Magicians are aware of the fact that looks and attitude matter a lot when having a show. People are sensible to the human personality and can get easily charmed away by the smile or voice of the performer. If you manage to charm the public you will be less observed into details because their attention will focus on your face and beauty of mimics.

We are prone at being attentive to new things. Our brain will raise interest when will observe a dove flying out of a hat and will take a minute to register and analyze the new information. Magicians also use exciting actions and movements in order to catch and distract the attention of the public.

Magicians know a little more than the average people about the human body. They know better how our senses work because they can use them in order to make magic happen. For example, I am sure that some of you already tried looking intensively at a black and white picture only to see if you still see it after you look away. And most of you really had that after-image. Magicians use this into obtaining more time for making a switch.

We have a smartass brain. It insists that we are always right and that it has free will. Our brain will make appeal to the ‘cognitive dissonance’ in order to make up excuses to rationalize events even if it’s contradictive with what you felt or thought just a second ago. Magicians use this bug in our brain and present a reality that doesn’t obey the idea of reality our brain is used to seeing. Finally, we reach the unique sensation of astonishment where magic actually happens.

The obvious changes in scenery are nothing to be concerned. What really tricks our brain into seeing magic is the slight doubt that a certain object moved just a little without noticing the movement. Our brains are susceptible to ‘change-blindness’ which means that it’s pretty weak at observing small changes. Is not really the fact that we don’t see the delicate movement but the brain is trained to don’t alarm our ration unless it’s something significant. Magicians use this weakness of the brain and we never notice the so small but important changes until the performer directs our focus to it.

The ‘woman sawed in half’ trick is probably a solved mystery for all of us. The head we see in one end of the box doesn’t belong to the legs we see at the other end. Yet, our brain insists into thinking otherwise. Why? Brains are suckers for continuity. We will use what we can see to continue the image and fill out the blanks.

Magicians know a thing about our brain. Our brain is a ‘believer’. Believes in itself. We many time think that every choice we make is a result of our will. In a ‘pick a card, any card’ trick, we are asked to choose and we chose that card thinking that that it is the card we want. We forget to think about the possibility that the magician made something that directed our choice to a certain card.

Our brains follow a mindset. When we see a ball get thrown in the air, it comes back so after we see it million times we make a pattern of action called ‘memory-prediction framework’. Therefore when a magician puts a ball in a cup only to have it disappear when the cup is lifted we are shocked because what our brain predicted didn’t come true.

This is an interesting fact. It seems that we are affected by something called ‘misinformation effect’. This effect makes us have false memories because our attention was distracted and we got lost, the magician showing us the rationalization.

Magicians feel pretty good about themselves when they manage to make us see what they want us to see. Brain is a funny organ and has something called ‘spotlight’. Our attention is pulled to one thing in particular due to the ‘moving spotlight’ theory.