AsianScientist (May 25, 2016) – Researchers in Japan and the UK have shown that magicians use techniques for doing magic tricks that are timed to spontaneous blinks synchronized across participants.
Associate Professor Tamami Nakano from the Dynamic Brain Network Laboratory, Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences at Osaka University (OU) and Professor Richard J. Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire in the UK—who is also a well-known magician—published their results in PeerJ.
It is known that magicians do magic tricks by using misdirection of attention, a method for distracting the attention of an audience that is focused on one thing by manipulating their minds through words and movements and by taking advantage of visual and audio effects.
Research by Nakano and others had shown that the blinks of participants were significantly synchronized at implicit breaks of information on the scene. Furthermore, the activity of the brain responsible for external attention momentarily decreased following blink onset. It had been found that participants’ attention to a magic trick was temporarily relaxed when the blinks synchronized across participants.
Under the hypothesis that relaxation of attention is used for magic tricks, the researchers examined the timing of participants’ blinks while they were watching a magic show.
In experiments, 20 people including OU students and staff watched a two-minute video in which a famous American magician produced coins from various places. This group examined the timing of participants’ blinks using a far-red light camera. As a result, they found that the blinking of participants watching the magic trick occurred at a synchronized timing with an interval of 0.15 seconds.
While they were watching the magic trick in which coins came out from the magician’s hand one after another, participants’ blinks were suppressed. Just after the trick was over, at the timing when the blinks of participants were significantly synchronized, the magician was taking action for the following trick.
The experiments revealed that by taking advantage of the timing of participants’ blinks, magicians could execute the following trick right at the moment when the audience’s attention was relaxed—given that blinking is associated with the relaxation of externalized attention.
According to the authors, these findings suggest that blinking plays an important role in the perception of magic, and that magicians may utilize blinking and the relaxation of externalized attention to hide certain secret actions.
The article can be found at: Wiseman and Nakano et al. (2016) Blink and You’ll Miss It: the Role of Blinking in the Perception of Magic Tricks.
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Source: Osaka University; Photo: Chris Hsia/Flickr/CC.
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