Omni Brain

The Assn for the Scientific Study of Consciousness announced their 2007 conference, June 22-25. It's being held at the Imperial Palace hotel on the Las Vegas strip, and features a special symposium on The Magic of Consciousness with five top magicians performing and discussing their trade.

Just as visual scientists study visual art and illusions to elucidate the workings of the visual system, so too can cognitive scientists study artists of cognitive illusions to elucidate the underpinnings of cognition. Stage magic shows are the manifestation of the deep intuition and understanding of human attention and awareness held by the accomplished magical performer. By studying magicians, and learning their techniques, researchers can hope to learn the skills necessary to manipulate attention and awareness in the lab, at a quantitative level. In this spirit, each of these performers will describe an aspect of magical technique that serves as a powerful tool to manipulate attention and/or awareness, either on a large scale (to a large audience) or a small scale (such as a card trick, or other close-up manipulation). They will demonstrate an example application of each technique, and then discuss why/how they believe the technique may work, in terms of human cognition.

The presentations will be followed by 30 minutes of Q&A with the audience.

The goal of the event is to help raise awareness among ASSC delegates about the powerful tools that magicians have already developed to manipulate awareness. And the magicians themselves have also expressed their wish that the information flows both ways! The performers deeply hope to learn from the consciousness research community about new principles in cognitive science that can be exploited to entertain and amaze their audiences.

Probably change blindness is just the beginning. Sounds fun. A reader recently went to Las Vegas and left this comment at Channel N on a post with a great video on ghe neurobiology of addiction: "I JUST GOT BACK FROM LAS VEGAS BABY, I'D LOVE TO SEE WHAT KIND OF ADDICTION THAT CAUSES. I WANT A SLOT MACHINE ON EVERY CORNER STORE AND A ROULETTE TABLE IN EVERY OUTBACK STEAKHOUSE." What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, though, right? Even this symposium on secrets of stage magic illusions? We'll see.

Hat tip to The Neurocritic!