Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions by Stephen L. Macknik

Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions by Stephen L. Macknik
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Dr. Indre Viskontas mentioned this book in her Teaching Company Great Courses lecture series Brain Myths Exploded: Lessons from Neuroscience and I was all over it. Magic and neuroscience? The authors did a great job talking about how magicians (consciously and often unconsciously) take advantage of the way the brain works to fool and entertain you.

Magicians understand at a deeply intuitive level that you alone create your experience of reality, and, like [one magician], they exploit the fact that your brain does a staggering amount of outright confabulation in order to construct the mental simulation of reality known as “consciousness.”

They studied magic from the perspective of neuroscience, in addition to their own studies holding a Magic of Consciousness symposium in 2007

The idea behind [was] to show these researchers that magicians have much to teach them about the subjects of their life’s work: attention, perception, and even the holy grail, consciousness.

Examining the various sleights of mind and explaining each of them from an anatomical and physical frame, they offer a lot of insight into both. And in the end, they say

We’ve given some answers as to why you (and we) are so gullible: our brains create sensory afterimages, our memories are fallible, we make predictions that can be violated, and so on. But as we reflect on the reasons, we are drawn to one that stands above all others in explaining the neurobiology of magic—the spotlight of attention.
[…]
A crucial take-home lesson from this journey through neuromagic is that when you are confronted with the uncertainty of a complex decision with lots of variables, you cannot always anticipate what will turn out to be most important factor, because of the suppressive and enhancing effects of your own attention. To overcome this, you must cast your attentional spotlight over each detail of the decision in turn, even if some initially appear insignificant or ephemeral.

And after all the study “The more we learn about magic, the more interested we become as consumers.” Me, too. One complaint about the book is the less than useful Notes section. No references in the text. Stumble across it at the end, and they are the oh so annoying sentence snippet with the accompanying note. Not even a page number to try to locate said snippet. Disappointing enough to ding a star. Not really. But almost. I liked the SPOILER ALERTs each time they explained a magic trick. Some I knew, but can’t do without the thousands of hours of practice. Some were enlightening. And even though I “was all over it”, I did set it aside while moving, and turning over at my old job, and vacationing, and … well, I got back to it and was all over it again.

A few selected highlights…

One of the smarter magicians (note: they are all smart! They have to be.) observed:

“Much of our life is devoted to understanding cause and effect,” Teller says. “Magic provides a playground for those rational skills. It is the theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality but that, in our hearts, ought to. It is rather like a joke. There is a logical, even if nonsensical, progression to it. When the climax of a trick is reached, there is a little explosion of shivery pleasure when what we see collides with what we know about physical reality.”

On memory, this reinforced what I already knew:

Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, and an authority on the malleability of memory, is famous for having shown in the 1990s that some psychiatrists and other mental health professionals implanted so-called repressed (and later recovered) memories in the minds of their patients.
[…]
Our colleague Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University who studies memory and emotions, says that he used to think a memory was something stored in the brain and accessed when needed. But a researcher in his lab, Karim Nader, convinced him otherwise. Nader demonstrated that each time a memory is used, it has to be re-stored as a new memory in order to be accessed later. The old memory is either gone or inaccessible.
[…]
Thus your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it.

I have never been chosen for jury duty, but if I am ever interviewed, I’ll be asking if the lawyers know about Dr. Loftus.

I loved this assessment of psychics: “We concluded that if magicians are artists of attention and awareness, psychics are poseurs of false wizardry.”

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Electric Brain: How the New Science of Brainwaves Reads Minds, Tells Us How We Learn, and Helps Us Change for the Better by R. Douglas Fields

Electric Brain: How the New Science of Brainwaves Reads Minds, Tells Us How We Learn, and Helps Us Change for the Better by R. Douglas Fields

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Whew. What a book. I was a science/math geek in high school (that would be 40+ years ago) but I didn’t take the Advanced Placement Anatomy & Physiology class offered because I wasn’t into the squishy (or soft) sciences. I’m an engineer now, and still not, but…I’ve expanded my interests to polymath levels over the past 25 or so years. I’ve read a bit, and listened to Great Courses lectures, on the brain and neurology, memory and “disorders”, but interesting maybe only to me, none have delved more than a scratch into the electric waves of the brain. So I requested and was granted this advance review copy from the publisher BenBella Books through Edelweiss.

Be warned in advance…there is a lot of anatomy and physiology – of the brain – in here. I can’t speak for those in the field, but it seems to me to be sufficiently medically detailed to satisfy those in the profession. And for those of us who are not, if you can get past the technical elements of the many cortexes, axons, neurons, and more, there is much here to likely enlighten you. Fields writes well, if overly academic…perhaps he had little choice. Considerable history of the field, backstories, successes and failures, modern advancements. Here are a subset of my takeaways…

Dr. Hans Berger was the first to record a human EEG, but his science was affected (infected?) by ethical issues. And he mixed in a belief in telepathy and psychic energy. In a monograph relating an incident where he was thrown from a horse in the path of a horse-drawn cannon that stopped just in time, his sister “far away, had at the same moment a sudden strong feeling that Berger was in danger” and he wrote, “It was a case of spontaneous telepathy in which at a time of mortal danger, and as I contemplated certain death, I transmitted my thoughts, while my sister, whose was particularly close to me, acted as the receiver.” … okay, sure.

Berger wrote fourteen identically titled papers on his research between 1929 and 1938. Fields notes

It is also difficult to reference any of Berger’s specific findings, as the citations for these fourteen papers differ only by the year of publication. Cloaking his findings in this way hid them from the larger scientific community and diminished their impact.

This prompted my recall of Martin Gardner’s characteristics of a crank (see Fads and Fallacies in the name of Science). Not strictly a Gardner crank, but secretive enough to edge in.

Fields showed a limitation I’m not sure many would catch. Recounting the experiment of Stanley Miller in the 1950s in which Miller replicated what he thought the atmosphere was like 3.5 billion years ago, sealing it in a globe of purified water and bombarding it with electric sparks simulating lightning, and found amino acids in the result.

Simple cells might then assemble into primitive organisms – all initiated by a spark – and through eons of evolution the tree of life would expand and ultimately yield Homo sapiens, …

The limitation/trap? That would be “ultimately”. The reality is…so far. Homo sapiens tends to think evolution stops with himself.

I got a kick out of Fields, who at one point said, “I’m leaving out a lot of fascinating neurobiology here to stay on point.” He put a lot of fascinating neurobiology in!

Researchers have found brain wave evidence to support Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow theories.

A good researcher, and I’ll say, journalist, Fields submitted himself to a comprehensive brain wave scan that took more than a month to analyze. Brain Science International scientist Jay “Gunkleman says he performs his EEG analysis without first reading the patient’s medical history or the initial complaint that motivated them to have their brainwaves recorded and analyzed.” My note was simply “Good. Unbiased.” Fields’s analysis revealed a variant with his alpha waves present in 10% of the population. Fields said something there that I consider probably the most important in this long, dense book: “Just because something differs from the norm, it does not necessarily mean it is bad.” So true. What are called “disorders” are just differences. Of course, they can manifest as disorderly, but …

When testing neurofeedback to see if his alphas could be modified, Fields interacted with neurofeedback practitioners Jessica Eure and Robin Bernhard

“What am I supposed to be trying to do?” I ask.
“You don’t need to …” Robin halts her reply to my question and turning to Jessica, she says under her breath, “Did you see what he said to me?”
Rephrasing my question, I ask, “How do I interpret that screen?”
“You see, that’s what I knew would happen,” Robin says in a tone conveying good-natured, restrained frustration, Jessica giggles knowingly. “You thinker,” she scolds, “So the cool thing is that your amygdala knows exactly what is going on already. The conscious mind is really way too stupid to do anything to affect it.” She and Robin chuckle, They’ve already cracked into my brain with their machine. They knew I would take a left-brained, analytical approach to neurofeedback, and that tack would not be of much help.

Apart from the “left-brained” bit, I suspect I’d be the same way. I am that way with most things.

Fields opens his chapter Consciousness, Riding on Brainwaves, with

Consciousness has long mystified philosophers and scientists. What is conscious awareness? Do animals have it? Consciousness touches on the most fundamental question in philosophy, psychology, and biology, of how the brain creates the mind.

Good. No dualism there.

Here’s an example of something that sounds like Dan Ackroyd wrote (no disrespect intended…just that those are busy words!)

In 1949, Giuseooe Moruzzi and Horace Winchell Magoun found that electrical stimulation of the midbrain reticular formation instantly desynchronized the slowly oscillating EEG and aroused sleeping animals.

On the purpose of dreams: “One of the reasons that we sleep is to dream, and one of the reasons we dream is to remember and forget.” And on remembering and forgetting, this was something I did not yet know:

Many labs conducting research in the last few decades, including mine, have identified the detailed cellular and molecular mechanisms of memory consolidation. The key distinction between short-term and long-term memory is that genes must be turned on and new proteins made for long-term memory but not for short-term memory.

I thought this was a refresh of a good point:

Science is a luxury that can only be practiced in societies after all the basic needs of life have been obtained, because scientific research requires substantial funding and public support. For this reason, science does not proceed at the pace of scientific innovation; it proceeds at a pace, and in the specific directions, that is funded by the public or business. Research can be stalled or halted by regulations.

Evidence when a draconian medieval administration bent on being anti-science forbids research – forbids their agencies from even talking about it – into the most pressing world concern of today, anthropogenic climate change.

Fields makes an important clarification on the medical technology of cranial implants translating waves and electrical impulses into prosthetic movements:

As you well appreciate by now, no matter what you may read in sensational articles, neuroscientists do not yet understand how thoughts, emotions, and intentions are coded in the pattern of neural impulses zipping through neural circuits and sweeping through brain tissue as oscillating brainwaves. The neural code is still a mystery, but computers using advanced machine learning can begin to recognize patterns of electrical activity that are associated with a specific sensory or motor function, and use that insight as a reliable signal to trigger prosthetic devices to perform useful functions. This is a complex process, far from being able to decode neural impulses as one would read computer code.

I thought it interesting that brainwave study revealed abilities to learn new languages seems to be inversely proportional to reading ability. Don’t take offense. Dr. Chantal Prat “claims to be able to [“spot accurately which students will learn a new language rapidly”] by simply recording the brainwaves of a person as they sit quietly at rest.” Prat analyzed the author and determined that Fields “should not move to Europe.” She said “You are probably an excellent reader. Our brain is optimized, and when you get better at one thing it comes at a cost to something else.” A Cambridge study that came out as Fields was researching this part of his book reported that “monolingual people are superior to bilingual people at metacognition, which is described as ‘thinking about thinking,’ and that they excel at correcting their performance when making errors.” – I am so monolingual!

New terminology to me was “fluid intelligence” – “facility of thinking abstractly and rapidly, accurately identifying patterns and quickly reasoning to solve problems” – and “crystallized intelligence” – ability to use acquired knowledge and reasoning to recognize patterns and find correct solutions to problems.

Looking at the wave patterns associated with creative activities, Field wisely cautions “[o]nce again, correlation is not causation, and the surge in alpha waves during a creative flash could be the result, not the cause, of creative thinking.”

Here’s a good one that needs to be trumpeted:

Dyslexia is commonly referred to as a dysfunction. While it is certainly a serious disability in the modern world, I would not consider it a dysfunction, because reading is not a normal brain function.

Fields observes that reading “is something that human beings never did until very recently in our history.” Fields compares difficulty learning to read to learning to play the piano – not being able to learn either is not a disorder! Well, pass the biscuits and praise the cook! I’m going to pass that on to friends with kids with dyslexia. I think it is very important to de-label the labels.

Bottom line, unless you are in the field, or a serious amateur enthusiast, this book might take a bit of time to digest, but it will be enlightening. Recommended.

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Scatterbrain : How the mind’s mistakes make humans creative, innovative and successful by Henning Beck

Scatterbrain : How the mind’s mistakes make humans creative, innovative and successful by Henning Beck

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I received an uncorrected proof from the publsher Greystone Books through LibraryThing. I finished this on a return flight from vacation two weeks ago and had to sort out my plethora of sticky notes!

Now, I’ve developed a habit of checking the notes before reading non-fiction. If there are none, I tend toward reading it as more opinion than not. If there are, but are not cited in the text, my opinion of the author is diminished – that’s lazy and irresponsible (on the author’s part, not mine) yet sadly increasingly common.

And then there is Dr. Beck, who opens his notes section in a novel way: “You can google data. If you are really good, you can google information. But googling knowledge is quite a bit harder.” Beck is a degreed neuroscientist who gives public talks on the subject of this book, the brain “flaws” that give us our creativity. I don’t know if he’s always been this way or if the talking changed him, but this book is written with a style and approach that makes it easy to impart to the reader what he’s saying. That’s not to say there is not depth and detail…just that Beck presents them well. The entire book is one to three page soundbites; large enough to encapsulate the micro-topic and small enough to capitalize on the brain’s short attention span.

Beck looks at fourteen “so-called brain blunder”s and explains why they aren’t at all: forgetting, learning (why we’re bad a rote learning), memory (a false memory is better than none), blackout (choking under pressure), time (misjudging it forges valuable memories), boredom (hard to turn the switch off), distraction (which leads to more creativity), mathematics (best calculations don’t involve numbers), decisions (we risk much yet still manage to choose wisely), selection (choosing is hard), pigeonholing (biases can help, and of course hurt), motivation (“inner critic limits us”), creativity (doesn’t happen on demand), perfectionism (can’t improve without mistakes.) There, in a nutshell, that says nothing. Dr. Beck cites the biology behind his points and the studies that support those points. It’s not burdensome at all and quite enlightening. He consciously emphasizes the good things about the brain’s fallacies (“Even biases have their good sides – if you use them correctly,”)

Now…sticky notes (some of which are for me to look up or follow up)… Beck talks about his neighbor who is “a truly extraordinary character”, and who happens to be two years old. That neighbor (who makes appearances throughout the book) is “a pretty clever guy with the ability to master things that would bring any supercomputer to its knees.” He is constantly making little mistakes. “Every mistake, every imprecision is an incentive for him to try it differently next time and maybe even to get a little better.” It occurred to me that I’ve never thought of our learning process as Bayesian (Beck doesn’t put it that way.)

Subtitle for Forgetting is Why You Won’t Remember the Contents of This Book – Thereby Retaining the Most Important Information. Counter-intuitive but he goes into wonderful detail on why rote doesn’t work and we shouldn’t try to force it. We need to walk away because the brain needs time to dynamically combine information. “If you sort your information too early on, it’s much harder to put things into a different kind of order later down the road.”

Learning – “[…] information stored in a brain is not located in any particular physical location but is rather an ever-changing state of mind.” Constantly rewritten, which is why no memory is accurate.

Memory – on the difference between an orchestra playing a score and a brain, which “doesn’t play the order of notes as they are written on the score but instead alters the melody a little bit each time it practices.” Memory is not fixed. Ever. Memory retrieved is subject – and vulnerable – to the influences at the time of retrieval. Studies demonstrate that memories can be altered by peer pressure and “participants were no longer able to distinguish between truth and fiction.” Some, namely jeenyuses, are better at that than others.

In general, every one of our memories is false and, each time we recall one, it becomes even more false.

Blackout – “Secret Formula for Fending Off Stage Fright”. Beck says a better solution than preparing calculations for a test is “to combat the anxiety directly by simulating the pressure-situation in practice, thus growing accustomed to it.” When I prepared to take the Professional Engineer license test, two four hour sessions of forty questions each, I did so by laying out my books and notes as I would on test day. And I’ve coached others to do the same – muscle memory goes a long way. Instead of freaking out looking for an index or a certain book…I already knew where it was!

Boredom – we need to have productive daydreaming. Not no daydreaming, more productive. On distractability

For example , if we are concentrating on reading a book while simultaneously wondering about a strange look that a colleague gave us earlier in the day, it is going to be hard to remember the text. Perhaps something like that already happened to you while reading this chapter. You may have been reading along and then suddenly realized that your thoughts were somewhere else entirely, But whereas this might make the average author feel sad or distressed, I personally feel happy to hear it. Because it shows that your own thought-journey function is working beautifully.

This. All the time.

On distraction, the brain is wired to filter. “[…] the importance of a piece of information is not determined by its contents but rather by its variation.” I am distracted easily (unless I don’t want to be). I rely on distraction to help organize tasks, memories, thoughts I have. Sounds opposite, but not for me. Beck thinks it is a problem to not allow ourselves to be distracted. He says “[c]reative people allow themselves to get more easily distracted because their filter mechanisms do not work as well as those of other, less creative people.” Or, perhaps they work exactly well?

Decisions – “Our brain’s goal is not to be happy but to become happy.” “Becoming happy is always a little bit nicer than being happy.” And unhappy people are the world changers – we don’t like uncertainty.

Selection – another section I’d read of in other books, we don’t do well when we have a lot of choices. Beck said his local market in Germany has…”about 118 different varieties” of muesli! He notes the chain Aldi limits the different number of each product. Shopping is much easier when we don’t have to sift hundreds of options. To avoid “the agony of choice”, Beck offers five tricks: Narrow your goal, Be satisfied (my note: close enough is often good enough), decide important things with your gut (still not on board with that myself…but that’s for Kahneman’s book…), resist the excess (you don’t have to make a decision for every option), and up the pressure (get off the pot, so to speak.”

Pigeonholing – have to always be alert to avoid the trap of stereotyping. Stereotypes are necessary for our brain to function well, but we have to make sure we don’t create false correlations. We look for patterns, connections, and we overinterpret them when we find them.

Motivation – how many of you are familiar with the marshmallow study? Children told they can have one marshmallow now, or two if they wait. One famous 1970s study found years later that those who waited were more successful, wealthier, better educated, etc. Well… “There is one important factor that is often left out when people refer to this Marshmallow Test: the children who participated in the experiment came from a privileged circle of society (they were largely the children of professors and scientists at Stanford University […])” A repeat of the experiment in 2016 with poorer children discovered the exact same neural mechanisms that influenced the 1970s children to wait influenced the 2016 to eat the marshmallow now. They “must be able to afford the luxury of holding back.” Lightbulb. I like Beck’s addressing demotivational techniques that are passed off as motivational – “employee of the month”, pay for performance… I think formal performance evaluations are demotivational.

Creativity – autopilot is often the best way to be creative. And forced breaks help. Struggle with a problem for a while and walk away for a bit. Isaac Asimov said in his memoirs that he never had writer’s block because he had so many writing projects going on at once. If he got stymied by one, he’d shift to another and couldn’t help but take a break from the one threatening to block him.

Perfectionism – avoiding mistakes can obviously be a good thing, but “just because you don;t make a mistake does not necessarily imply that your are right.” Keep that in mind. Chaos is beneficial – Spock would cry to know that “[i]f our brains were to switch to a logical system of thought, we would lose our mental flexibility entirely.”

So…soundbites from soundbites, hopefully enough to spark an interest. Excellent book that I’ll revisit after I loan it to a couple of people.

Note to the publisher:
– page 161, second paragraph, “Sometimes people sayz that they think they are…” Deliberate typo? Beck has a deliberate misspelling on page 173, but doesn’t mention this one.
– page 218, middle of last paragraph: “protein-fat-ration” should be “protein-fat-ratio”?

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