I’m a psychologist. Not the kind of psychologist who helps people. I do experiments. Specifically, I am a cognitive psychologist: an experimental psychologist who studies the building blocks of thought with a goal of better understanding the relationships between thought and behavior. Before I was a psychologist, I was a magician. Like many magicians, I was drawn to psychology through my firsthand experience with the fallibility of memory and perception. However, as an undergraduate studying psychology, I had no idea that magic would continue to be central to my career.
Indeed, as a doctoral student at Arizona State University, I had no plan for magic to be anything more than a hobby I pursued on the side while formally studying the psychology of language. That changed when I began to see scientists taking an interest in the methods of magicians to inspire new hypotheses and laboratory techniques in the study of attention and perception. Thanks to the help of a supportive mentor, I was able to add a new focus to my doctoral work, studying the means by which magicians manipulate their audience’s attention. My doctoral dissertation, an empirical study of the magician’s “off beat,” was likely among the first dissertations in the new science of magic discipline.
As a midcareer faculty member in the Department of Psychological Science at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, magic pervades nearly everything I do as a teacher-scholar. Part of scientists’ enthusiasm for this new topic of study comes from its ability to bridge between artificial, contrived laboratory experiments and real, lived experience in the world. Magic is applied cognitive science, and as such, it can be a useful educational tool to exemplify abstract concepts from psychology. I became aware of this powerful application of magic when teaching my first course as a graduate student, a basic Introductory Psychology course. When I taught the section on sensation and perception, I used a magic trick to demonstrate some of the assumptions that our visual system makes when presented with ambiguous information. Not only did the inclusion of a magic performance capture the students’ curiosity, but it offered a salient reminder of how automatic and unconscious these perceptual assumptions can be and provided a strong memory hook that allowed students to return to the example readily.
This early experience using magic in the classroom only hinted at the broader role that magic can play in an educational setting. After 15 years teaching in higher education, I have come to realize that inspiring curiosity and wonder in students is the most basic role that magic can play. On the opposite end of the continuum, I believe that the science of magic is an ideal sandbox for student engagement with STEAM education.
STEAM is a current buzzword in education. It is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics. Proponents of STEAM argue that the world’s problems will be solved most efficiently through the collaboration of diverse disciplines and that students should be encouraged to see how each of the STEAM disciplines approaches problems through a different lens. Broad training in STEAM could allow students to approach problems flexibly and dynamically. Of course, this approach is not new. This perspective has been championed by the liberal arts for centuries. As a faculty member at a liberal arts college, I know that the liberal arts were engaged in interdisciplinary thought before it was cool.
At Carthage College, I regularly teach a course on The Cognitive Science of Magic that attempts to realize the full educational potential of the scientific study of magic. I have now taught the course eight times, at three different institutions. The course has evolved to fully embrace interdisciplinarity and highlight the complexity of interactions between the arts and sciences. Indeed, it is now labeled as a “Diverse Perspectives” course within the Carthage curriculum by because of its focus on interdisciplinary thought.
The most fundamental learning objective in the course is for students to practice distilling testable hypotheses from the writings of magic scholars (the Science component of STEAM). This is no small feat, as magic theorists do not have to operationalize their ideas in the same way that scientists do. Most magicians care about how their magic works, not why their magic works. Students read theoretical pieces by Arturo de Ascanio, Tom Stone, and others, identify testable hypotheses, and practice designing experimental techniques to test those hypotheses. Meanwhile, I expose students to historical approaches to interaction between science and magic and modern empirical works exploring the cognitive basis of performance magic. I try to pepper in some examples of computational modeling in cognitive science so that students see how mathematics shapes theory development (the Mathematics component of STEAM).
Students also gain experience building and performing pieces of magic (often for the first time) and understanding how the performance of magic can be informed by findings from psychological science (the Technology & Engineering components of STEAM). All of this is enveloped in elements of magic appreciation, and most students leave the class with very strong attitudes about what makes for good and bad magic (the Art aspect of STEAM). It turns out that when students are exposed to the full breadth of magic, they find themselves drawn to magic that is narrative- or character-driven.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the course is that it is immersive. I often teach it during our January Term, when students take a single course that meets three hours every day for the month of January, and I include multiple excursions that allow students to experience magic “in the wild.” Further, nearly every class period includes a guest speaker from the world of science or magic. Students are learning about the content from the people who are on the front lines. Magicians who have visited my class over the years include James Randi, Mac King, Christopher Carter, Steve Bedwell, Kenton Knepper, Simon Aronson, Danny Orleans & Jan Rose, David Parr, and Joe Diamond (among others). Scientist visitors to the class have included much of the leadership of the Science of Magic Association and some researchers whose work may speak to magic without explicitly invoking it, including Gustav Kuhn, Steve Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde, Amory Danek, Jay Olson, Matt Tompkins, and Larry Rosenblum.
I have had great success with the course. It has inspired students to begin learning magic, to become magic aficionados, and to pursue scientific inquiry in magic. I also firmly believe that the course makes students more effective critical thinkers. It enhances awareness of how readily our senses can be deceived and provides students with a toolbox that allows them to see through bunkum. Part of the course’s effectiveness stems from the fact that it is deceptive in and of itself. Students enter the course thinking they will be immersing themselves in a world of fantasy and wonder (which they are), but they are fooled into learning about STEAM along the way.
References
Barnhart, A. S. (2010). The exploitation of Gestalt principles by magicians. Perception, 39, 1286-1289. https://doi.org/10.1068/p6766
Barnhart, A. S., Ehlert, M. J., Goldinger, S. D., & Mackey, A. D. (2018). Cross-modal attentional entrainment: Insights from magicians. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 80, 1240-1249. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-018-1497-8
Grassi, P. R., & Bartels, A. (2021). Magic, Bayes and wows: A Bayesian account of magic tricks. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 126, 515-527. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.04.001
Triplett, N. (1900). The psychology of conjuring deceptions. The American Journal of Psychology, 11(4), 439-510. https://doi.org/10.2307/1412365
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