Brains On Purpose™

Attention choreography: It's not just for mediation anymore—Conjuring conflict resolution

As those of you who have attended my programs in the last several years know, we explore in depth the concept and process of attention choreography. So it was fun to listen to an interview (Token Skeptic) of a magician this weekend and hear him use the phrase "attention choreography."

Anthony Barnhart, the interviewee, is an unusual magician in that he is finishing up his doctorate in cognitive psychology, and will be teaching an undergrad course this fall on the psychology of magic. (I have blogged about him before: Good magicians are masters at attention choreography: So are good mediators.) In case you are wondering why I think magic is an appropriate topic for a blog focused on the neuroscience of conflict resolution, listening to this interview of Tony will help to explain.

He will tell you that our senses are easily deceived and fallible, we can miss seeing what is right in front of our eyes, and expectations can greatly influence what we observe. Those phenomena can be very helpful to magicians but, on the other hand, can obstruct the resolution of conflict. If we can understand how magicians deftly fool us, we may be able to watch, maybe even reduce, the ways we—and our clients—are fooled.

In a nutshell, I think that conflict professionals can learn much about what happens in a dispute by learning about magic. As Tony explains, psychologists and neuroscientists have long recognized the knowledge skilled magicians have about how our minds and brains, and have been trying to mine that knowledge. So maybe it's time for mediators to look to magic, too?

There's much to get you thinking in Tony's interview. He looks at such questions as the relationship between intelligence and ease of being deceived, and why humor can play an important role in a magician's trick. Before you listen, make sure you have a deck of cards. Tony will demonstrate a trick with your deck.

To learn more about magic, read Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions, a book by two neuroscientists. You will run into Tony in the book, too!

Note: Click for previous posts about magic.

Good magicians are masters at attention choreography: So are good mediators

Why are neuroscientists interested in the skills of magicians? Because magicians have long known traits and states of the brain that brain scientists are just now learning. Why am I so interested in what magicians do to so masterfully simulate magic? Because they know the value of paying attention to attention, a critical skill in the my approach to conflict resolution. That's why I often—in programs, presentations, and with clients—use this phrase to describe my approach to mediation: Attention choreography™.

Because of the topic's importance to my professional (and personal) interests, I have blogged about magic many times in the past here and here. (Scroll down at each of these links to see many posts.) Today I point your way to still another piece on magic.

From "How Neuroscientists and Magicians Are Conjuring Brain Insights" (Scientific American blogs):

Why are scientists working with sleight-of-hand artists? Their tricks, honed through the decades, have revealed that people respond to certain situations in specific ways. Like detectives looking for new leads to solve a mystery, scientists can mine magicians’ knowledge for ideas to test in the lab. And for the magicians, understanding principles about the brain—that is, why a trick works the way it does—can suggest new ways to advance their art as they develop new tricks or improve existing ones. (The article, “What Can Magicians Teach Us about the Brain?”, provides some more background and a November 2008 Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper coauthored by neuroscientists and magicians.)

The conference explored several aspects of attention. [Stephen] Macknik started things off by explaining how the brain constructs our experience of reality from a truly imperfect set of biophysical tools, resulting in a “grand simulation of everything around you.” For instance, “You have one megapixel eyeballs compared with your eight megapixel camera,” he said. In addition to collecting a relatively small amount of information from a scene, the eye itself has a large blind spot, where the optic nerve that ferries information to the brain pierces the light-collecting retina at the back of the eye; the brain fills in the visual gap to create the illusion of your vision acting like a seamless movie camera.

Our internally produced picture of reality is subjective—and subject to influence. “Magicians are the performance artists of attention and awareness,” Macknick said. ...

Click to read the rest. Wouldn't you like to go to one of those Neuromagic conferences? For me, it would be a magical trip, a dream. Maybe I can learn to conjure myself to the next one?

Image credit: Magic Tony, or Anthony Barnhart, who is both a magician and a grad student in cognitive psychology.

A magical treat for those of you in NY interested in neuroscience

I am reading Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions. The book is one of the most fascinating I have read this quarter about how our brains work; I highly recommend it. (Click for a couple of reviews of the book.)

The authors and a magician will be speaking at New York Academy of Sciences on November 18, at a public event. From the Web page:

Two Neuroscientists and a Magician Show How Tricks Hack Our Brains
Science & the City and Scientific American will host "Mind over Magic" this week.

Magic tricks work because humans have a hardwired process of attention and awareness that is hackable. At a November 18 public event at the New York Academy of Sciences, vision scientists Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, authors of Scientific American MIND's November/December cover story and of the new book, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions, will explain just how magicians distract and fool an audience by surreptitiously manipulating people’s attention, tricking

New book: "Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions"

Excerpt of review from Science News:

Magic wands, fake drop boxes and invisible thread may be fun gimmicks, but a magician’s most valuable tool weighs about three pounds and sits in the skull of the spectator.

In their illuminating book, brain experts Martinez-Conde and Macknik make the case that magicians are some of the most skilled neuroscientists around. No mere hucksters, magicians deftly manipulate brains by sculpting attention, perception and memory so that the outrageous seems possible.

The authors, both researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, have a deep appreciation of magic and close ties to the magic community. ...

Click to read the rest.

Click for links to several articles about neuroscience and magic (Web page of Stephen Macknik, one of the book's authors).

Note (added November 6, 2010): Another article about the book: "Science and magic" (The Scientist).

Note (added December 6, 2010): Still another article about the book: "Now You See It: Neuroscientists Reveal Magicians' Secrets" (LiveScience).

 

Video of magicians discussing attention, perception, and memory at Neuroscience 2009

From the Society for Neuroscience Web page:

On Saturday, Oct. 17, 2009, internationally known magicians Apollo Robbins and Eric Mead joined attendees at Neuroscience 2009 for an interactive discussion on Magic, the Brain, and the Mind. As the featured Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society lecture, the magicians explored how attention, memory, and perception inform the art and practice of illusion and magic. View video of the dialogues below.

Click to watch the video. H/T: Dana Foundation Blog.