The Illusionist Brain: The Neuroscience of Magic

This explores how magicians manipulate our brains to create illusions and astonish us. It provides a comprehensive tour of modern neuroscience, using magic as a lens to understand the unconscious and automatic functioning of our brains. Our brains are adept at tricking us into believing our experiences are continuous, and our minds construct reality by elaborating meanings and continuities from incomplete information. This strategy has benefits for survival, but it also has blind spots that magicians exploit. This explores various ways illusionists manipulate our attention, making us look but not see, and takes advantage of our individual predispositions and fragile memories. It uses the latest neuroscience findings to explain how magic deceives us, surprises us, and amazes us, and how illusionists skillfully "hack" our brains to alter our perceptions and influence our imaginations.

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