My career in magic was short lived (age 9, 1983)
Magic tricks may sharpen attention and cognition
STUDY: De Lucas M et al, Frontiers in Psychology 2026
STUDY TYPE: Scoping review
FUNDING: Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Spain
Background
A magic trick is a carefully engineered event that manipulates attention, perception, causal reasoning, and memory to create an experience of impossibility, making it a useful tool for studying cognition. This review mapped two decades of research that used magic tricks to study how the mind works.
The Study
- 55 studies following PRISMA guidelines for scoping reviews.
Cognitive Illusions
In magic, the trick takes place within our field of vision, but we miss it. Experimental studies explain how magicians exploit our cognitive biases
In some tricks, they steer an audience member to pick a particular card or make another predetermined choice. Experimental studies tell us this works, and the audience member has no awareness that they were steered.
In other tricks, the magician steers us toward a false explanation of the trick. This creates a “mental fixation” where we get stuck on false leads, unable to take in new information that would allow us to see the true mechanics behind the illusion.
The magician directs our gaze away from the trick, in part by looking away from it themselves. We follow their eyes. But eye position doesn’t tell the whole story.
When watching a lighter disappear, people did not see it fall in the background. Researchers created a video of this trick, and in one version edited out the falling lighter. Through a series of experiments, they showed that even when our eyes are directed toward the falling lighter, we fail to perceive it consciously.
Instead, our brain depends on context. If a magician makes all the movements as if to throw a ball in the air, we assume they through the ball, but it is kept hidden in their hands.
Magic and Optical Illusions
Research on optical illusions arrives at the same conclusion. The brain doesn’t take in visual information like a camera. Instead, it takes a rough shot and fills in the details, making educated guesses based on the context.
In the illusion below, the middle square on the top looks orange-brown, and the middle square below on the side yellow, but they are both orange-brown.
The Lotto Cube was created neuroscientist Dr. Beau Lotto et al in 2002
Don’t believe it? Neither do I, so I clipped the yellow cube to confirm. Here it is without the context:
Like magic tricks, this illusion varies by person. For 20%, it is a strong difference, and another 20% are not fooled at all. People with schizophrenia don’t fall for many optical and visual illusions that the rest of us are prone to, suggesting their minds are not distorting reality to fit expectations in those scenarios, even as they perceive illusions in others.
Magic, Autism, and Psychosis
Although people with schizophrenia are less prone to optical illusions, autism and magic have a different interaction. Researchers thought that autistic people would be less susceptible to the magician’s social cues, and indeed they were, not following his or her gaze away from the trick. However, this didn’t translate to greater awareness. In a disappearing ball trick, they were less likely to see the ball fall away.
Other researchers wondered if magicians themselves had distorted thinking or subtle psychotic symptoms, something they had observed in other creative performers. But study after study showed the opposite. Magicians have a keener sense of reality; it is the audience that is fooled.
Healing Magic
Learning magic sharpens our cognitive skills, requiring planning, dexterity, timing, and stage presence. A magic-trick training program improved cognitive scores and attentional control in older adults with mild cognitive impairment, and a pilot program showed early gains in sustained attention in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Limitations
There is no magic in science, just layers of disbelief. This review was limited by small studies with varied designs.
—Chris Aiken, MD
Director, Psych Partners
Editor in Chief, Carlat Psychiatry Report
