The illusionist brain : the neuroscience of magic / Jordi Camí and Luis M. Martínez ; translated by Eduardo Aparicio.

"Magic is the art of creating impossible effects that violate our expectations, games that conclude with the apparent transgression of natural law. As spectators, we find magic tricks-and the state of true cognitive dissonance that they create-tremendously provocative. Why is our brain caught by surprise? The human brain is a very advanced organ, its capacities highly adapted to our environment and lifestyle. But its capacities are not unlimited. Restricted by limited space and energy, the brain cannot possibly process the vast amount of information that we receive continuously through the senses, and the transmission of information that we do receive is relatively slow and must overcome several bottlenecks. To overcome these restrictions, the brain has developed extraordinarily effective strategies to create a sense of reality from limited information. Magic has learned to "hack" these strategies, essentially playing with our unconscious processing. In this book, neuroscientists Jordi Camí and Luiz Martínez explore how magic accomplishes this feat. As magic is fundamentally an art, presented in playful contexts, it has not received sustained attention from scientific disciplines-but as Camí and Martínez show, magic is an excellent entry point into the inner workings of the brain. In twelve chapters, Camí and Martínez explore the ways in which magicians manipulate attention, memory, perception, and decision-making, and what these tricks can tell us about these processes themselves. Early chapters offer an introduction to basic neuroscience and what we know about how the brain creates reality, and later chapters delve more deeply into how magic both sheds light on and impacts how we perceive and act. Throughout, Camí and Martínez draw on their own research and raise fascinating questions that have yet to be explored. This book was originally written in Spanish. The Spanish edition was published in February 2020 (RBA Books)"-- Provided by publisher.

"How magicians exploit the natural functioning of our brains to astonish and amaze us. How do magicians make us see the impossible? The Illusionist Brain takes you on an unforgettable journey through the inner workings of the human mind, revealing how magicians achieve their spectacular and seemingly impossible effects by interfering with your cognitive processes. Along the way, this lively and informative book provides a guided tour of modern neuroscience, using magic as a lens for understanding the unconscious and automatic functioning of our brains. We construct reality from the information stored in our memories and received through our senses, and our brains are remarkably adept at tricking us into believing that our experience is continuous. In fact, our minds create our perception of reality by elaborating meanings and continuities from incomplete information, and while this strategy carries clear benefits for survival, it comes with blind spots that magicians know how to exploit. Jordi Camí and Luis Martínez explore the many different ways illusionists manipulate our attention-making us look but not see-and take advantage of our individual predispositions and fragile memories.The Illusionist Brain draws on the latest findings in neuroscience to explain how magic deceives us, surprises us, and amazes us, and demonstrates how illusionists skillfully "hack" our brains to alter how we perceive things and influence what we imagine"-- Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The art and science of the impossible -- Part I. The basics -- Living in illusion: the human brain and the visual pathway -- The conception of reality: we are our memories -- Part II. The mechanisms -- We build an illusion of continuity -- Magic and contrast: the key to it all -- We filter and process only what is useful to us -- Perceiving is a creative act, but everything is already in your brain -- To remember is to rebuild -- The undervalued unconscious brain -- The magic of decision-making -- Part III. The results -- The magic experience and its audiences -- Wrapping up: scientific research and magic.