Posted: Dec 11, 2010 1:11 pm
More on magic and illusions:
Having just finished a book
on magic and perception, I talk with C about some "magicians' principles" - basic ideas that allow them to fool people's perception 
. 
Among them,
- large movements mask small movements (deception through sleight of hand)
- the effectiveness of apparent invisibility / camouflage
- the influence of past experience on perception (to provide continuity of experience in spite of gaps; to allow for efficient inferential leaps)
- making moves seem natural allows the magician to lead people down an incorrect inferential path
C read about and taught herself a "floating pencil" trick from that book I mentioned above. Using a thin thread attached to the eraser and her shirt, she is able to make a pencil appear to levitate out of a bottle. She chose red because she was wearing a pink shirt and thought it would camouflage better than black or white thread.
We've talked about animal camouflage in the past, how markings can fool the eye, and now I can talk to her about the limits of perception - how it's useful from an evolutionary standpoint, but also how it can be fooled. It's a nice confluence of ideas, linking camouflage, optical illusions, and magic together.
With these topics, I try to emphasize how our perceptions/inferences are useful in most everyday situations, but, as illusions demonstrate, they can be fooled very easily: it's not really magic, just errors in our cognition. And from this discussion, we can go on to cognitive biases sometime in the future (using riddles is a great way to do this).
[Smilies provided by C
]
Having just finished a book
on magic and perception, I talk with C about some "magicians' principles" - basic ideas that allow them to fool people's perception . Among them,
- large movements mask small movements (deception through sleight of hand)
- the effectiveness of apparent invisibility / camouflage
- the influence of past experience on perception (to provide continuity of experience in spite of gaps; to allow for efficient inferential leaps)
- making moves seem natural allows the magician to lead people down an incorrect inferential path
C read about and taught herself a "floating pencil" trick from that book I mentioned above. Using a thin thread attached to the eraser and her shirt, she is able to make a pencil appear to levitate out of a bottle. She chose red because she was wearing a pink shirt and thought it would camouflage better than black or white thread.
We've talked about animal camouflage in the past, how markings can fool the eye, and now I can talk to her about the limits of perception - how it's useful from an evolutionary standpoint, but also how it can be fooled. It's a nice confluence of ideas, linking camouflage, optical illusions, and magic together.
With these topics, I try to emphasize how our perceptions/inferences are useful in most everyday situations, but, as illusions demonstrate, they can be fooled very easily: it's not really magic, just errors in our cognition. And from this discussion, we can go on to cognitive biases sometime in the future (using riddles is a great way to do this).
[Smilies provided by C
]