Magic, the Brain, and the Mind - Synopsis

Presidential Welcome
This Dialogue began with a welcome to the conference by the President of SfN, Tom Carew. Highlights of this years' conference made by Tom include:

- First time held in Chicago
- 29,009 attendees as of this morning
- 40,000 members of the society as of last week
- 500 of the original 1,100 charter members are still active within the society
- 100 of these charter members are in attendance this year

The Speakers
Eric Mead
His talk began with a demonstration of memory manipulation. He gave a woman a list of 5 shapes and had her memorize them in a few seconds. Eric then told a story to the woman featuring 4 of the 5 shapes, which turned out to be the only 4 she could remember. A discussion then followed about how Eric is interested in speaking with neuroscientists about designing experiments that probe what is happens in the mind during such memory manipulation.


Apollo Robbins, "The Gentleman Thief"
His talk began with a very entertaining demonstration of pick-pocketing. Volunteer from the crowd Johann was distracted by a coin while his wrist watch and cell phone were lifting form his person. Apollo then processed with us what happened to achieve his removal of Johann's wrist watch. These include 1) creating wide sweeping arcs that the eye instictually follows, freeing the opposite hand to do the removal, 2) the use of proximics, or personal space, and 3) by creating internal dialogue in his targets to distract them from his actions. Apollo is also interested in merging the study of the brain with his profession.


Where this speaks to me is in the area of presentation design. Scientists have to be good at so many things, including communication and public speaking. Both of these magicians' presentations reaffirmed to me through that we only have so much attentional capacity. In order to get our message across clearly we need to enhance the signal and reduce the noise. To keep this short, just spend some time poking around the blogs of Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte.

The Questions
- Are politicians and advertisers using these deceptive techniques?
- What do you look for when choosing a volunteer from the crowd?
- Is there any evidence for magic and misdirection in primates, has any one tried to perform magic for a non-human primate? YouTube video below:



- Mike