The Neuroscience of Magic - with Gustav Kuhn

[@beachboardfan9544]

Wooo that intro segment! Few things better than magic AND comedy. +1 for the cutie at the end

[@hakanunlu6880]

Amazing talk.

[@deeliciousplum]

This is a priceless talk on the science of magic and on the mechanisms underlying perception. Thank you for sharing this. 🌻

[@Noaxe_Tegrinde]

I'm in my seventies and enjoy satisfying my curiosity on a variety of subjects. I'm an Engineer, but as a boy I enjoyed magic. I have to say that this is one of the most enjoyable videos I've watched in a LONG time. You have a 'magical' delivery style and you strike me as a very personable character. Your humour and wit are delightful and I'd enjoy seeing you on TV (well the parts I see, anyway :)! You brought together a lot of things which I've learned about over the years and it was THOROUGHLY enjoyable, entertaining....and very thought provoking...an eye-opener! :)! I had a surprising experience lately...rather like the gorilla walking across the stage experiment. I had some old friends visiting me. My daughter and husband are staying with us and have their belongings in a FULL size shipping container in my front garden, behind a tall boundary hedge. When they were leaving I casually said there's the container.....about 20ft away (we had talked about it and they had walked past it on the way in). They stood in the porch looking, with their back to me, for a few seconds and turned and said, where? I said 'Right there'.....a second or two later they finally saw it! BTW, they are bright people!! As I have an interest in these things I wasn't really surprised but it was a real world demonstration of the 'problem'! Dare we drive at all? It's the futurising again, I guess....and linked to the ability that particles have of being in two places at the same time, perhaps? I love the combination of humour and most acts, including music. It makes me wonder about, say, orchestral music and how 'steady state' the whole experience is, between the players and their instruments and what we hear. I can understand that the audio entering the ears can be continuous and be processed continuously...in a digital way....probably. OR does our hearing 'jump around' searching different frequencies; I know the hearing hairs probably respond to different frequencies which tones and pitches are interpreted from and the brain pieces together. I've just realised that THIS necessitates having a conductor...as only he hears what everyone, in different playing positions hear, in ONE position. The players suffer from the slowish speed of sound....all hearing things at different times. I don't read much but I do have Jim Al-Kahlili's book 'Life on the Edge', about Quantum Biology,....which is fascinating to me (well Quantum Mechanics IS magical! (A short video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/laLKhK1nitKWeK8 ) His book made me deduce that we MUST respect each other's opinions as, genetically, we cannot help how our very different, randomly created brains interpret the SAME input, differently.....hence democracy, Brexit problems.....we all hear the same stuff but we all have different opinions. WE CANNOT HELP OUR OPINIONS!! :) So we must respect each other's opinions and views...... :) I must start saving up for your book (I hope this statement is in your blind spot!) I told you it was thought provoking!! :) APOLOGIES for the length. No Axe

[@RFC-3514]

Well, once you learn about all the _other_ image (re)construction the human visual system does, the fact that we don't normally notice the blind spot is one of the last impressive. Especially considering we normally have both eyes open, which means one eye can generally see whatever happens to land on the other eye's blind spot. But I guess that one is easier to demonstrate with a piece of paper.

[@MrJayPuff]

I lovde this talk. Excellent lecture!

[@Metalkatt]

I experience this with my sister all the time. She asks why I didn't wash or move the cup on the counter. ... There is no cup on the counter. She insists it's RIGHT THERE. I look again, and still, no cup. She reaches out and grabs, and darn thing suddenly appears. Both her husband and I have this interaction with her, and it drives her bats. He and I truly cannot see what it is she is talking about until she grabs it and presents it. We're not being trolls; we simply cannot see it. It's so strange.

[@TheNovemberRose]

She is magick.

[@mariomenezes5974]

Amazing and entertaining

[@rogertheshrubber2551]

Now, I'll be disappointed if I buy that book and it doesn't burst into flames.

[@muthulaxmisrinivasan5354]

In our hindu scriptures we are taught "Yugapat Jnana anupapathihi" - Which means the brain cant perceive knowledge from different senses at the same time - yugapat mean at the same time. That is the reason that even talking on a hands free while driving is dangerous.

[@ioblevle9520]

Min 31:14 So, is it that the information catched by other senses (like hearing) is being transferred to the brain while there's this lag of incoming visual information?

[@RFC-3514]

31:06 - Actually, that "phenomenon" was more about suggestion than perception. The vast majority of people weren't asked which colours they saw, they were asked to pick between two alternatives (white+gold or blue+black), neither of which described the _actual_ colours in the image. And, _after_ picking one of those two options, they convinced themselves they were seeing those colours. In fact, if you just asked people which colours they were seeing in the picture (without priming them with prefab options, and without asking them to speculate on what colour the actual dress _might_ be, in person, under normal lighting), most said they could see brown and bluish grey (and colour meters confirm those are indeed the colours in the image).

[@mehowop]

Even if it is about suggestion, its perception. Percived world depends on your believe system.

[@RFC-3514]

@@mehowop - So we'll just abolish one of the words because you apparently can't understand the difference, shall we?

[@Jeff121456]

At 15:37 he magically turns 30% into 25%.

[@ExcludedLayman]

He must be using 16 hours of being awake, otherwise the majority of sleep is getting counted as "time spent seeing".

[@mariusvanc]

I would be interested in a presentation about some practical aspects of human vision and processing, such as with eyewitness recollection and testimony in court.

[@thepooaprinciple5144]

not going to happen...the secrets to that trick..SHALL NEVER BE REVEALED!

[@RFC-3514]

28:20 - This is misleading. While it is _also_ dangerous, it's _not_ "just as dangerous". And the same goes for talking to someone sitting next to you in the car, listening to the radio, or simply _thinking_ about what you'll have for dinner. They all reduce the attention you're paying to the actual driving, but not by the same amount, so they're not "just as dangerous" as each other. The reason why _holding_ a phone is more dangerous is that, in addition to taking up one hand (which you might need to control the car), people who happen to _drop_ the phone tend to take their eyes off the road (and sometimes their one remaining hand off the wheel) completely.

[@celloer13]

If Sean Bean failed actor school

[@samuelworstell3786]

Gustav Kuhn would win on "Got Talent".

[@xponen]

Some people didn't saw that white ball disappearing (probably) because their perception (motion prediction) is at different interval, like how time slows down when you're in crisis. Movies also display at different frame-rate; 24hz, 50hz, 60hz, or 120hz, and yet they all appear fine to our perception.

[@V00D00M0NKY]

Or it's my prediction as to why I didn't see it. Being a talk about magic and illusions, I was expecting the ball to be palmed. I'm not sure and going back having watched it taints testing this but there is a chance with my expectation i didn't see it moving until it was near his head the second time.

[@abhishekthorat3631]

Summary use Magic in your life

[@CaseyFinSF]

This was bloody fun, even for an American who never uses bloody ever! 😏🤔😉

[@RFC-3514]

15:48 - Blindness isn't darkness. Darkness would be information (i.e., you're seeing black), which your brain makes you aware of. Blindness (be it from saccades or the retina's blind spot, etc.) is _absence_ of information, which your brain tries to fill. The distinction is pretty important.

[@technopoptart]

thankyou for putting the q&a at the end!

[@TheRoyalInstitution]

It was too short to make into a separate video. We're glad you liked it!

[@johnjob9523]

Calculation at 15:40 is not accurately presented. There is 86400 seconds in a day, 3 blinks per second for a total of 259200 per 24 hours. He made no mention of sleeping hours nor any of his other assumptions. I would like to see his calculations

[@JoachimTHIBAULT]

Because he doesn't count for the sleeping time.

[@Seal0626]

43:00 I want to hear the really complicated explanation in regards to autism. Is it to do with the basic element of autism where we don't learn and store knowledge subconsciously, so don't run off automatic processes of deduction and anticipation, the same way neurotypicals do?

[@RFC-3514]

"Autism" is used to describe a lot of different things which aren't always related. The most objective and testable descriptions / definitions I've seen are from Simon Baron-Cohen's work, and have to do with a theory of mind (basically, the ability / tendency to constantly simulate a separate mind inside your mind to guess what other people might be thinking, or how they might react to some future event, such as your own actions). So it's not just about _storing_ raw data (as a savant would) vs. "distilling" data into knowledge and forgetting the raw data (as most people do), it's about trying to read other people's minds (by basically simulating their mind inside your own).

[@Seal0626]

@@RFC-3514 is it your belief that autistics don't have theory of the mind?

[@RFC-3514]

@@Seal0626 - Like I said, "autistic" is used to describe a lot of things that psychologists and neurologists don't understand very well, and which probably aren't even related. It's a very generic and vague term. Simon Baron-Cohen focused on some specific things that can be well defined and tested.

[@777Skeptic]

"It's tea break time." That's the most British thing I've ever heard. I disagree with his analogy of the blind spot in our eye where the optic nerve is, and how magicians exploit our "blind spots," metaphorically speaking. That trick exploits the hardware failure in our eyes, most magicians exploit our brain's reasoning shortcuts, which would be more of an A.I. or software failure.

[@RFC-3514]

I don't think that was quite his point. His point was that your brain _hides_ your eyes' blind spot from you by "painting in" something that completes the image, and a lot of tricks work by making people _assume_ they saw something which they never did. Incidentally, that's also one of the mechanisms of humour (a joke's set-up makes you paint a mental picture - or a set of likely pictures - and the punchline contradicts that picture not because the set-up lied to you, but because it manipulated you into making false assumptions).

[@mohammadmostafaii7535]

نکات جالبی رو برای اولین بار یاد گرفتم. اینکه یکچهارم زمان بیداری بدلیل پلک زدن ما نمیبینیم. دوم اینکه انچه میبینیم مربوط به زمان گذشته است ،حدود یکهزارم ثانیه قبل، ولی مغز ما با توجه با تجربیات گذشته در واقع اینده رو، که حال کنونی ماست، پیش بینی میکند و ما میبینیم. من کلا با لهجه بریتانیایی راحت ترم (من ایرانی هستم).

[@rigapictures]

Great...thanx u tube 4 this kind of uploads...

[@JohnDlugosz]

You explained that we don't see our own eyes move in a mirror. But, why don't we the saccades of people in a recording?

[@peterguernsey4556]

what amazed me was the blind spot in the ellipse of life , helped me understand why 2 particle in separation at 1.1 degree can be so far apart of there perihelion distance from your true center, it interesting you bring up another resonant frequency , ie RF ,but that is a blind spot for most, I just did a experiment, based on what I learned . I stood on my balcony at night with many cars going by, but my view when looked from 3 different point of perspective at I tried to record the scene first noticing any frame change of everything , yet when I change my perspective, the shadow came alive , again , 2 street light,s , then the corners ,you could do it for hours and make memory, of each companion , make a story to remember it , this is how memory experts do it, and some Artificial intelligence or machine learning . Again memory like a couple hundred video cards.

[@eapenninan4950]

👍👏

[@whirledpeas3477]

Playback at .25% speed, still incredible

[@cradusie]

i am too drunk to see if this has already been mentioned (ad also it might come up later in the video) but at 28:44 ... does this not also suggest that, if you talk to anyone, like the person on the passenger seat, is equally dangerous as talking to someone on the phone or as Mr. Kuhn says, driving drunk?

[@RFC-3514]

His use of "equally dangerous" is very misleading. It's _also_ dangerous, but definitely not "equally". Holding a phone is much more distracting than simply talking / listening, and when people drop a phone they often take their eyes off the road completely, which makes it a lot more dangerous.

[@DavidAndrewsPEC]

Looks like a younger and hairier Tommy Cooper!

[@georgeindestructible]

I can always see the rabbit no matter what...

[@sachinshah4596]

I loved it, how he explained and tricked me!

[@jacquesfall8117]

Today I learned i can see the future, I always knew I am a Jedi!

[@MagnumInnominandum]

When you extricate yourself from your straight jacket a "Jedi will be you."

[@jimrichards7014]

More em. Has this infected the modern English?

[@horrified871]

So we can say that getting fooled by magic is a sort of prediction penalty of our brain!

[@RFC-3514]

Yep. Same thing with a lot of jokes (the set-up makes you paint a mental picture - or a set of likely pictures - and the punchline contradicts that picture not because the set-up lied to you, but because it manipulated you into making false assumptions). In computing, it's called a "speculative (or, more accurately, predictive) execution miss". Since the early 90s, most CPUs execute code before it's needed, sometimes making assumptions about the outcome of code that hasn't finished running yet. If they get it wrong, they have to go back and do it again, this time with the correct values.

[@pienmash9376]

NICE TOPIC

[@K_i_t_t_y84]

I LOVE MAGIC!!!!

[@CreativeContention]

Fascinating.

[@wktodd]

excellent:-)

[@orange_car155]

Iblees taught them well.

[@hansvanzutphen]

I guess my eyes must be broken. When I'm driving and there are cars with LED back lights (and recently there are also LED front lights), when I move my eyes based on this description I should see nothing special. But instead I see a trail of dots or lines where the LEDs blink. To me that effect is extremely annoying, but nobody else seems to see it (and I have asked lots of people). Similarly, if I'm sitting in a fast moving train and look outside, everything moves way too fast to see any details - but when I do my eyes start to shoot back and forth and during short moments when the move in the opposite direction of where we're driving I can see things pretty sharp..

[@amereon]

But that's just how eyes work? The first thing you're describing sounds like an afterimage and in the second case, it's pretty obvious you'll see thing better if you stare at them for longer

[@JohnDlugosz]

Same here. I don't see how such flashing taillights can be safe/legal. Can you detect the refresh on some LED nightstand clocks, too?

[@hansvanzutphen]

@@JohnDlugosz Yes! I wondered the exact same thing. It's dangerous, because your attention is constantly drawn at things that move. And yes, alarm clocks, some Christmas trees, and I recently also saw it on the dashboard of someone's car. I'm guessing that if more people saw this, it would be banned.

[@hansvanzutphen]

​@UCf1ovudxhF8o9-6xnt0SGWg I don't see the light at 2 places (before and after movement), but I see a dotted line from where the car was before moving my eye to the place where it's after the movement. There are clearly 4 different type of car backlights: 1. Normal (always on) lights 2. LED's that blink briefly with a long period between blinks. These are the most annoying ones. 3. LED's that blink for a longer period with a brief interruption between blinks. These are kinda ok for me. 4. LED's that blink with a pattern of long and short periods where they are on. These are usually also kinda ok. No idea why they do this. 2 and 3 are often the same LED, used for a combination of backlight (2) and brake (3). And staring longer at it: I mean I'm looking at stuff maybe 5 meters away from the train while moving at over 100 km/hour. You can't stare at something very long at that speed. But when you lock your eye movement to the speed at which things move by, you get very brief moments where you can see things sharp. Except that, according to this video, you shouldn't be able to.

[@Seal0626]

I get it. Similarly, if I move my eyes rapidly over a projection that's coming from a single lens projector, the afterimage separates out into its colour components. It must be to do with the fact that the image being projected is actually cycling through the three(might be four?) images, each a different primary colour, relying on the persistence of vision to make the brain combine them into a single full-spectrum image. Something to do with the speed of eye movement combined with the speed of image change. Technology Connections goes into the workings of the projector pretty well, but I'm not sure why the same thing happens with stationary LEDS unless they're also flickering at what is supposed to be an imperceptible speed.

[@alkistisTV]

Fantastic

[@SlowToe]

Why is the audience so old? Just wondering

[@wktodd]

At a guess, the old people belong to clubs and associations that will organise trips to these day time lectures

[@corywarshaw4100]

Probably timing. The talk likely occurred during the workday or something like that. I've seen a lot of other talks with kids so those are probably on the weekend.

[@garthwilkinson3929]

@@wktodd They are held for the older U3A audience in the afternoon

[@TheRoyalInstitution]

This talk was hosted in conjunction with U3A (University of the Third Age). They're a fantastic organisation providing lifelong learning opportunities for retirees.

[@SlowToe]

@@TheRoyalInstitution Thanks for responding. I was just genuinely curious. Fascinating video. I'm a big fan of the channels content.

[@nookgal]

U can see ur eye move if u can keep one eye looking forward while the other one looks at ur nose. Alternate eyes doing this, make sure to look upwards or ur lids close. Its looking crossed but only one eye moves to the nose , other one looks forward. Takes practice to get eyes muscles to do this but I've done it for years to entertain children ;) Do I win the $1K now? I can see my eyes move as I alternate them. Cool!!

[@gilloselton824]

A clown and a genius. Amazing :)

[@panc8ke324]

So what is the this video about? "The Psychology of Magic" or the "Science of Magic". At least try and keep the titles consistent with what's on the thumbnail. But i suppose if all you're thinking about is the money, EVERYTHING else takes a back seat.

[@MrRobit33]

Tough audience

[@orange42]

Retirement village outing?

[@TheRoyalInstitution]

Even better, this talk was hosted in conjunction with U3A (University of the Third Age). They're a fantastic organisation providing lifelong learning opportunities for retirees and other who consider themselves to be in their third age.

[@orange42]

@@TheRoyalInstitution cool!

[@Epoch11]

I wish you had put the videos that were up on the wall, on screen. That would have made it so much nicer and easier to follow along, but instead you have to look at the wall which is far away and on an angle. This makes it difficult to see and to follow along. Whoever edited this video ........I'm sorry to say....................but you did not do a very good job. In the future, if possible, I think it would be nice to just see the video on the whole computer screen instead of watching it on an angle on the wall. It really took away from the experience of this presentation which was incredibly interesting. I know that watching it from far away makes you feel more like you are in the audience, but this is a science presentation...........the most important thing here is the science itself.

[@TheRoyalInstitution]

We usually do. There are occasions when we are not able to - for example when the presenter doesn't give us the embedded video. We'll check why it wasn't embedded this time.

[@samuelworstell3786]

As far as the ball not going up, I have 145 IQ, was paying very careful attention. Don't think it has to do with autism or defect, just better trained situational awareness.

[@gilloselton824]

I always considered Autism a Different Ability. :)

[@Seal0626]

What's IQ got to do with anything? It's about how your brain processes information. If your brain habitually depends on assumptions and anticipation at a subconscious level, only checking against what actually happened when it doesn't match the automatically generated forecast, your perception is going to be different to if your brain doesn't rely on subconscious processes as much and instead runs everything through a fact checker, which is what happens when you're autistic. Intuition vs. intellect. They can't be hacked the same ways.

[@thephilosopherofculture4559]

Magic is proof that it is mind over matter.

[@MrPotatoMind]

Guy doesn't understand the meaning of Magick.

[@hauntologicalwittgensteini2542]

You mean a bunch of witty illusions ? Or are you another new age quack ?

[@thephilosopherofculture4559]

At 37min he starts to talk politically correct baloney. People live a little bit in the future. That is how you 'feel' what is going to happen in the next instant. Somebody calls, or you 'know' an accident is going to happen, and so on. Start wondering how that can be. You think with your mind, not your brain. Try figuring out how you can speak. There are no processes in the brain fast enough for you to speak or understand what is said. So this lecture is disappointing to me, I could do it, too, and perhaps better, no need for big research budgets. And the reason why we enjoy art, magic, and can experience happiness is that we are not a body but a spirit with a body, which is a huge difference.

[@RobertSzasz]

"I could do all those things, it's not that hard." Sure buddy. Seems strange that all those easy things are available for you to do, and yet you aren't doing them?

[@jokdigitalvideo]

Very interesting I’d like to hear more from you please

[@thephilosopherofculture4559]

@@RobertSzasz I was talking about his presentation. I cannot do the magic tricks because I never practised that.

[@thephilosopherofculture4559]

@@jokdigitalvideo Like what? You want email an address?

[@SanguineThor]

OK Boomer

[@pissfilth]

Nice one Gustav.. nice humour too. Magic is cool. People are easily distracted and influenced. Those tricks rule where dexterity is used, and those mindf*ck perceptual "tricks" where you get prepared to think something in advance (expectation++)... Lately i see tricks performed, where (i suspect) electronic technology is used.. (not convincing for me, because i myself know ways how i could perform such a tech-trick => magic is gone). Lots of mindf*ck magic is applied in real life, already.. DLPFC'es are making overtime. It is all real, as long as you can't figure it out.. Conception and misconception I apply to be measured :) if you ever need a guinea pig.