Do Magicians Or Illusionists Use Two Forms Of Attention?

In Tennessee Williams’ plays Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire, several characters suffer by lying and by being unaware of reality. Both plays demonstrate and signify the themes of illusion vs. reality and mendacity through past trauma, alcohol abuse, and through strained family and marital relationships. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brick is an example to all of these factors through his past with his friend skipper, his abuse of alcohol, and the lack of love he shows for his wife, while in A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche encounters similar problems as Brick with her past trauma and her alcohol problem. The two plays share many similarities

One wonders what an optical illusion is, “an optical illusion is a visually perceived image that differs from reality.” (Eifrig, 2014, n.p.). There are so many different types of optical illusions in which play with the brains of people. Optical illusions are normal because the majority of humans experience them. Humans’ vision tries its best to figure out what is happening to the picture, which then creates an image contradicting reality. Sometimes illusions can be entertaining because it fools the brain and one tries to figure out the image shown. Illusions cannot only be in a form of art but sometimes it happens whenever reading something without putting much effort.

An illusion is some event or object that appears to have existence but is actually does not, whereas, reality is composite of objects which have attributes that we can observe and/or measure.

Some the earliest optical illusions date back all the way to 450 B.C. and were made by Epicharmus and Protagoras. From tricking us that a duck is actually a rabbit to making us believe that a still image is moving, optical illusions give us the sense that we are seeing something that is actually not happening. In reality, an image might be some black and white circles but, to our eyes the might look like it's moving. I believe that you can’t trust your eyes in these situations because your eyes are sending the wrong information to your brain. Optical Illusions are an interesting way in how our eyes are tricked into seeing and believing the wrong

Magic, or illusion, is a large presence in Las Vegas, both by street performers you'll see along Las Vegas Blvd, as well as the many talents of performers like David Copperfield (MGM Grand), Criss Angel in Cirque du Soleil (Luxor), Jan Rouven (Tropicana), and the duo team of Penn and Teller (Rio).

The article Please, Corporation, Experiment on Us written by Michelle N. Meyer and Christopher F. Chabris state that every time a new product launch, the companies are experimenting on us since they don’t know the consequences that this might bring to the persons using it and their lives. The article rises up the question of why can ethical issues limit real experiments but launching a new product, which can have a larger impact, doesn’t have the limitations needed.

Apart from performing escape acts and other magic tricks, Houdini used his skills to expose frauds that others couldn’t. Houdini would explore what fascinated his audience. However, to other magicians they thought houdini should have seduced his audience rather than “bullying” them.

while you are looking one way they can create any illusion they wish due to

George and Martha’s entire relationship is based on illusions and the distortion of reality. The author of the play once claimed that the play as a whole asks the question, “who’s afraid of living a life without illusion?” At the beginning of the play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee, George tells Martha not to “bring up their son” to the guests and is very mysterious when their guest, Nick, asks George whether he has any children. Martha violates her promise of secrecy when she discusses their son in detail with Nick’s wife Honey and at the end of the play, George and Martha ‘bring up the baby’ for the final time. George has Martha talk about their son in detail as he recites a Latin incantation for the dead. George and Martha tell stories and play games and nobody people cannot distinguish what is fact from what is fiction.

In “The Magicians,” magicians employ magic as a tool, not as a complete answer. Quentin goes from a depressed recluse to a member of a depressed group, all of whom know the suffering of magic, the suffering of living in general. In studying what magic can and can’t do, as well as living as young adults do, they learn their place in the world, and the adversity meant to endure. Penny Adiyodi at first seems a jerk, but gains grudging acceptance as the others realize his value among them. Amidst quests and projects, the group struggles with everything magic can’t solve. They explore the murky waters of romance, trust, and deception with a tone of uncertainty. Their unhappiness stems from the harsh reality of adulthood, and their pain represents the true cost of the revelations they stumble

Consequently, this shows that the audience of a magician may not all be affected and some may experience no illusion. In addition, Illusions are based on many things. A good magician uses “The Cooperative Principle”. This law basically states that the cause precedes the effect in time, cause and effect are contiguous in time and place, and there is a history of regularity in the precedence and contiguity of cause and effect. These rules may be applied to illusions due to the fact that the magician uses the cooperation of the audience and their sleight of hand.

We all have been in situations where we failed to notice something in daily life because our mind was focusing on something else. What we hear and see depends not only on the information entering our senses, but also what we choose to acknowledge and pay attention to. This is called selective attention. Our attention is limited and selective attention makes is possible for us to block out unimportant information and keep our minds focused on the important details as it occurs. Knowing this, people can use this to their advantage to trick us in order to get what they want. Selective attention can be used for or against us. Whether it is a magician trying to give us an illusion, a neurologist hypnotizing us, or even when we are simply concentrating,

Specifically, covert misdirection, or “sleight of hand” tricks, are nestled tightly in these cognitive principles of change and inattentional blindness as the magician utilizes interruption of the spectator’s temporal and spatial information to make them unaware (Demacheva, Ladouceur, Steinberg, Pogossova, & Raz, 2012). This could be achieved by causing the spectator to blink or produce a saccadic eye movement (i.e., a quick, jerking eye movement) during gradual or immediate change of a complex scene (Macknik et al., 2008). Furthermore, there is evidence as to the role of micro-saccades, or minute disruptions of retinal perceptions, in covert misdirection which may benefit from future study and aid in providing a more fruitful depiction of attentional cognitive principles (Engbert & Kliegl,

You try to make sense of the whole trick but you can’t wrap your mind around it. You plead to the man to tell you but he simply refuses, telling you that it’s magic. So after thanking him for his performance you run back through the crowd to find your mother and tell her about all about it. She nods excitedly, acting like she is interested, and supports all your ideas on how magic works and how you want to be a magician.

One of the earliest examples of humans tricking themselves is through the act of magic tricks. Performing artists like The Great Tomsoni (John Thompson) take advantage of the visual cortex’s defects to do split-second movements that look like witchcraft to the naked eye. In one act, John first turned his assistant’s white dress red by changing