In my experience, there are two main reasons why magicians tend to be highly creative. First, coming up with ideas for magical happenings involves imagining a world that isn’t constrained by reality. For instance, producing something from an apparently empty box confounds our thoughts about object permanence and making a person seem to levitate defies our beliefs about the effects of gravity.
Second, magicians need to figure out a way of making these impossible dreams appear to happen. Audiences tend to be both observant and smart, and so their methods frequently involve a significant amount of lateral and creative thinking.
A few years ago, Professor Caroline Watt (from Edinburgh University) and I wondered whether learning more about magic might help to get people’s creative juices flowing. A student of mine named Amy Wiles was teaching in a local school and suggested that we conduct a study with some of her pupils. The resulting experiment was simple and involved three key stages.
We asked a group of around 60 schoolchildren to complete a standard measure of creativity known as the Alternative Uses Test. Created in the late 1960s by psychologist Joy Guildford, this test involves presenting someone with an everyday object, such as a mug or pencil, and asking them to think of as many uses for it as possible. To score the test, researchers then carefully count the number of uses that the person comes up with (known as the Fluency score) and rate how novel these uses are (known as the Originality score).
Then we randomly split the pupils into two different groups and had one group take part in a magic lesson and the other participate in an art lesson. The magic lesson was based around a trick called Colour Vision. Invented by magician Martin Sunshine, this illusion involves giving the spectator a cube with different coloured faces, having them place the cube into an opaque box, and the magician mysteriously divining the top colour of the cube.
During the lesson, the children watched the trick, tried to figure out how it was achieved, were shown the solution, and then performed it on one another. It was important that the art lesson shared many of the features associated with the magic activity, and so we needed to create something that was illusion-based, interesting, fun, surprising and involved a sense of mastery. After much thought, we decided to show the children a perspective illusion, explain how to make it and then have them create their own drawings.
In the final stage of the study, we had the children complete the Alternative Uses Test a second time.
Amy did a great job of carrying out the study and we soon set about carefully scoring the creativity tests that had been completed before and after the two lessons. Before the activities began, both groups obtained roughly the same Fluency and Originality scores. However, after the activities, the children in the magic group had much higher Fluency and Originality scores than those in the art groups.
In short, our hunch was right, the magic lesson had boosted the children’s creativity. Three weeks later we returned to the school and had the children complete the Alternative Uses Test one last time. This time, there was no difference between the groups, suggesting that the boost to creativity was relatively short-lived.
We were delighted with the findings but, as is often the case in science, our experiment produced more questions than answers. Why did the magic lesson enhance creativity? Was it due to the children watching the trick, learning how it was achieved, or a mixture of both? Did all of the children benefit from the lesson or was magic especially effective for a certain type of person? What would happen if the children had been taught different illusions every week rather than just taking part in a single lesson? And finally, what could be done to prevent the effect fading away after a few weeks? Right now, we are planning various studies to examine these issues and many more.
Our study was published in an academic journal called Peerj and quickly attracted the attention of the media. In addition, several educational websites and magazines produced lesson plans that encouraged teachers to incorporate magic into the classroom. The idea of incorporating magic into schools isn’t new. Over the years, many educational practitioners have described using magic tricks to enhance attention, understanding, curiosity and recall. However, our study is the first to show that magic really can have a positive effect on children’s creativity, and we are excited to see how this idea develops in the future. Who knows, maybe one day magic will form part of the standard school curriculum along with other performing arts, such as dance, drama, and music. In doing so, it might help to broaden minds, spark creative ideas, and create a more magical future.
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Richard Wiseman is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. He has written several best-selling books on psychology and his illusion-based YouTube videos have attracted over half a billion views. The full details of this study, entitled ‘Conjuring up creativity: the effect of performing magic tricks on divergent thinking’, can be seen at: https://peerj.com/articles/11289
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