Close your eyes and imagine a sound, someone’s voice, coming from your left. It slowly moves to come up behind you, then moves to your right. Round and round it goes. Suddenly, the voice jumps. It was clearly in front of you, but now it’s coming from somewhere else. How did it get there? Did it… magically jump?
That’s the premise of the winning magic trick, announced on November 13, in a competition to create a magical experience based only on sound. The challenge, proposed by researchers in England a few months ago, is part of an attempt to answer a simple question: Can magic tricks, which usually rely on a striking visual element, ever be witnessed just through the ears? ?
“Imagine a world where you’ve never heard music,” says magician-turned-psychologist Gustav Kuhn of the University of Plymouth. Magic tricks, he says, can be like that for the blind.
Kuhn studies magic to understand the human mind (SN: 20/10/09). “Many of the questions that psychologists are interested in are really central to magic: perception, consciousness, but also free will, how you can influence people’s decisions and beliefs,” he says.
His interest in non-visual magic was sparked last year by his student Tyler Gibgot, who is visually impaired. Gibgot’s childhood birthday parties would feature magic shows for his friends. “I was the only one in the corner and I didn’t pay attention to the tricks because I couldn’t see what was going on,” says Gibgot.
Although Gibgot could not see the magic tricks as a child, hearing the terrified screams of his friends piqued his interest. He taught himself card tricks and took up cognitive science in college to learn how magicians manipulate people’s perception of reality—which led him to work with Kuhn.
The contest is, in part, an effort to make magic more inclusive for people like Gibgot. But it’s also a scientific exploration of why magic tricks rarely involve the sense of hearing.
The lack of auditory magic tricks, Kuhn says, points to fundamental differences between how our minds encode sight and sound. “We don’t know why this is the difference.” One reason may be that our eyes give us continuous information about the world, but what our ears tell us is fast.
“Sounds keep appearing and disappearing… but that’s not magic. “If a rabbit appears and disappears, that’s magic,” says Kuhn.
At the heart of every magic trick is a conflict: we believe something is impossible, but our senses tell us it is happening. “Because we don’t tend to trust our hearing as much as our vision, it could be that it just isn’t powerful enough to cause this kind of conflict,” says Kuhn. Humans are visual beings, so we are more surprised when our sight deceives us than our hearing.
Conventional magic tricks that involve hearing—like ringing a bell that makes no sound—either rely on other senses or rely on language. All 11 entries in the contest relied somewhat on language. An auditory magic trick that doesn’t involve language might even be impossible, Kuhn admits.
Kuhn plans to reopen the competition next year and expand its scope to include all non-visual senses, not just sound. And he hopes future appearances will move even further outside the box.
The non-visual magic project “brings a sense of power to people like me,” Gibgot says.
For this year’s contest, three independent magicians who performed tricks on the same principle will share the $200 prize.
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Image Source : www.sciencenews.org