The Illusionist Brain

The Neuroscience of Magic

By: Jordi Cami, Luis M. Martinez

Narrated by: Gary Tiedemann

How do magicians make us see the impossible? The Illusionist Brain takes you on an unforgettable journey through the inner workings of the human mind, revealing how magicians achieve their spectacular and seemingly impossible effects by interfering with your cognitive processes. Along the way, this lively and informative book provides a guided tour of modern neuroscience, using magic as a lens for understanding the unconscious and automatic functioning of our brains.

We construct reality from the information stored in our memories and received through our senses, and our brains are remarkably adept at tricking us into believing that our experience is continuous. In fact, our minds create our perception of reality by elaborating meanings and continuities from incomplete information, and while this strategy carries clear benefits for survival, it comes with blind spots that magicians know how to exploit. Jordi Cami and Luis Martinez explore the many different ways illusionists manipulate our attention and take advantage of our individual predispositions and fragile memories.

The Illusionist Brain draws on the latest findings in neuroscience to explain how magic deceives us, surprises us, and amazes us, and demonstrates how illusionists skillfully "hack" our brains to alter how we perceive things and influence what we imagine.

©2022 Princeton University Press (P)2022 Tantor

Understanding Magic

This extraordinary book investigates and reports the neuroscience of magic. Are the authors correct? Is there a scientific explanation of that magician’s card trick? How does s(he) know which of those 5 cards spread before you will be the one you will pick? Will require at least two listens for several chapters. It’s more than sleight of hand.
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Like Reading a Textbook

For a book about magic, I was disappointed at how unengaged I was with the material. It felt too hyper-technical, like reading straight out of a college textbook on neurology with an application to magic. But it never seems to apply its science to the tricks in a meaningful way. I get that magicians aren’t supposed to reveal their secrets, but some examples of how magicians actually exploit our brain would have made the material so much more interesting.