The Magic of Consciousness

So there’s a great article in the New York Times (again) about consciousness and ties to magic, recently discussed at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Las Vegas. This is especially relevant to me because I was just in Las Vegas, and I saw a show featuring one of the speakers at this conference - Teller, of Penn & Teller.

Neural networks learn by receiving input, generating output, and comparing that output to an expectation - this, by analogy, is how our brain works. Whether our brains produce the correct answer will reinforce the neural network or force change. When something happens that we don’t expect, we are surprised. This is how magic operates, as George Johnson of the New York Times writes:

As [Teller] ran through the trick a second time, annotating each step, we saw how we had been led to mismatch cause and effect, to form one false hypothesis after another. Sometimes the coins were coming from his right hand, and sometimes from his left, hidden beneath the fingers holding the bucket.

He left us with his definition of magic: “The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.”

Perception is not perfect; the world we see is incomplete, but our brains are smart enough to fill in what is missing. And when we’re focused on something that takes a lot of our attention, we can easily miss something that would seem obvious otherwise (like a gorilla walking through a scene we’re processing, Simons & Levin, 1999).

However, perception does make due with what it is given - it tries to make sense out of what it is presented with and, in Las Vegas, it can be difficult to reconcile how the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, and an Egyptian pyramid can all be right next to each other.

The left brain, as Dr. Gazzaniga put it, is the confabulator, constantly concocting stories. But mine was momentarily dumbstruck when, after his talk, I passed through a doorway inside the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino and entered an air-conditioned simulation of the Grand Canal. My eyes were drawn upward to the stunning illusion of a trompe l’oeil sky and what I decided must be ravens flying high overhead. Looking closer, my brain discarded that theory, and I saw that the black curved wings were the edges of discs — giant thumbtacks holding up the sky. Later I was told they were automatic sprinklers, in case the clouds catch fire.

The article is fantastic and really sheds light on the role of perception in consciousness - with a little Las Vegas flair.

Article on NYTimes website
Article in PDF form