Camí Jordi, Gomez-Marin Alex, Martínez Luis M
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
Instituto de Neurociencias CSIC-UMH, Alicante, Spain.
PeerJ. 2020 Aug 25;8:e9712. doi: 10.7717/peerj.9712. eCollection 2020.
Cognitive scientists have paid very little attention to magic as a distinctly human activity capable of creating situations that are considered impossible because they violate expectations and conclude with the apparent transgression of well-established cognitive and natural laws. This illusory experience of the "impossible" entails a very particular cognitive dissonance that is followed by a subjective and complex "magical experience". Here, from a perspective inspired by visual neuroscience and ecological cognition, we propose a set of seven fundamental cognitive phenomena (from attention and perception to memory and decision-making) plus a previous pre-sensory stage that magicians interfere with during the presentation of their effects. By doing so, and using as an example the deconstruction of a classic trick, we show how magic offers novel and powerful insights to study human cognition. Furthermore, live magic performances afford to do so in tasks that are more ecological and context-dependent than those usually exploited in artificial laboratory settings. We thus believe that some of the mysteries of how the brain works may be trapped in the split realities present in every magic effect.
认知科学家很少关注魔术这种独特的人类活动，它能够创造出被认为是不可能的情境，因为这些情境违背了预期，并以明显违反既定认知和自然法则而告终。这种对“不可能”的虚幻体验会引发一种非常特殊的认知失调，随后是一种主观而复杂的“神奇体验”。在此，从视觉神经科学和生态认知启发的角度出发，我们提出了一组七种基本认知现象（从注意力和感知到记忆和决策），再加上一个魔术师在表演效果呈现过程中会干扰的先前的前感觉阶段。通过这样做，并以拆解一个经典魔术为例，我们展示了魔术如何为研究人类认知提供新颖而有力的见解。此外，现场魔术表演能够在比人工实验室环境中通常所利用的任务更具生态性和情境依赖性的任务中做到这一点。因此，我们相信，大脑运作方式的一些奥秘可能隐藏在每一个魔术效果所呈现的分裂现实之中。
