What can magic reveal about the brain

The art of magic relies on tricking our brains into experiencing the impossible. Years of performance experience has allowed magicians to refine and perfect their deceptive techniques, and scientists have now started to investigate these techniques to help uncover some of the mysteries of the human brain. The Science of Magic has become a field of its own right, and huge advances have been made in furthering our understanding why these illusions work. We review the latest scientific research on magic and misdirection and explore what these deceptive techniques tells us about perception, memory and reasoning.