We're the first people to discover things about the human brain,

neuroscientists or magicians.

How do magicians steer your attention?

Why can't you see what they're doing when they do something right in front of you?

And how can someone appear to read your mind?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford,

and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Today's episode dives deep into the world of magic tricks. Why do magic tricks work?

I'm not talking about the mechanics of how a card trick works, or how a magician saws a box in half,

and it's actually two ladies in two boxes, or how a magician pulls off a trick with mirrors.

I'm not talking about that. I want to talk about the way

the human brain works and how that opens the door to us getting fooled. And so I'm going to start

with an assertion. If brains worked in a totally different way, presumably we would have

different sorts of magic tricks.

Other things would work for us.

So, for example, if we ever discover life on other planets, we might find that the aliens' visual

systems or attentional systems work differently.

And therefore, an alien magician stands on stage. visual systems or attentional systems work differently.

And therefore, an alien magician stands on stage in front of its alien audience and does things that would seem patently obvious to us.

And all the aliens would put their green hands over their mouths and gasp, wow, how did she do that?

In other words, if they have some sort of flaw in their understanding of the reality of the

world out there, then their magicians could take advantage of that.

...