Is there a good Cognitive Psychology book for magicians that is inexpensive? What is it?

I have found none that embrace the new discoveries of neurobiology -- having to rely on articles.

(opinion) most college text books are years out of date

you might also want to explore Entertainment Psychology to understand where the cognitive part vanished.

There's a guy called Andy Lutrell who has released a book called Psychology for the Mentalist:

http://www.themagiccafe.com/forums/viewtopic.php?topic=604074&forum=218, but I have not read it.

Not sure there is a book for magicians. Although there is a book called Sleights of Mind, by Sandra Blakeslee, Stephen Macknik, and Susana Martinez-Conde that is about the psychology of magic.

As somebody who has read a lot of psychology books I cannot think of anything that would be particularly good for a magician or mentalist ...

Sleights of Mind is excellent.

Mike

Andy Lutrell's Psychology for the Mentalist is well written and useful, but it is mainly grounded in Social Psychology, not Cognitive Psychology.

George

I consulted on a book that was set to be released later this year from a Psychology doctoral student but I cannot seem to remember his name or of the work has been released I see if I can find more information as the premise of this book was brilliant and very interesting.

I was about to mention this too. Highly recommended.

Barry

MCK:

I think you are referring to Lutrell's book, which is mentioned above.

George

Hi all. Andy Luttrell here. Thanks for mentioning the book!

miistermagico -- is there a reason you're looking for cognitive psychology specifically? As George mentioned, Psychology for the Mentalist largely draws on social psychology, but the line separating social from cognitive psych (especially for what most mentalists and magicians are looking for) is a pretty subtle one.

-Andy

I was interested in your comment about neuroscience, and I'm curious what you've found that relates to mentalism. In the book, I wrote a bit about neuroscience as it pertains to lie detection and subliminal influence, but in general I find that neuroscience doesn't give us a huge amount of implementable information that psychology research hasn't. This isn't to say that I'm not interested in neurobiology--I've done some neuroimaging studies and follow the literature. I'm just squeamish about over-interpreting those findings. Nevertheless, I'd be interested to know what you've been reading!

I read everything I can on how people make decisions and refuse to -- what are the expectations of a person in a communications situation.

Performance magic in any form is a unique form of communication and based 100% on taking advantage of psychological ploys, perceptions, heuristic fallacy, etc.

Understanding how the mind works is part of this -- so that you can detect when people short-circuit natural processes with vicarious drivel and conditioning.

The maxim of "know your audience" is difficult with cultural changes that destroy imagination, self-actualization and reasoned argument.
So, as a mentalist you deal with an audience poorly equipped to react other than in conditioned responses based on experience with little certainly value or confidence.

Understanding neurobiology/psychology can provide a base line for how a person should think and react. When they act differently you can make assumption about what silliness will impress them.

People want to believe in magic because their brain is wired that way. But they have been conditioned that anything is possible by buying the right product, so they now seek "impossibilities of the mind."
Thus, your audience is pre-disposed to accept demonstrations of paranormal phenomenon and really just seek validation.

The problem is that they find it in the venue of "entertain me" that leads to distrust. All opinions, of course.

Remember that my statement was in reference to "cognitive psychology" and not "communication psychology" or "Entertainment psychology."
The more we learn how the human brain is meant to work the more we realize how most people derail the process out of fear, laziness or greed.

The key is to abreast of cultural dynamics of which both psychology and neurobiology play a role. What works to day might not work tomorrow,


For example, you can't rely on any spectator being able to add numbers on a pad accurately today. So, you avoid such effects.
The mental abilities have, only the belief people have in learning how to add and the psychological rewards received for learning it.
The incredible ability to manipulate numbers in one's mind on an imaginary pad is being lost.
Soon a Mentalist will be able to wow a crowd by demonstrating long division on a piece of paper.

Neuroscience inters the picture when we ask, "How do people make decisions when they can't add or function with an imaginary pad?"
Study the functions of the orbital cortex to find out.

I would personally recommend Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, which has something to do with behavioral decision making.

Also, when you are reading Sleight of Mind, or any book on psychology, remember academia can hardly explain all nuances and subtleties on magic performances. Cognitive psychology and neuroscience, at least in this stage in time, cannot explain why and how magic works.

Oh, that is simple. After a day of pretending they are intelligent, superior and powerful folks like to be reminded in a fun way that they are not.
Before people can aspire to be more than what they are they must accept they are less than what they pretend.

I spent most of my woking life demonstrating that people can overcome what they believe to be impossible. Magic effects can do that.

Today I feel people must be shown that what they believe from others is fictional and that illusions of possible and impossible are but marketing driven superstition. Magic effects can help there.

Is that psychology, applied anthropology, communication theory or epiphany? No matter! Understanding what works today requires the study of many fields -- then actually interacting with live people.

The more that people "learn" (sic) vicariously from an electronic device, the more chance for a live person shaking their faith in what is impossible will be essential.

The role of cognitive study is to realize that most people avoid thinking at all costs. Magic works because people want it to.

The Invisible Gorilla by Daniel J. Simons

Neuroscience, particularly cognitive neurospychology has a pretty good understanding of why illusions work. In simple terms - its all about prior experiences and a discontinuation of that experience from memory.
We have expectations that things should be a certain way based on prior knowledge and exposure. I put a few horizontal lines evenly spaced apart from each other. Your brain has evolved to pick up vertical parallel lines. Our environment is very much vertical. We have receptive fields in our vision that evolved specifically for picking up vertical lines. With those straight lines laying down evenly spaced out I draw a few diagonal lines on those vertical parallels. All of the sudden you start to see that those lines are curved.

Take the ponzo illusion - two horizontal lines, even to each other in length are laid down ontop of two diagonal lines in a railroad track fashion. Your prior experience with distance cues says that the top most line is longer than the bottom in relation to where the diagonal lines converge at the vantage point.

All illusions are are breaches in patterns that we are used to experiencing.
Cognitively - we also have a innate naive bias to physics. We expect the laws of physics to act a certain way.... Flying in an airplane and dropping something, you would naively think that the object will drop straight down but that's not always the case, the object will follow a more curved tajectory.

- 5 years in undergraduate cognitive neuropsychology

Magicians & mentalist would be better off looking into social psychology, Psycholinguistics or psychophysics. Cognitive Psychology is just the study of brain processes.
Psychophysics is more on the study of how and why we experience our environment and the naive biases we have on how incorrectly we assume the way the Universe works.

Personal I got more out of developmental psyc. Any text on child psyc is useful. Old editions often sell by the pound, no joke. Check your collage bookstore.

You have to be careful with old research. Recent research has found a lot of problems with the Piaget stages of development. Maslow's Hierarchy has been completely debunked. The problem with Piaget's stages is that they have been found to extend far beyond the years that Piaget assigned. Take Piaget's Formal Operation stage, Piaget assigned the age range to be 11 years and up. Recent research has found that people don't actually reach that stage as Piaget defined it until their mid 30's and early 40's.
With old research you have to take things with a grain of salt because a lot of the times - newer data shows problems with the original.

Hi All-

Interesting thread! I am a cognitive psychology professor and have been doing magic and mentalism for the past 15 years.

I'd put another vote in for The Invisible Gorilla by Chabris and Simons. They explore several ways that our intuitive understandings of the world can go awry. I would argue that some of these intuitions (particularly the ones about perception and memory) are fundamental to the successful performance of most effects in magic and mentalism. The Invisible Gorilla wasn't written for magicians so you'll have to do a bit of thinking to apply the content to magic, but the book is very accessible and provides references for those want to learn more about any particular topic.

Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath is another great introduction to some cognitive psychology and behavioral economics ideas.

Adam

Selective Attention and Illusions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo