Magic Tricks Research Articles

Exploring the influence of magic performance on design creativity

Design fixation refers to a blind adherence to a set of ideas or concepts limiting the originality of design products. It is crucial to help design students develop flexible mindsets that help reduce fixation and improve the originality of their designs. Research suggests that watching magic performance can help designers improve the originality of designs and engage in divergent thinking. However, none of those studies focused on participants’ experiences and the reasons behind those influences. Therefore, this qualitative study explored how watching magic performances, learning the underlying principles, and performing magic helped design students reduce thinking fixation, increase flexible thinking, and improve design creativity. Three themes across and within students’ experience with this interactive method were identified: 1. Watching magic tricks creates a psychologically safe environment that helps relax the constraints of cognitive fixation for designers and design groups. 2. Learning magic principles and secrets increases the awareness of fixation and promotes divergent thinking. 3. Magic learning and performing experience shapes attitudes toward design constraints, challenges, and failures.

Discourse genres and children agency in everyday family science engagement

Accumulating evidence underscores the imperative role of family discourse in supporting children's engagement with science and, in turn, children's science learning. However, little research explores children's roles and agency in everyday family discourse in various unstructured settings. This study explores discourse genres , which are routine ways of using language for particular purposes. I examined what discourse genres one family employed to engage with science and how these genres supported or hindered the children's agentic engagement. By analyzing audio recordings obtained over a year of self-ethnography and employing linguistics ethnography methods, I characterized seven discourse genres: (1) scientific exploration; (2) classroom; (3) ask-the-expert; (4) wildlife viewing; (5) guided reading; (6) sports broadcasting; and (7) magic trick. The analysis demonstrates how the enactment of genres allowed family members to recruit resources from science and other domains to support science engagement for themselves and others. The findings illustrate how children exercised epistemic agency by introducing certain genres, taking agentic roles within genres (navigating the inquiry process, regulating the focus of conversation, creating shared object of attention), and undermining genres parents introduce. The study suggests more attention should be paid to genres in everyday family science discourse and children's roles and agency in them.

Libido, Psychic Eugenics and Abnormality

Abstract This article attempts to resituate the Greek regime of 4th of August 1936 within the wider context of interwar fascism in Europe and address it as fascist ideology and practice. It does so by pointing to the ways in which the biomedical discourse on gender and sexuality was pivotal in Ioannis Metaxas’s project in terms of playing a crucial role in normalising ideas of racial, class, sexual and gender hierarchy. The article has two areas of focus. The first approaches the eugenic discourse developed in Greece and Europe under liberal governments. This relied on the premise that the mental or psychic disorders it accounted for, identified mainly among the lower classes, were diagnosed as diseases of the ‘libidinous libido’ when it came to criminality, poverty, strikes, psychic diseases and brutal deaths. The second area of focus reveals how, once trained to detect biological and psychical anomalies, Metaxas’s regime managed to perform something that now gives the impression of a magic trick: by waving the wand of psychiatric technocracy over a scene of profound economic inequality, it cultivated an authoritarian, patriarchal, biomedical discourse on psychic normality.

Magic to conjure up academic skills for dissertation support

This project uses magic to explore dissertation skills with students. Students in a session on preparing for the dissertation learnt a magic trick and then used their experience of learning the trick to reflect and to develop narratives around their dissertation topic focussing on the skills of researching and writing. We compared the results of the intervention group to those of a control group (who were given the same session but excluding the magic trick). The teaching sessions integrated skills essential for completing the dissertation such as critical thinking, linking, metacognitive reflection, and conceptualising the process of a long project. Previous research has suggested that using magic can stimulate curiosity, engage and motivate students, and that they will find the session more memorable (see Moss, Irons and Boland, 2017; Wiseman and Watt, 2020; Wiseman, Wiles and Watt, 2021) The presentation reported the findings from pre- and post-session questionnaires completed by participants to evaluate the use of a magic trick in teaching dissertation skills by: Evaluating the effectiveness of using a magic trick to teach dissertation skills. Evaluating the use of magic to make skills teaching more memorable. Evaluating the use of magic to support motivation and positive emotions around dissertation tasks. Evaluating the use of magic to counter some of the negative affects students encounter such as lack of motivation or negative self-efficacy beliefs.

Machine-learning as a validated tool to characterize individual differences in free recall of naturalistic events.

The use of naturalistic stimuli, such as narrative movies, is gaining popularity in many fields, characterizing memory, affect, and decision-making. Narrative recall paradigms are often used to capture the complexity and richness of memory for naturalistic events. However, scoring narrative recalls is time-consuming and prone to human biases. Here, we show the validity and reliability of using a natural language processing tool, the Universal Sentence Encoder (USE), to automatically score narrative recalls. We compared the reliability in scoring made between two independent raters (i.e., hand scored) and between our automated algorithm and individual raters (i.e., automated) on trial-unique video clips of magic tricks. Study 1 showed that our automated segmentation approaches yielded high reliability and reflected measures yielded by hand scoring. Study 1 further showed that the results using USE outperformed another popular natural language processing tool, GloVe. In Study 2, we tested whether our automated approach remained valid when testing individuals varying on clinically relevant dimensions that influence episodic memory, age, and anxiety. We found that our automated approach was equally reliable across both age groups and anxiety groups, which shows the efficacy of our approach to assess narrative recall in large-scale individual difference analysis. In sum, these findings suggested that machine learning approach implementing USE is a promising tool for scoring large-scale narrative recalls and perform individual difference analysis for research using naturalistic stimuli.

Effectiveness of Two Different Behavior Modification Techniques for Anxiety Reduction in Children.

BackgroundDental anxiety has been a major concern for dentists while operating children. For a smooth, uneventful treatment, operators must incorporate various behavior management techniques in their practice. The incorporation of magic tricks as behavior management techniques has been used earlier by physicians and nurses to reduce pre-operative anxiety in hospitals. This study aimed to compare the impacts of magic tricks on reducing dental anxiety in children.Material and methodsPatients aged four to 11 years were eligible for inclusion. The study comprised two groups of 15 children each. During the first visit, children weren’t subjected to any behavior management. Behavior management aids (magic tricks and audiovisuals) were used during the second visit. Hemodynamic parameters along with an anxiety scale were used to assess anxiety in children before, during, and after treatment procedures. Venham’s picture test and modified visual analog scale were also used to assess the anxiety.ResultsA reduction in anxiety was seen in both groups after behavior management was used. The hemodynamic parameters like blood pressure and pulse rate were seen to decrease during the second visit, while the oxygen saturation was seen to increase.ConclusionThe study demonstrates that magic trick along with audiovisual aids was effective in controlling dental anxiety. Thus, magic tricks can be used in dental practice as a behavior management aid for children to facilitate cooperative behavior. Reducing a child's dental anxiety through various different magic trick aids could be a potential behavior management modality that needs further research.

CARD tricks: Understanding magical processes in organizations

Who doesn’t love a magic trick? When we watch magicians perform, we enjoy being fooled by their manipulations and sleights of hand. But when leaders in our workplaces use the same techniques as magicians to further personal agendas, they engage in a special and unique form of falsity. This can be useful in furthering organizational goals and performance, but it can also lead to frustration, dysfunction, and even the collapse of the organization. Drawing on research on the psychology of magic, we explain how business leaders construct “magical processes” that can be used to mislead and manipulate workers in the same ways that magicians trick their audiences. We propose a typology of magic tricks in organizations and introduce the acronym CARD to summarize the four steps in these processes: concealing, attracting attention, retaining attention, and directing behavior. We describe each step, provide illustrations, and explain how managers and employees might detect and defend against each one. Finally, we identify structural conditions that may make organizations vulnerable to magical processes. We hope to improve readers’ ability to detect magic and CARD tricks, and to pierce through to the agendas hidden behind these false facades.

Too perfect to be good? An investigation of magicians' Too Perfect Theory.

The “Too Perfect Theory” states that if a trick is too perfect, it might paradoxically become less impressive, or give away its secret method. This theory suggests that an increased impossibility results in a less magical effect. The Too Perfect Theory is often applied to magic effects, but it conflicts with recent scientific investigations showing that participants’ level of enjoyment of a magic performance is positively related to their perceived impossibility of the trick. The current article investigated whether an imperfect magic performance is more impressive than a perfect one. Across two experiments, we studied whether participants enjoy a performance more if the effect is not perfect. We also examined the different types of explanations people give to these two types of performances. The results showed that participants enjoyed a perfect performance more than an imperfect one. However, consistently with the Too Perfect Theory, participants watching the perfect performance also discovered the correct method behind the magic trick more frequently and believed the performance was staged more often. Moreover, participants’ method explanation significantly impacted their reports about the performance.

1991 by Franck Thilliez

Reviewed by: 1991 by Franck Thilliez Nathalie G. Cornelius Thilliez, Franck. 1991. Fleuve, 2021. ISBN 978-2-265-14428-6. Pp. 504. Rather than being another detective thriller situated during our present time, the latest installment in the Franck Sharko/Lucie Henebelle series takes the reader decades into the past. Inspector Sharko, who was initially introduced in the 2003 debut Train d'enfer pour Ange rouge, and has been aging in real time since, appears in this literary time capsule as a thirty-year-old lieutenant freshly transferred to the Paris Brigade criminelle. In his world, the policewoman at 36, quai des Orfèvres is a groundbreaking novelty. Faxes and pay-phones are basic modes of communication. DNA profiling is just starting to gain ground and computerized criminal databases are virtually nonexistent. Binders and carbon paper are the standard for record-keeping. As the newest recruit, Sharko is relegated to the tedious task of reviewing the archives of a cold case of the brutal killing of several women in the south of Paris. Slogging through massive piles of paperwork, the eager lieutenant nevertheless takes to the trying task with assiduity. But Franck's real trial by fire comes when his team must track down an elusive murderer intent on perturbing the Parisians' present. Le Méticuleux, as the criminal is nicknamed, seems able to do the inexplicable. By somehow compelling an innocent citizen to uncover a shocking photograph through an anonymous letter and a copy of Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal, the felon leads the police to a reclusive crime scene peppered with hidden clues in a room sealed from the inside. As the case evolves, a frustrated and exhausted Franck finds it increasingly difficult to compartmentalize his emotions. Ghosts from his past resurge, shedding light on the origins of Sharko's dogged determination to become a criminal investigator. Despite the graphic violence of some scenes, Thilliez's old-school procedural is thoroughly entertaining. The fast-paced, well-written plot immerses the reader in a foreboding atmosphere where mentalism, voodoo rituals, and Houdini's escapist illusions overlap, highlighting a time when intuition and emotion guided investigations more than in today's increasingly regimented and computerized police environment. The nostalgia elicited through the cultural and historical references to the early 1990s is an appealing escape from the contemporary reader's heavily computerized environment. As intimated by the novel's palindromic title, number games, magic tricks, and word play are the order of the day, although not as well-integrated and developed as in some of Thilliez's prior novels. Particularly appealing is the insertion of a preliminary mental exercise which gains relevance later as the investigation unfolds, while also cleverly demonstrating how society influences individual thought. The mystery's solution is satisfying as well, although somewhat predictable for those familiar with Thilliez's thrillers. As an entry-point into the author's universe, 1991 is an excellent choice. For avid fans, this novel finally answers some key questions about one of the best-known popular heroes of the French thriller. [End Page 261] Nathalie G. Cornelius Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

Syntheses, homeomorphic and configurational isomerizations, and structures of macrocyclic aliphatic dibridgehead diphosphines; molecules that turn themselves inside out.

The diphosphine complexes cis- or trans-[upper bond 1 start]PtCl2(P((CH2) n )3P[upper bond 1 end]) (n = b/12, c/14, d/16, e/18) are demetalated by MC[triple bond, length as m-dash]X nucleophiles to give the title compounds (P((CH2) n )3)P (3b-e, 91-71%). These "empty cages" react with PdCl2 or PtCl2 sources to afford trans-[upper bond 1 start]MCl2(P((CH2) n )3P[upper bond 1 end]). Low temperature 31P NMR spectra of 3b and c show two rapidly equilibrating species (3b, 86 : 14; 3c, 97 : 3), assigned based upon computational data to in,in (major) and out,out isomers. These interconvert by homeomorphic isomerizations, akin to turning articles of clothing inside out (3b/c: ΔH ‡ 7.3/8.2 kcal mol-1, ΔS ‡ -19.4/-11.8 eu, minor to major). At 150 °C, 3b, c, e epimerize to (60-51) : (40-49) mixtures of (in,in/out,out) : in,out isomers, which are separated via the bis(borane) adducts 3b, c, e·2BH3. The configurational stabilities of in,out-3b, c, e preclude phosphorus inversion in the interconversion of in,in and out,out isomers. Low temperature 31P NMR spectra of in,out-3b, c reveal degenerate in,out/out,in homeomorphic isomerizations (ΔG ‡ Tc 12.1, 8.5 kcal mol-1). When (in,in/out,out)-3b, c, e are crystallized, out,out isomers are obtained, despite the preference for in,in isomers in solution. The lattice structures are analyzed, and the D 3 symmetry of out,out-3c enables a particularly favorable packing motif. Similarly, (in,in/out,out)-3c, e·2BH3 crystallize in out,out conformations, the former with a cycloalkane solvent guest inside.

From Murambi: The Book of Bones

from Murambi:The Book of Bones Boubacar Boris Diop (bio) Translated from French by Fiona McLaughlin During ninety days in 1994, members of the Hutu majority in Rwanda murdered 800,000 members of the country's Tutsi minority, in one of the swiftest and most brutal genocides of the twentieth century. In Boubacar Boris Diop's novel Murambi: The Book of Bones, "the time, place, and mood of the genocide are created through a concert of voices," Eileen Julien writes in the book's foreword, and readers hear "the thoughts of fictive victims and killers who lived through those terrifying and horrific days." The following is a chapter from the book. f.s. We called him Tonton Antoine. For as far back as I can remember, I always saw him at the house. He was my father's best friend. Actually his only friend, I think. Already, when I was a little girl, I had the feeling that he wasn't like anyone else we knew. He didn't laugh very much, but he loved doing magic tricks with cards. Projecting the shadows of his fingers against a wall, he could also create tortoises or dragonflies. As soon as I saw him arrive, I would rush out to meet him. He would lift me up on his shoulders and run around our place singing, "Marina has an airplane, Tonton Antoine is little Marina's airplane!" I was, I think, one of the few people who could cheer him up. A few days after the events, he came to the house a first time. He and my father talked for a long time in low voices. We knew that he was in charge of several barricades in Kibuye. Nonetheless, he had a sweet face, if a little bit sad, just as I'd known him from my earliest childhood. When he left, my father seemed to be very preoccupied. "Does he know that we're hiding those little ones here?" asked my mother, worried. "No, but he says I should take up my machete like all the other men." "Ah?" "I refused. I can't do that." My mother said nothing. After a while he cried out again: "Yes, I refused!" Two days passed. Tonton Antoine came back. He and my father locked themselves away again in the living room. For the first time in my life I heard Tonton Antoine shout. [End Page 65] After this second meeting, my father started to change. He talked to himself, wandering from one room to another: "Ah! I can't agree to do it, those people have never done anything to me! It's savagery!" The next instant he would say that he had to protect us. If he didn't do anything, the Interahamwe were going to come and kill everyone in the house. The third day, not being able to stand it anymore, he took up his machete. My mother and I wanted to keep him from going out. Then he screamed, "Don't you watch the television? It's like all wars—you kill people and then it's over!" He went to the barricades. They tell us that he handles his machete like a maniac over there. However, when he's back at the house, he goes straight to the little ones' hiding place, he gives them treats and plays with them. Then he retires to his bedroom. Mother and I don't disturb him. When he leaves very early the next morning, we pretend we're asleep. [End Page 66] Boubacar Boris Diop Boubacar Boris Diop was born in Dakar, Senegal, and is a Francophone author of novels, plays, and essays. He was awarded the Senegalese Republic Grand Prize for Les Tambours de la mémoire and the Prix Tropiques for The Knight and His Shadow. His Doomi Golo was the first novel to be translated from Wolof into English. The Zimbabwe International Book Fair listed it as one of the hundred best African books of the twentieth century. In 2022 he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for Murambi: The Book of Bones. Fiona Mc Laughlin Fiona Mc Laughlin is associate professor of African languages...

John’s Turn by Mac Barnett

Reviewed by: John’s Turn by Mac Barnett Natalie Berglind Barnett, Mac John’s Turn; illus. by Kate Berube. Candlewick, 2022 [32p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781536203950 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781536226768 $17.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R 4-7 yrs At Friday assembly every week, one student takes the stage in a segment called “Sharing Gifts.” Tina plays the tuba, Jesse shows off magic tricks, and Carla cracks jokes. When John’s turn comes around, he’s nervous about how his act will be received, but he starts to gain confidence as he gets into the groove of his ballet performance and ends his act to resounding applause. The first-person plural narration invites the viewer into the story, treating them as a fellow classmate and part of John’s audience. Dappled textures and simple lines of the ink and watercolor art play well with perspective and easily depict the large crowd, shifting between John’s view of the assembled students and their view of him from the floor. The dots, lines, and half-circles of each face convey important expressions as John eases into his dance, starting with a frown and gradually working his way up to a confident [End Page 213] smile. Viewers who struggle with stage fright and embracing their hobbies may gain some confidence from John’s journey and the book’s welcoming, inclusive tone. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Chinese Folklore for the English Public: Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 Translation of Pu Songling’s Classical Tales

Chinese Folklore for the English Public: Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 Translation of Pu Songling’s Classical Tales

Magic Card Tricks on Hamming Codes over Finite Fields

Magic tricks based on binary Hamming codes are well known. A typical trick goes as follows. The audience picks a number from 0 to 15. The magician prepares seven Tables and asks Yes/No questions—if...

Stage Magic as a Performative Design Principle for VR Storytelling

This article examines The VOID’s Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire (2017) VR arcade attraction, and analyzes the intermedial magic principles employed by co-founder and magician Curtis Hickman to create the illusion of a fictive world with impossible space and liveness. I argue that The VOID (Vision of Infinite Dimensions) functioned like nineteenth century magic theaters run by Georges Melies and others, by employing magic principles of misdirection that directed player attention towards the aesthetics of an illusion, and away from the mechanics of the effects generating technology. Narrative framing and performative role play transported multiple players into a believable Star Wars immersive experience, creating an aesthetics of the impossible that reflected the goal of many stage magic tricks, and was foundational to trick films in the cinema of attractions of the early twentieth century. Using game studies concepts like Huizinga’s magic circle and theatre arts concepts like Craig’s uber-marionette, this article suggests that The VOID and other stage magic approaches to VR, like Derren Brown’s Ghost Train (2017), are a new medium for participatory theatre that incorporate immersive features from both cinema and games.

General solution to the spectator-first Tantalizer problem

This paper investigates a topic inspired by a magic trick called the “Tantalizer”, which is a card game resembling the well-known Josephus Problem. We study the spectator-first Tantalizer problem with a deck of n-cards and investigate which card is left in the end after a series of dealing operations. A formula and an algorithm with a running time complexity O(log⁡n) based on the binary form of n are proposed to solve this problem.

Differential Effects of Experience and Information Cues on Metacognitive Judgments About Others' Change Detection Abilities.

This study explored the interaction between visual metacognitive judgments about others and cues related to the workings of System 1 and System 2. We examined how intrinsic cues (i.e., saliency of a visual change) and experience cues (i.e., detection/blindness) affect people’s predictions about others’ change detection abilities. In Experiment 1, 60 participants were instructed to notice a subtle and a salient visual change in a magic trick that exploits change blindness, after which they estimated the probability that others would detect the change. In Experiment 2, 80 participants watched either the subtle or the salient version of the trick and they were asked to provide predictions for the experienced change. In Experiment 1, participants predicted that others would detect the salient change more easily than the subtle change, which was consistent with the actual detection reported in Experiment 2. In Experiment 2, participants’ personal experience (i.e., whether they detected the change) biased their predictions. Moreover, there was a significant difference between their predictions and offline predictions from Experiment 1. Interestingly, change blindness led to lower predictions. These findings point to joint contributions of experience and information cues on metacognitive judgments about other people’s change detection abilities.

"Impossible" Somatosensation and the (Ir)rationality of Perception.

Impossible figures represent the world in ways it cannot be. From the work of M. C. Escher to any popular perception textbook, such experiences show how some principles of mental processing can be so entrenched and inflexible as to produce absurd and even incoherent outcomes that could not occur in reality. However, impossible experiences of this sort are mostly limited to visual perception; are there “impossible figures” for other sensory modalities? Here, we import a known magic trick into the laboratory to report and investigate an impossible experience for somatosensation—one that can be physically felt. We show that, even under full-cue conditions with objects that can be freely inspected, subjects can be made to experience a single object alone as feeling heavier than a group of objects that includes the single object as a member—an impossible and phenomenologically striking experience of weight. Moreover, we suggest that this phenomenon—a special case of the size-weight illusion—reflects a kind of “anti-Bayesian” perceptual updating that amplifies a challenge to rational models of perception and cognition.

Cognitive style predicts how people explain mental magic tricks

Magic tricks are deceiving, yet we can readily generate an explanation for a trick that we do not fully understand. In three experiments, we show that the way people explain a mental magic trick depends on their individual cognitive style. Analytical thinkers tend to generate explanations that appeal to rationality, such as using physical props to accomplish an effect. In contrast, intuitive thinkers are more likely to generate irrational explanations that accord with the magician's provided backstory, such as using subliminal cues to guide a spectator's choices. We observe this effect when measuring a participant's cognitive style using the Cognitive Reflection Test, and also when manipulating a participant's cognitive style using a simple narrative prompt.

Intuitions about magic track the development of intuitive physics

Many successful magic tricks violate our assumptions about how physical objects behave, but some magic tricks are better than others. We examined whether the interest adults express in a magic trick is predicted by the age at which infants first respond to violation of the corresponding physical principle. In Experiment 1, adults (N = 319) rated their interest in magic tricks mimicking stimuli from violation-of-expectation experiments with infants. We found a clear correlation between how interesting a trick is and the age at which infants demonstrate a sensitivity to its underlying principle. In a second experiment (N = 350), we replicated this finding and also used three additional tricks for which there is no established age of acquisition to predict the age at which those physical principles might be acquired. A third experiment (N = 368) replicated these findings measuring adults' surprise at physical violations rather than their interest in magic tricks. Our results suggest that adults' intuitions reflect the development of physical knowledge and show how magic can reveal our expectations about the physical world.