Illusions of Imagery and Magical Experiences

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the idea that we may gain new insights in cognitive science by studying the art of magic. Here, I offer a first exploratory overview and preliminary conceptual analysis of a class of magic tricks, which has been largely neglected in this pursuit, namely, a set of tricks that can be loosely defined as topological tricks. The deceptive powers of many of these tricks are difficult to understand in light of known psychological principles, which suggests that closer scientific scrutiny may raise interesting questions and challenges for cognitive science. I discuss a number of known and novel psychological principles that may explain why these tricks evoke the strong feelings of impossibility that are characteristic of magical experiences. A profound and detailed understanding of how topological tricks evoke magical experiences remains elusive, though, and more research on this topic could advance our understanding of perception, imagery and reasoning.

Möbius Band Surprise: A Systematic Illusion in Imagery

“…Other specific forms of attribute substitution may also explain the effect. For instance, the path of the cut made by the scissors along the Möbius band may be substituted by a plane intersecting the loop, which would indeed imply two separate pieces ( Ekroll, 2019 ).…”

“…The misleading intuition evoked by the Möbius band can be characterized as an “illusion of imagery” ( Ekroll, 2019 ) that reflects the internal structural of our cognitive system. While research in the domains of perception (e.g., Carbon, 2014 ) and higher-level cognition (e.g., Tversky, 1986 ) has focused strongly on systematic illusions to elucidate the inherent structure of our mental machinery and the heuristics employed by the system to fulfill its purposes, investigations and discussions of illusions and their significance are, with some notable exceptions ( Hinton, 1979 ; Margolis, 1998a , 1998b ; Pani, 1997 ; Pearson, 1998 ; Pylyshyn, 2003 ; Tversky, 2005 ), much rarer in the field of visual imagery.…”

“…Anecdotal evidence suggests that what happens here appears impossible or even magical to most people, and the effect is indeed exploited in a magic routine known as The Afghan Bands ( Gardner, 1977 ; Wilson, 1988 ). That people experience something that is very well possible as impossible ( Kuhn, 2019 ; Macknik, King et al., 2008 ; Macknik, Martinez-Conde et al., 2010 ) is of course a phenomenon that warrants explanation, and in this regard, the Möbius strip is not only of mathematical interest but also poses a challenge to cognitive science ( Ekroll, 2019 ).…”

The Illusion of Absence in Magic Tricks

“…In many magic tricks, the secret is so simple and blatantly obvious in retrospect, that once the spectator knows the secret, they may find it incomprehensible how they could be fooled by the trick in the first place. A key reason why it may be difficult to understand why one is so easily fooled by many magic tricks is that they are based on systematic failures in visual metacognition ( Ekroll, 2019 ; Ekroll et al., 2017 ; Kuhn, 2019 ; Kuhn et al., 2014 ; Ortega et al., 2018 ). These failures of metacognition are highly counterintuitive and have consequences that may appear impossible (for instance, that you failed to notice something that happened right in front of your eyes or that your brain made you “hallucinate” missing pieces of an object).…”

How Visual Perception of the Inside of Things Creates the Impossible Dovetail

“…That is, the object triggers reasoning about its causal history ( Spröte et al., 2016 ) as well as the possibilities for actions it affords ( Gibson, 1966 ). But much like a magic trick ( Ekroll, 2019 ; Kuhn, 2019 ), the assembly and disassembly of the two parts appears impossible.…”