Flying back to my island paradise after a month of being elsewhere is always a nostalgic experience. I picked up the American Airlines magazine American Way to pass the time and was immediately drawn to an article entitled “The Science of Magic”. The two words “science” and “magic” are rarely seen in the same sentence together so I was intrigued.
According to the article, “magic is helping researchers and doctors understand brain disorders such as autism and Alzheimer’s disease. The term neuro-magic is the name for research into visual neuroscience.
Since magicians are the masters of “attention and awareness” understanding instinctively how to trick the brain, they hold answers to how we look but do not see. Scientists are now researching perception, our own personalized illusion that feeds the brain.
As an example, the IPhone camera has 8 megapixels (8 million pixels), yet our eyes have only 1 million neuronal fibers. Consequently, your brain takes this sparse information and builds this simulation of reality called consciousness by confabulating stuff from what you perceive. No wonder some philosophies state “life is an illusion”!!
