When Gustav Kuhn was 13 years old, a friend released an egg from his ear.
Kuhn was amazed – but his wonder did not decrease, even after learning that the egg was made of foam and had been easily hidden in his friend’s hand.
“I was quite fascinated by these eggs,” he recalls. The trick has triggered an obsession with how the brain can be distorted by believing the impossible. “My whole life during my adolescence was centered (on) magic and deception,” he said. “I became completely addicted.”
Kuhn’s fascination with teenage girls finally led to a career in magic – although he did not exactly follow the trajectory he had in mind at 13. Although he is a practicing magician, he is mainly a psychologist, working to understand what the cognitive oddities that lead us to perceive a rabbit from a hat or a cognitive note of £ 5 can reveal the brain. “I tried to create the science of magic, which uses (tips) as a way to explore the human mind”, ” Kuhn said.
It seems to work – more than 150 “Magic Science” papers have been published since the late 2000s. This research has been trying to take off the conscious experiences of experience to demonstrate how the expectation seems to control our perception of reality and the ease with which we can have to make decisions while maintaining a feeling of agency.
The field, however, attracted criticism from members of the two disciplines. Some scientists fear that it lacks rigor, while some magicians fear that these experiences go beyond …