Inner circle Isle of Man 1609 Posts	Posted: Jan 31, 2017 12:45 pm 1 Interesting stuff http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.......16654676 Mike psychicscience.org \| Ebooks \| Facsimile Book Test \| Card Decks
Escamoteur Regular user 109 Posts	Posted: Jan 31, 2017 08:49 pm 0 Wow. Very interesting indeed. Thank you. Carter
Bill Hallahan Inner circle New Hampshire 3226 Posts	Posted: Feb 3, 2017 01:50 am 0 Thanks, it's a good article with plenty of interesting references and ideas. I have one comment about their central tenet. The article states: Quote: The factor we have in mind is the intuitive experience of and reasoning about hidden things. It is obvious that the hiding of objects plays a central role in magic. When objects magically materialize, it is mostly because they were kept well-hidden just before, and when they magically disappear, it is mostly because the magician suddenly hides them (Gibson, 1982). What is not so obvious, though, is that the experience of hidden things is much more strongly determined by automatic perceptual and cognitive heuristics beyond our conscious control than we intuitively believe and that these automatic processes constrain our conscious thinking and impede our problem-solving abilities. I think what's in the last sentence IS obvious, and I've written about part of it here before - although I'm not sure I mentioned it impeding our problem-solving abilities. If our mind isn't automatically making predictions about the world around us, we couldn't realize that something had either appeared or vanished to begin with. The child psychologist, Piaget, studied babies attention to objects going out of site, and determined that "object persistence" is learned. Productions and vanishes contradict what we "know". Object-tracking is clearly an unconscious process, because we do it effortlessly without thinking. I don't have to be thinking about something to be astonished if I'm looking at it, and it suddenly disappears. Humans make life so interesting. Do you know that in a universe so full of wonders, they have managed to create boredom. Quite astonishing. - The character of ‘Death’ in the movie "Hogswatch"
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