“But magic’s not easy to pick apart with machines, because it’s not really about the mechanics of your senses. Magic’s about understanding—and then manipulating—how viewers digest the sensory information.”

We can certainly recommend the article to anyone interested in magic and the hidden science behind it, but especially to aspiring magicians who would like to know more about what really makes this amazing craft tick and would like to learn from one of the best.

Once you’ve read the excellent article you can dispel another illusion, by listening to Teller himself talk about his article on the NPR podcast. And what a lovely voice he has, miracle indeed. Don’t forget that Derren has a book out where he makes similar… confessions of a conjurer.

Thanks to the guys at Godvoordommen for bringing this to our attention.

“My dear bastard son,

It is about time you wrote, my boy.”

Read the whole story on this link and find Derren’s own letter of advice to a young mentalist in the Svengali Brochure.

“Henrik Ehrsson uses mannequins, rubber arms and virtual reality to create body illusions, all in the name of neuroscience.

It is not every day that you are separated from your body and then stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife.

But such experiences are routine in the lab of Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who uses illusions to probe, stretch and displace people’s sense of self. Today, using little more than a video camera, goggles and two sticks, he has convinced me that I am floating a few metres behind my own body. As I see a knife plunging towards my virtual chest, I flinch. Two electrodes on my fingers record the sweat that automatically erupts on my skin, and a nearby laptop plots my spiking fear on a graph.

Out-of-body experiences are just part of Ehrsson’s repertoire. He has convinced people that they have swapped bodies with another person1, gained a third arm2, shrunk to the size of a doll or grown to giant proportions3. The storeroom in his lab is stuffed with mannequins of various sizes, disembodied dolls’ heads, fake hands, cameras, knives and hammers. It looks like a serial killer’s basement. “The other neuroscientists think we’re a little crazy,” Ehrsson admits.

But Ehrsson’s unorthodox apparatus amount to more than cheap trickery. They are part of his quest to understand how people come to experience a sense of self, located within their own bodies. The feeling of body ownership is so ingrained that few people ever think about it — and those scientists and philosophers who do have assumed that it was unassailable.”

Read more at Nature.com (Thanks Annette)

The organisation has invited potential applicants to solve a visual code posted at an unbranded standalone website.

The challenge has also been “seeded” to social media sites, blogs and forums.

A spokesman said the campaign aimed to raise the profile of GCHQ to an audience that would otherwise be difficult to reach.

“The target audience for this particular campaign is one that may not typically be attracted to traditional advertising methods and may be unaware that GCHQ is recruiting for these kinds of roles,” the spokesman said.

“Their skills may be ideally suited to our work and yet they may not understand how they could apply them to a working environment, particularly one where they have the opportunity to contribute so much.”

The competition began in secret on 3 November and will continue until 12 December.

GCHQ said that once the code was cracked individuals would be presented with a keyword to enter into a form field. They would then be redirected to the agency’s recruitment website.

The organisation said it was not worried that the problem’s answer might be spread around the internet.

It said it would still benefit because the resulting discussion would “generate future recruitment enquiries”.

However, it added that anyone who had previously hacked illegally would be ineligible. The agency’s website also states that applicants must be British citizens.”

Read more at BBC News (Thanks @siobha)

“A self-styled “jet man” has performed another death-defying stunt – flying alongside two Albatross aircraft above the Swiss Alps. Adventurer Yves Rossy flew in a custom-built jet suit over the mountain range in formation with the aircraft. Rossy, 51, launched himself from the side of a helicopter before taking his place alongside the two jets high above the Alps.

The daredevil – who used to fly fighter jets with the Swiss airforce – wears a jet suit which has a wing span of two metres. The pack weighs around 120lb and is fitted with four engines that enable him to travel at speeds in excess of 125mph. Once the flight was completed, the adventurer safely parachuted back down to the ground.

Rossy is still the first man in the history of aviation to fly with a jet-propelled wing, a feat he first achieved in 2006. In May 2008, he flew in his suit over the Swiss Alps for the first time and then crossed the English Channel later that year. Since then, he has worked on the design of his jet-pack which has led to his first formation flights and acrobatics.”

Read more at Sky (Thanks Annette)

A grin may seem an odd response to the question I’ve just asked – why he chose to donate his brain to medical research – but after 17 years participating in a brain study led by the aptly named Carol Brayne of the University of Cambridge, Webb discusses his decision with ease. To him, donation secures a form of immortality.

He explains that he’d knit the sweater he’s wearing many years ago, before he lost his wife Ellen. Knitting was something they had done together. “When she died, I packed it in,” he says. She had dementia toward the end of her life. This Saturday marks the ninth anniversary of her death. They were married for 57 years.

It’s a poignant story in a fitting setting. We are standing in the middle of Mind Over Matter, an exhibition inspired by the research of Brayne and colleagues that is the result of a long collaboration between artist Ania Dabrowska and social scientist Bronwyn Parry. The exhibition focuses on 12 brain donors from Brayne’s studies – the stories of their lives and triumphs, and their reasons for donating.”

Read more at New Scientist (Thanks Annette)

Milgram was a 28-year-old junior faculty member at Yale University when he began his program of research on obedience, supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which lasted from August 7, 1961 through May 27, 1962.

As we know, in his obedience experiments Milgram made the startling discovery that a majority of his subjects — average and, presumably, normal community residents — were willing to give a series of what they believed were increasingly painful and, perhaps, harmful electric shocks to a vehemently protesting victim simply because they were commanded to do so by an authority (although no shock was actually given). They did this despite the fact that the experimenter had no coercive powers to enforce his commands and the person they were shocking was an innocent victim who did nothing to merit such punishment. Although Milgram conducted over 20 variations of his basic procedure, his central finding obtained in several standard, or baseline, conditions was that about two-thirds of the subjects fully obeyed the experimenter, progressing step-by-step up to the maximum shock of 450 volts.

First and foremost, the obedience experiments taught us that we have a powerful propensity to obey authority. Did we need Milgram to tell us this? Of course, not. What he did teach us is just how strong this tendency is — so strong, in fact, that it can make us act in ways contrary to our moral principles.

Milgram’s findings provided a powerful affirmation of one of the main guiding principles of contemporary social psychology: That often it is not the kind of person we are that determines how we act, but rather the kind of situation we find ourselves in. To perceive behavior as flowing from within — from our character or personality — is to paint an incomplete picture of the determinants of our behavior. Milgram showed that external pressures coming from a legitimate authority can make us behave in ways we would not even consider when acting on our own.”

Continue reading at APS (Thanks Annette)

“She finished the books and wanted more. Before her mother could fetch some, Lonni Sue started making grids with words hidden in them. Thousands of puzzles poured out of her. Wearing thin the pages of a paperback dictionary, she created elaborate word lists, then puzzles from the lists and then images from the puzzles. A grid of words for things that hang in the closet took the shape of a coat hanger. Words related to trousers formed a pair of pants. Her vocabulary seemed to open a new door for her creativity.

Enter Barbara Landau. She had gone to high school with Lonni Sue in the Princeton, N.J., area. (“She was brilliant,” Landau remembers.) Today, Landau is an expert on cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University. She had followed Lonni Sue’s career as an artist for years and now, with Hopkins colleague Michael McCloskey, she explored Lonni Sue’s amnesia intensively. It was Landau who brought Lonni Sue’s art to the Walters.

Scientists often work with people who have lost the use of part of the brain to learn how the normal brain works.

After working with Lonni Sue, Landau concludes: “If we think that art and creativity have to be rooted in what we know about ourselves or what we remember about ourselves, that clearly is not the case.”

Lonni Sue has been full of surprises. She can remember how to fly an airplane — “It’s like dancing in the sky,” she said in an interview — but she can’t remember the death of her father.

She can’t recognize art she treasured before her illness — “Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh, for example. Yet she can instantly recognize her own past work.

She can’t remember that she was married for 10 years, but she can remember how to play Bach suites on her viola. But if, as she’s putting her instrument away, her mother thanks her for playing, she’s likely to look astonished and say, “Oh, did I play?”

She cannot produce the kind of finished art she once drew, but her work shows flashes of her old skill as well as her characteristic whimsy and puns.

“When you draw a drawing, you can draw people in,” she says.”

The Washington Post (Thanks Annette)

Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems — and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. In this sparkling talk from TEDGlobal 2011, he asks us to embrace our randomness and start making better mistakes.