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

It's a great read whether you're passionate about brain science, magic, or both!” Odyssey Magazine (Editor's Choice). They are revealing the real knowledge jealously guarded by all great performersI know my fellow magicians are all going to be as jazzed as I am to read about how sophisticated magical techniques and state-of-the-art brain science combine.” Mac King, headliner, Harrah's Las Vegas“In Sleights of Mind, authors Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde persistently remind us that the human mind is a bad data-taking device. In this exciting book Stephen, Susana, and Sandra explore what magic and illusions can teach us about our fallible human nature--coming up with novel and fascinating observation

Susana Martinez-Conde, Ph.D., is Director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at BNI. Sandra Blakeslee is a regular contributor to "Science Times" at The New York Times who specializes in the brain sciences, and the author of several books.. Macknik, Ph.D., is Director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology at the Barrow Neurological Institute

"Fun read of magicians teaching neuroscientists how our vision/attention/mind works." according to Veda Dalsette. You'd think magicians could learn a thing or two from neuroscientists, but this book is all about how two neuroscientists are learning what to study and why from professional magicians. Sleights of Mind is a fun layman's read of how our vision works and how our minds interpret what we see. I wasn't a magic fan nor a neuroscience fan when I started this book, but I am now! I learned why, when I edit my writing, I miss so many errors. I don't see them! My mind is conjuring up what the words are supposed to be, because that's h. Bernie Gourley said The spoiler sections are an attempt to comply with the magician’s code (the neuroscientist authors became magicians themselves). Sleights of Mind explains magic tricks by telling one about the shortcuts, limits, and programming of brain (and attendant sensory systems) that facilitate such tricks. The reader needn’t be concerned that the book will spoil all the illusionists’ secrets for one. The authors carefully demarcate the beginnings and endings of spoiler sections that explicitly explain tricks. This allows a reader to skip over such sections if one doesn’t want to know the trick. I suspect few readers do skip the spoiler section. Darth Rater said Perception is Everything & This Book Explains Why & How. A well-presented treatise on how neuro-science is revealing the how and why we perceive our surroundings as we do. If you are interested in Psychology, Neurology, and Psychiatry, you will find this book interesting. This is not a medical text, so, the average student of the mind-sciences should be able to comprehend it without difficulty. For example, I have a Master's Degree in Clinical Social Work and I had no difficulty with the concepts. The useful novelty of this book is that the authors recognized how the profession of

Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, the founders of the exciting new discipline of neuromagic, have convinced some of the world's greatest magicians to allow scientists to study their techniques for tricking the brain. The implications of neuromagic go beyond illuminating our behavior; early research points to new approaches for everything from the diagnosis of autism to marketing techniques and education. Fun and accessible, Sleights of Mind is "a tour through consciousness, attention, and deception via the marriage of professional magic and cognitive neuroscience" (Vanessa Schipani, The Scientist).