The Science of Illusion with Teller

Why does magic fool us so easily? Is our perception of reality just an illusion? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Gary O’Reilly explore the neuroscience behind magic with magician Teller (of Penn & Teller) and neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Garrett, lob me some neuroscience.

• 0:02Gary O'Reilly?

  I know.

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you add magic to that, and my conversation with Teller.

• 0:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As in Penn and Teller.

• 0:08Gary O'Reilly?

  And that's the magic trick. You got him to talk.

• 0:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk, all about the mind and magic.

• 0:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

• 0:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And I got with me, of course, Gary O'Reilly. Gary.

• 0:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Hi, Neil.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary. And Chuck is on hiatus.

• 0:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll bring him back soon, yeah?

• 0:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Yep, we've just given him a break.

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, what have you cooked up for us today?

• 0:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, ever wondered how a magician pulls off their tricks? Is it smoke and mirrors? Is it magic? Are they in your head? But how can you violate the laws of physics? So it has to be magic, right? But you can't mess with the laws of physics. So does this mean that magicians have a deep understanding of our sensory perceptions? Do they have understanding of complexities of neuroscience? For that, we need to get a magician to talk. That'll be his job. And we'll need an expert in the field of attentional misdirection in stage magic. That'll be someone else's job. So Neil, if you would introduce our guest.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd be delighted to.

• 1:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Good.

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have Professor Susana Martinez Conde. Professor of ophthalmology.

• 1:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll learn how to pronounce that one day.

• 1:44Gary O'Reilly?

  To be said slowly.

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Slowly. Neurology, physiology, and pharmacology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, right here in Brooklyn, here in New York City. In fact, we're in Manhattan now, in my office, at the Hayden Planetarium. So this was an easy date to have, just coming up here from Brooklyn.

• 2:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Yep.

• 2:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And where she's the director of the Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience. So welcome to StarTalk.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Hi, thank you for having me.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and we are reminded that you were a guest 10 years ago on one of our shows, and we'll have to dig that one out of the archives.

• 2:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Also an author.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yes!

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Even earlier.

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're an expert on illusions and perceptions and how the brain allocates attention in ways that leave us susceptible to illusions and magic and maybe that's a good thing.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 2:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we were not susceptible, there would be no magic.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't want to live in that world.

• 2:43Gary O'Reilly?

  A world without magic?

• 2:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A world without magic, that's not a good world.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  It's a feature, it's not a bug.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, it's a feature, it's not a bug, I love it. And you're an author from now 2011, a book still selling well, Slights of Mind.

• 2:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Nice.

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love that title. Published by Holt, a publisher I've worked with in recent years, and more recently Champions of Illusion in 2017. And you co-wrote an essay with Teller, a pen and Teller. Because I was hanging out with Teller and I said, "I can't hang out with him unless I get something for the show."

• 3:20Gary O'Reilly?

  This is gonna be hard work.

• 3:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, I interviewed Teller for this show, so that you can tell us and inform us and enlighten us.

• 3:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Basically, you're gonna pull off the magic trick of the year and get the magician that doesn't talk to talk.

• 3:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He'll talk to me. I don't know about you, but me and Teller, we're tight.

• 3:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Spoiler, I'm gonna hear him.

• 3:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yes, we have him. Others will hear him. Yes, but not live.

• 3:47Gary O'Reilly?

  No.

• 3:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's from a recording. So, yeah, I'd like knowing what the limits of the human mind are. And Susanna, this is your career. Not just neuroscience, but that aspect of neuroscience.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Well, the neuroscience of illusion in general, I think, is at the heart of my career. And illusions are so interesting to neuroscientists because illusions are this discrepancy between reality and perception. So if you understand what the brain is doing when you experience an illusion, that's really what a whole lot of neuroscience is about.

• 4:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so you'll understand it, but the person having the illusion doesn't. They think it's real in some way.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Well, what happens with some illusions is that even if you know they're not real, you know your brain is tricking you, but you can't make yourself see it any other way. So there's a disconnect, there can be a disconnect in illusion.

• 4:46Gary O'Reilly?

  How are you able? To manipulate our senses. These in the end are our first line of defense for survival.

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 4:55Gary O'Reilly?

  We hear, we see, we smell.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And taste and.

• 4:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 4:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And. And touch.

• 5:00Gary O'Reilly?

  We're so easily fooled.

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you saying if we're so easily fooled, how did we last this long?

• 5:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly.

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As a species?

• 5:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Well, again, it's because illusions are useful. There's this misunderstanding that illusions are something that we should try to get rid of. But in fact, illusions make us faster.

• 5:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta explain. You gotta explain to me how.

• 5:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 5:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not seeing reality as it is is somehow to our survival benefit.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Well, for one, seeing reality exactly as it is, we don't have the neural machinery that can do that. We just don't have the hardware or the software that would be necessary. The computing power would be disastrous. And so metabolically, and just think about reaction times, we don't need to see reality as it is. We need to see reality as close enough so we can make it out alive.

• 5:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting, because we can't see the flapping of the wings of a hummingbird.

• 5:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm.

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if we did, that would require much more processing power in our brain and in our eyes.

• 6:00Gary O'Reilly?

  So we need upgrades.

• 6:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Upgrades. But I guess that that was not important to our survival.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Exactly. You don't, maybe if you're a hummingbird, that would be important to your survival, to see another hummingbird.

• 6:10Gary O'Reilly?

  We've created our own simulation in a certain sense.

• 6:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't say that. That's scary.

• 6:17Gary O'Reilly?

  I know, but it's scary.

• 6:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're scaring me.

• 6:18Gary O'Reilly?

  You know, across the road.

• 6:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're saying our version of reality is our own simulation?

• 6:23Speaker 02

  It is a construct. That's, you're absolutely correct.

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Construct is the better word.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I like the word simulation too.

• 6:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  And that, because we're making it up, we construct more than reconstruct. We, we take little bits and pieces of the information that comes in and we make up a whole lot of the rest. So we do create a grand simulation.

• 6:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put it that way, it makes me wonder, we get bits and pieces of reality that if they don't otherwise make sense, we try to make sense out of it. And the sense-making can be fraught with all kinds of error.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  The brain is a storyteller. We tell ourselves stories about what's happening. It may have nothing to do with reality, and magic is a great example of connecting cause and effect in a way that is not true.

• 7:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 7:11Gary O'Reilly?

  I know, so. If that's the case- That's so succinct. Of course. I have nothing else to add to this whole show.

• 7:19Gary O'Reilly?

  You're not getting off that lightly. Sit still. So, if that is the case, then magicians for thousands and thousands of years have understood this and found ways to take us on a journey, tell a story, and use our own senses and our own brains wiring against us?

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Well, magicians are not using any type of neural pathways that we don't use otherwise. So they're sort of hacking into our brains, but so do all artists. When we see, you know, a painting, a masterpiece, or we listen to music. All of these artists and creators are hacking into our brains, so to speak, to produce certain sensations, certain emotions. And magicians are great manipulators of our attention and our awareness.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is true about someone who becomes a magician? That they arrive at that place when the rest of us don't? Is it a curiosity? Is it they want to take advantage of people? Is it because they're evil? Well, think about it!

• 8:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, no, it's the dark art.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  I think it's probably a sense of curiosity that lead people to be magicians and scientists as well. And I think that that's why we have this great potential for a collaboration, because we both care from different perspectives-

• 8:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We both who's you and Teller himself.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, we care about the workings of the mind.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  We approach it differently, but there's an overlap.

• 8:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let's go to my first clip.

• 8:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, the first clip, basically, Teller tells us, "He's in our heads."

• 8:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's in our head, okay.

• 8:59Gary O'Reilly?

  And then we'll talk on the back of it.

• 9:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's see what he's got.

• 9:02Gary O'Reilly?

  But there is one circumstance in which we can make a mistake-

• 9:07Speaker 03

  And just enjoy it. And that's magic, because magic is kind of the playground for this very important thing of how we ascertain truth.

• 9:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it requires you understand people better than they understand themselves.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Yes, except I have time to plan this out. I have time to plot this, and I have time to really say-

• 9:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plot is the right word.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  Plot, yeah. I have time to say, if I were in that position, what would fool me? And so I'm doing this great service for them of harmlessly fooling them with an idea that is in some way enchanting. It doesn't have to be supernatural. It can be just funny. And sometimes it is sort of weirdly supernatural looking. But I enjoy being in both places at the same time. And I enjoy, the other thing I love when I'm composing a thing, I love thinking from moment to moment. What would I be thinking if I were watching this right now? Where would my attention go?

• 10:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what any good educator should be doing. Always having a minute-by-minute understanding of what's going on in the mind of the student or the audience. But you do this, you take this to extreme levels, because people want to believe their own senses. And you find the limits to those senses and go beyond them, and then people are stupefied.

• 10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stupefied, so you know where those limits are.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Some of them, if I knew where all the limits are, I wouldn't be a scientist, because there wouldn't be anything else to discover.

• 10:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, on the frontier of the limits.

• 10:39Gary O'Reilly?

  How far can we be taken with that perceived boundaries of our senses and still be fooled? Is there that limit where, oh, that's never gonna be- it's too far away from our senses for it not to be able to succeed as a trick? So if you're manipulating our senses and how you move with them, how far can you, or are there no boundaries?

• 11:04Speaker 02

  Well, I would say that what interests me most in terms of some of what magicians bring to the table is that it is surprising, from a neuroscience perspective, some of the methods that magicians use, they can be kind of crude and they still work amazingly. And so really, our brain is not- I mean, this can be done with great artistry and skill, of course, but our brains are just not that hard to trick. If you get at the heart of it, we just don't think about it and we don't realize on an everyday basis, but we're being tricked all the time.

• 11:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So are you thinking, like, if there's a battleship parked in the harbor, and I just raise my hands and the battleship lifts out of the water, you're saying, "Oh, you didn't really do that. That's not magic."

• 11:53Gary O'Reilly?

  It's too far beyond...

• 11:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's too much.

• 11:56Gary O'Reilly?

  But we've all seen the movies where the villain does exactly that.

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, the Bond villains.

• 12:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, the kind of... So, all right, using the title of your book, "Slights of Mind."

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Best title ever, still. Best title, "Slights of Mind." I love it. I love it.

• 12:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Why haven't we evolved to see through these? Why are we still here, this far into our evolution, falling for it?

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Because we don't have to, and that evolution will not lead to optimization, but just good enough. And what we have is good enough, and that you want to be making rapid decisions and have fast reaction time and be as efficient as you can with the resources you have, and that what does an extra 10, 20, even, I don't know, 30, 40% give you in terms of understanding reality for what it is? And that it's just not that useful at the end of it. And having these illusions, in fact, this is the correlate of the brain processes that make us efficient.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Like, the magicians play with our attention, they manipulate our attention, we talk about misdirection.

• 13:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  And this is a side effect of the fact that we can focus our attention. None of us can multitask, but magicians force you to multitask. But you don't want to be multitasking. That's going to make you worse at life. So you want to be single tasking. Right? So again, it's a feature.

• 13:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me get a more precise example here. So I'm running in the brush, and I see a lion, and it starts running after me. I'm not going to process all the information in that scene, other than that I might die.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, and then I run away or I climb a tree. So, what information would be distracting to me in that moment?

• 13:55Speaker 02

  In that sort of situation, there's a lion running at you and you see a big blurry, heavy thing fast approaching you. You want to get away. If you're able to survive, you may actually realize, hey, it wasn't a lion, it was actually a tiger. So what?

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I could have said, I could have stayed there and say, I think that's a lion, but maybe it's a tiger.

• 14:21Gary O'Reilly?

  I'll let it get closer.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  I'm absolutely sure.

• 14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, it's not clear what continent that would be on. I don't think they coexist.

• 14:28Gary O'Reilly?

  No, well.

• 14:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they do in The Wizard of Oz. Lions and tigers and bears.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  And bears.

• 14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I have the capacity to see the teeth of the lion, count the teeth, make a judgment how white they are.

• 14:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it a female lion or a male lion? I could think all of that. Is this the example of things your brain could be doing, but is not doing because you have a higher singular priority?

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Exactly, and it would be a mistake to want to do these things and to make sure because it's just pointless. And what you care about is just get away as fast as possible.

• 15:07Gary O'Reilly?

  So, this is, this is the point Teller's making in that last clip. Acertain the truth. So, the truth of the matter is, I need to focus exactly on the furry thing with the big claws and the large teeth and not get cluttered and have distraction. This is, this is a magician understanding our awareness and our attention. I'm guessing this is how they've worked out that if we can now maneuver around certain things, I can get this. Would you call it a cognitive illusion?

• 15:39Speaker 02

  So when we talk about cognitive illusions, we mean those that involve so-called cognitive processes such as

• 15:46Gary O'Reilly?

  So that's a different thing completely.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Memory, decision making. Well, it all plays into magic. Like, I often think about magic tricks as the layers of an onion. So you have sensory misperceptions and you have more cognitive effects and so on. And they all sort of work together. But in terms of truth, I'm not so sure that we can access truth even from a magic perspective or from a scientific perspective. From a scientific perspective, truth is whatever is left out after you've removed everything that is false. But truth is an ideal and your truth with your brain is going to be different

• 16:31Speaker 02

  from the truth from the hummingbird's brain and the tiger brain and so forth.

• 16:35Gary O'Reilly?

  But still the truth.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  See, different truths and maybe none of them is the complete truth.

• 16:40Gary O'Reilly?

  She knows me so well. Only just met. The professor's welled me out.

• 16:59Speaker 04

  I'm Ali Khan Hemraj and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 17:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in the day before your profession became a thing, our best access to what was going on in the human brain was through the work of psychologists. You know, they'd lay you down on the couch and just ask you questions. But now you can get in there and look at neurosynapses and things and you're synapse fluent. But in this next clip, we talk about just the overall interest that psychologists have in magic. So let's see what Teller has to say about psychologists and our senses. Let's check it out. So are you a part-time or full-time psychologist?

• 17:51Speaker 03

  I certainly, we deal with psychology.

• 17:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do psychologists come to you?

• 17:56Speaker 03

  Psychologists like magic. They're very interested in magic. And there are more and more work is being done by serious psychological students on magic.

• 18:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So of the senses, we typically think of a sight gag, or you fool someone for what they see, or for what they hear. These are two common senses, very important senses. But we have other senses: sense of touch, sense of smell, sense of taste. Have you guys considered exploiting those senses to your own gain as well?

• 18:24Speaker 03

  We have not. I mean, those are harder to do. But partly because a large audience can see, a large audience can hear, a large audience can smell, but to rely on smell...

• 18:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The smell doesn't move at the speed of light, nor the speed of sound.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  One of the things that we do, which I won't detail right now, but in our live show does indeed convince people by smell. It's just very subtle. They don't even know that it's happening.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. This is your live show at the Rio in Las Vegas? This is your own theater, if memory serves?

• 18:56Speaker 03

  This is our own theater. We've been there for more than 20 years. We're the longest-running headliners in the history of Las Vegas, crazily.

• 19:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More than Elvis, come on now.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Yes, we are the longest-running headliners in the history of Las Vegas. Not better, not better than Elvis. God, no.

• 19:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A testament to the perennial appeal of the trade of magic.

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Susanna, can you pick up on the idea that when we think of illusions, we typically only think of what you can see or hear as an illusion? Are there famous illusions that involve our other senses?

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, we do have a lot of... There are tactile illusions, there are multisensory illusions. In fact, I would go and even say that in magic, if we're talking about theatrical pickpocketing, for instance, there are touch illusions that play a big role. Because the magician, the pickpocket, is touching the volunteer, the person that they're stealing from. And there are, first off, some touches they're not noticing, and they're using other touches to direct their attention, forcing them to multitask across the senses.

• 20:09Gary O'Reilly?

  And the movement, the direction of the movement of a hand has another distractive element to it?

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Yes, that's the visual component. But we're talking about the pattern of the magician. So that's already an auditory component. You have the visual, you have the touch, and you have the internal dialogue as well that the magician is generating. Because not everything is happening in the senses, but when the magician gets you to ask yourself a question, now your attention is drawn inwards and you cannot really perceive what's happening outside.

• 20:42Gary O'Reilly?

  So the magician will get you to power down certain other aspects while you fire up to answer the question?

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Some magicians, I believe it was Arturo de Ascanio and that Juan Tamari talks about the discombobulating question. And that's a question that the magician asks the audience. And it can be something very simple, like, "I need a scarf. Has anybody brought a scarf?" At that moment, everybody's thinking, "Did I bring a scarf?" And while you're asking yourself if you brought a scarf, you're not paying attention to what's happening on stage.

• 21:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Distraction.

• 21:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in my conversation with Teller, which he was kind enough to grant, I was invited to his home outside of Las Vegas. And I was just delighted to hear perspectives of someone who's been in the business that long. And for me, what I liked was the humility and the humanity of his motives. His motives are not to make fun of you, not to... He will say upfront, "I'm about to trick you." And then trick you. There are magicians where susceptible people think they're actually wielding powers, supernatural powers. They come right out because they're very big in the skeptics movement and they want to disavow people of, you know, whatever is the belief system

• 22:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  they were drawn into because there's a charlatan at the top of that pyramid that's fooling you. And since they also fool you, they don't want to ever be confused with people who were exploiting you or taking advantage of you. And so I deeply appreciated that aspect of his act with Penn, of course.

• 22:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Are we hardwired, if we can't work out something, then we can't trust it? Is it as simple as that? Our nature is to, well, I can't trust that because I can't understand it, work it out?

• 22:31Speaker 02

  I don't think that we typically dig so much beneath the surface. I think that we tend to accept.

• 22:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you figure it out? You trust your brain.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  I think that we tend to accept things at face value and I think that that's why it's so important, magicians like Teller and Penn and others that are active in the skeptic community. Because magic, I think, as science, those can be great tools, but magic, of course, with its entertainment value, can be so great to promote critical thinking, especially in younger people.

• 23:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, promotion of critical thinking. Something that science is based on.

• 23:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's based on, yeah, but the magician who also cares about that, such as Penn and Teller, you come out of that just a little more enlightened, a little more of a critical thinker than you started, because that's part of their mission statement.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's the magic trick. You don't even know that you're learning critical thinking.

• 23:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I like that. If I can teach you and you don't even know you're teaching, that's a magic trick. I'll take it.

• 23:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Got another clip coming up.

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, what's that?

• 23:33Gary O'Reilly?

  For me, Teller, when he's talking to you, if you use the stage scenario, just pulls back the curtain just a bit, and you can see there's something, but you don't quite see what it is. And he mentions in this clip about shortcuts. So let's play the clip.

• 23:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 23:51Gary O'Reilly?

  And he'll try and explain what it is he's thinking.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Many times what we're doing is taking things that are very beneficial shortcuts that we always use and saying, "Well, you know, if you don't pay careful attention, that shortcut can mislead you." I mean, a standard thing. We use shortcuts all the time. If you see something done and then you see it done again, you assume it's done the same way.

• 24:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why not? Of course.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  In magic, we take advantage of that by doing something one way. Let's say I produce a coin, and then I produce another one, I produce another one, and I produce another one. And now you're saying, "Oh, he's just got the coins in his hand." And at that moment, I pluck the coin in a way that shows you that my hand is empty, and I keep doing it. So that your shortcut of saying, "He's doing it the same way every time," is not making it easy for you. It's not making it easy for you to follow, because I'm taking advantage of that.

• 24:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What a devil.

• 24:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. But it... So what would a neuroscientist phrase that as? If we... It's just, okay, I'm just like predictive text. I'm predicting that because the balls get thrown up, and he does it twice, and third time, the hand moves, but there's no ball. But I assume that I've predicted that that's happening.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  So we talk about filling in processes. And the filling in processes can be at a very sensory level, like the fact that in our retina, we have a big hole in our retina, which is where the optic nerve leaves the eye.

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a hole where it's not sensitive to light, or to any information in front of you.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  We are blind. It's called a blind spot, literally. We have no photoreceptors there, but we don't see... And every time that we close one eye, we should see a big hole near the center of our vision. But we don't, because our brain takes the information from outside the hole and uses it to fill in what should be there. So, but that's, that's a very sensory process, but they sort of like the same concept applies to more cognitive processes. And we use this in everyday life all the time, like you're my friend and you introduced me to your good friend. I don't know this person, but now I like this person because I like you and that person is your friend. Exactly. So, so we apply this all the time.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If A likes B and B likes C, then A likes C.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, we do this without realizing.

• 26:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's different from this case where you assume it's true because it's repeated

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in front of you.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, and so it's not just a one-off assumption. It's an assumption that has legitimate foundation for making.

• 26:35Gary O'Reilly?

  As Susanna says, you're filling in.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  So you can stop allocating your attention because you already know what's going on. This is not going to further increase your survival, going back to evolutionary issues. But now I know that I'm gonna pay attention to something else now, something that I don't know already.

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To me, the foundations of propaganda are it's information that you kind of are interested in and then gets repeated. And then later on, you just assert it as truth because you've seen it repeated. And it didn't even have to be demonstrated to be true. It just had to be stated as true. That's a susceptibility, isn't it?

• 27:13Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. And even I believe that there are studies even showing that even knowing that it's false, the act of repetition generates certainty, a certain real certainty.

• 27:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It unravels the knowledge that it's false.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  The familiarity effect.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's what it's called. Okay.

• 27:30Gary O'Reilly?

  So is that a similar thing to if you were reading some text and there's a word in there and you've got, you're about to get to it, but you don't see it correctly and you assume it is something else? So you missed really what it's being said, but it's it plants, there's another word that your brain puts in front of you.

• 27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 27:50Gary O'Reilly?

  You probably don't do that because you concentrate exceptionally well, it's just bird brains like me.

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were you ever taught how to read?

• 27:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Not properly, obviously.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  You have seen this text where you have the word "the" repeated twice.

• 28:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  And you don't see the repetition because you sort of skip over it.

• 28:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 28:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially if it ends one line and begins another line.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:13Gary O'Reilly?

  So is there a term for that in in in the neuroscientist world when we do this?

• 28:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Blind spot.

• 28:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Possibly, yeah, simple as that.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Perhaps.

• 28:23Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm just thinking of it being the awareness of a magician to think, I'm going to set you up with one, two, and then the third one is not going to be what you think it is, the assumption. And the fact is that, as you've said already, we do not pay enough attention.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  There is a general brain principle, which is, which we call redundancy reduction. And the brain often operates to remove redundancy. And from a very simple visual perspective, we know, for example, that corners have more information than straight lines, straight lines have more information than the inside of of things, if we're talking about just a plain surface. So even when we construct a visual percept, our brain is using information from the corners, from the edges, not from the inside, because that's all redundant. I've seen it all, I know what's there, I don't need to process it. So redundancy reduction, I think that's the general principle that you're going for.

• 29:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you, yeah.

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this whole idea, I think, I didn't have your official term for it, but I think I came up with my own phrase in conversation with Teller.

• 29:32Gary O'Reilly?

  And?

• 29:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's find out.

• 29:34Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Magic works because people are lazy.

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are sensorially lazy in that we make assumptions that are just not true in your case, but they're true for every other case we experience in life.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. And the example that I gave earlier, when you see something done a second time, you think it's done the same way as it was the first time. And that's absolutely practical, right? For everyday use, you don't want to have to think about every intersection that you drive your car through as a completely different experience.

• 30:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You couldn't live.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  No, you have to use these shortcuts.

• 30:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And evolutionarily, that probably helped us survive.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  Absolutely, no doubt about it. But those are also things that, those are cracks that you can play with in magic. And the fun of magic is partly being amazed. The fun of magic is also partly figuring it out if you can. You know, it's okay to be thinking that way. There are certain magicians over the last, I don't know, 40 years who have gone, "Oh, don't try to think about how magic is done. Just set aside your intelligence and become as a stupid child." No.

• 30:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I don't agree with that. That's right.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Nobody does. Nobody wants to do that.

• 30:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The fun part is trying to figure it out.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  And...

• 30:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And failing at that.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  If you succeed, you're happy. And if you fail, you're happy. There's a no-lose situation on magic.

• 30:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That...

• 30:59Gary O'Reilly?

  So magic's all about being happy?

• 31:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a brilliant take on it.

• 31:03Gary O'Reilly?

  What's interesting, Neil, is you see a magician who wants to make you happy. Isn't here trying to make you feel...

• 31:13Gary O'Reilly?

  But is so conscious of our mind and where the cracks are and how they...

• 31:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He used the word "crack."

• 31:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. Come forward. I mean, how many sensory mind little chasms and cracks do we have that people like Tella can just wander through? All of them. That many.

• 31:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's one big chasm is what you're saying.

• 31:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Yes, and all artists have to be, a successful artist has to produce some kind of emotion. All great artists have emotion and you have to have that intuition. You know, we just recently published a paper out of my lab in which we were left wondering, these changes, these Rubens, when he was...

• 31:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, the painter Rubens.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  The painter Rubens. So Rubens was for nine months of his life, he was actually copying paintings of Titian in Spain. He was there as a diplomat, but that's another story. But he was making copies of Titian, but introducing his own changes. And the way that he changed the composition, we found out in the lab that is drawing observers' attention much in the way that a magician might. And we got left to wonder, well, did he do this on purpose? Or he intuitively knew what he was doing, or he actually knew it? How did he arrive to this understanding of the human mind to be able to manipulate

• 32:44Speaker 02

  the attention of the observer? You can ask the same questions about magicians.

• 32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You do this with sensors on people's eyes and what they focus on first?

• 32:51Speaker 02

  We did this with eye tracking, yes.

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:53Gary O'Reilly?

  And the depth perception and the placement of certain figures in certain areas, you're always drawn to the center.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 33:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you mean the vanishing points?

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Well, what Rubens was doing was more sophisticated because he was using the gaze direction of the characters in his paintings. So, you know, we call this joint attention, like if I look up, you're gonna look up to see what I'm looking at. But, and magicians do this too. Magicians say, if I want the audience to look at me, I'm gonna look straight at the audience. If I want the audience to look at an object, then the magician will look at the object themselves. But Rubens was doing this with the directions of the gazes in his painting. There's a famous painting, Adam and Eve, and everybody's gaze is pointing at Eve's face. And guess where people look at when they watch the painting?

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  ¿Cómo obtienes dentro de las cabezas de la gente para hacer tu investigación? ¿O es todo desde el exterior? ¿Pones probes y cosas? Pero mi pesadilla de neurocientista es que simplemente encuentras cualquier manera que puedas para entrar dentro de los cerebros de la gente.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Bueno, hacemos mucho rastreo de los ojos y también hacemos ocasionalmente fMRI. Pero estamos muy interesados en las movimientos de los ojos porque el sistema ocular motor se extiende a todo el cerebro, como desde los lados frontales hasta las raíces cerebrales, cerebelo, lo que sea. Así que es virtualmente imposible. Nunca he encontrado una situación en la que una condición neurológica o una impedencia o estado cerebral no afecten el patrón de tus movimientos de los ojos. Así que los ojos son muy... En el sentido de que son las ventanas del cerebro en este caso.

• 34:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Así que cuando hablas de las ventanas y el cerebro, he leído que los magos de la luz hablan de cambio, la blindness, donde organizas un evento y el cerebro no se adapta bien. Y luego hay algo llamado descarga posterior. ¿Es esto lo mismo que esto está siendo manipulado?

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Bueno, estos son diferentes tipos de fenómenos. La blindness de cambio, ese es un tipo de ilusión de atención. Básicamente, hay un cambio y a menudo hay una interrupción, antes y después. Pero no notas el cambio, así que eresblindado al cambio que ha sucedido y tiende a ser un cambio muy obvio que pensarías beforehand. Yo lo atraparía seguro cuando no es así.

• 35:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pero ¿por qué? Quiero decir, tal vez como científico, las cosas que son diferentes especialmente me interesan. Así que si veo algo diferente, estoy todo en ello. Como que no me perderé...

• 35:52Gary O'Reilly?

  ¿No crees?

• 35:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No me perderé. No sé cuántas cambios he perdido.

• 35:56Gary O'Reilly?

  ¿Puedo tener esto?

• 35:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No sé cuántas cambios he perdido, pero estoy bastante bueno en la continuidad en películas.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  But that's exactly what we're talking about. These continuity errors that you would see in movies. That's what change blindness is.

• 36:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, except that if I wouldn't notice the continuity error if I had change blindness. So there was someone in the scene and they were like carrying a, you know, uh, some kind of thing over their shoulder. And there was another scene, like instantly later and it's, he's on his other shoulder. Now, I didn't remember noticing that, but the fact that it was different. It's like, wait a minute, something's wrong about this scene. I went back, yep, they didn't, the continuity missed it. So I'm, I'm picking up the change. That's like the opposite of what you're saying.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, a lot of people don't and for sure, in any magic trick, there's gonna be some people that catch it. But the majority won't and that, uh, and also magicians, they rely on change.

• 36:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're saying I'm not the majority.

• 36:59Gary O'Reilly?

  So it's, it's hiding in plain sight.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Yes, but, uh, but, uh, but change blindness is only part of it. And I think it's actually a relatively small fraction of the attentional manipulation that magicians do. They rely, I believe, far more on inattentional blindness than change blindness, which is as the name indicates. You don't see it because you're not paying attention or you're paying attention to the wrong place or the wrong time.

• 37:26Gary O'Reilly?

  You've been misdirected.

• 37:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is what they always said, that the, the male magician always has a beautiful woman on stage with him. And everyone's looking at the beautiful woman at any time he needs you to, so that he can slip something else on the other side.

• 37:39Gary O'Reilly?

  The magician will orchestrate your gaze to the said beautiful young lady.

• 37:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  Actually, one of the ways that magicians say is the most effective way to just misdirect the audience is to bring a volunteer on stage because that becomes all of us.

• 37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  And that, uh, the audience's attention is gonna be focused on the volunteer.

• 38:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I've seen more of that lately than the old style.

• 38:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 38:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, scantily clad woman on the stage.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  And even humor, Johnny Thompson, the great Thompsoni, he, he died a few years ago, was one of the magicians that we collaborated with. He used to say that when the audience laughs, time stops and the magician can do anything.

• 38:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, that's the secret to the universe. If you want to time travel, just let, just get the universe to laugh.

• 38:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Time stops.

• 38:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly. So, right, let's go to our next clip. And strangely enough, manipulation.

• 38:35Gary O'Reilly?

  And tell us thinking about manipulation.

• 38:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Am I accurate to characterize what you do as knowing where a person's sensory limits are? And then stepping beyond them and manipulating them in ways they don't even know? Is that a fair way to characterize?

• 38:55Speaker 03

  Primarily magicians do not use things that are beyond everybody's normal experience. For example, if something is floating on stage and you don't see how it can be floating.

• 39:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Floating in the air.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  Yes, it's not because you haven't seen a spider web. It's the same principle as the spider web. The spider web is something that's part of your world. Magicians just frame that in a way that makes it hard for you to think of spider web. So, all of these things are very familiar to us. Look at the edge of your MacBook Air computer, right? It looks really thin. But look at the whole computer and it's three or four times thicker than that. We judge the thickness of something by its edge. Magicians know that and make use of that, but this is not something that is an obscure principle. We hold things in our hands all the time. Magicians do that all the time. They call it palming.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  It's a use of something that you know about every day, but that is placed in a context where it's hard to recognize.

• 40:01Gary O'Reilly?

  So, is he in saying all of that, using these so-called everyday items? Does that create a comfort zone for the audience?

• 40:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I like that, yeah.

• 40:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Where if I brought something weird, strange, abstract, oh, that's got to be the bad guy, that's got to be the trick. But by using these everyday items, we fall into a comfort with this?

• 40:23Speaker 02

  It's a false sense of familiarity. You think you're familiar, you assume you're familiar, but in reality, it's a different situation that presents in everyday life.

• 40:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was in a theater in the Pacific Northwest, I might have even been in Portland, where each chair had a little cage underneath.

• 40:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Alright.

• 40:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I said, "What's this for?" And they said, "Oh, that's where the gentleman would put his top hat upon watching the show." And that's when I read up on this and learned that the reason why the magician pulls a rabbit out of a top hat is because they got the top hat from someone in the audience. But now no one has top hats.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  No, every day I don't.

• 41:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so if I get your top hat, in the day, that was a familiar object, not today. But I actually own a top hat, I had to get one, just to kind of pop open, I had to. Because I just wanted.

• 41:17Gary O'Reilly?

  You like a hat, don't you?

• 41:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to feel, which is what that was like. But in that day, that was a familiar object.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 41:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you reach in and pull a rabbit out of it, and then clearly the random person didn't have a rabbit in their hat. So the magician produced the rabbit in the hat. But now they have to show you the hat and show you that there's nothing in it.

• 41:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Yep.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Right, right, and that's why James Randi, the amazing Randi, used to say that magicians that are claiming to have supernatural powers and they were bending keys and spoons, the power of that illusion was that these are everyday objects.

• 41:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  But we don't go around bending spoons and keys in our house because that would render them unusable. So that's a bad idea to bend your spoon and your keys. And so you have sort of like the false assumption that they're very hard to bend.

• 42:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  But they're not, we just don't do it.

• 42:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm. How we interact with our familiar objects sets limits on what we think is even possible to be done to them.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 42:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool, okay.

• 42:20Gary O'Reilly?

  So you're studying this stage magic. Is there any way that what magicians have been doing and now do at such a sophisticated level, enabling your field of research to say, we could take that and use it for the benefit of others? Not in entertainment, but say people who might have ADHD or some other problem.

• 42:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're asking, are they learning anything from magicians?

• 42:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 42:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what you're asking?

• 42:51Gary O'Reilly?

  That was the shorter version. Yes, are we learning anything from magicians?

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Well, the neuroscience of magic, it's still young. I would say, yes, we are learning from magicians, but this is early stages. We are not going to find, you know, next year, a cure for Alzheimer's based on what magicians are showing us. But just in terms of magicians, they manipulate attention, memory, decision-making, all sorts of cognitive processes that they can get impaired, and they do get impaired, in a number of ways, from trauma, from aging, from disease, and so on. And so, understanding what's happening in the brain better when these processes are manipulated

• 43:42Speaker 02

  is going to hopefully lead us to better paths of treatment and just diagnosis and so on.

• 43:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it possible for the person who's experiencing the magic to have a permanent change within them, possibly for the good?

• 43:58Speaker 02

  I think magic, like any form of great art, can have a long-lasting effect. But the act of the magic itself, the magic trick and the reveal and the surprise, I believe that the very fact that this is temporary is part of the charm, just having this wonder, this surprise. We wouldn't be able to sustain it. And remember, anything that gets sustained in the brain, the brain ignores. So just the fact that it's ephemeral, that we can't hold that feeling, I think that makes it more powerful.

• 44:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a good answer.

• 44:33Gary O'Reilly?

  It is. That's why our guest is here.

• 44:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a damn good answer.

• 44:37Gary O'Reilly?

  You said we're only just beginning to explore how magicians are working with our attention and our awareness. Is that because, over the past however long?

• 44:52Gary O'Reilly?

  They weren't trusted, they were seen as, what Neil called charlatans, before?

• 44:57Speaker 02

  I think there's a number of reasons. I think, in general, it tends to be difficult for artists and scientists to collaborate because we just moved in different spheres. Generally, we don't have a common language. I think it's becoming easier because now we're all much more connected than we used to be. But also, in terms of magic, perhaps magic has been historically less accessible to science than, say, visual arts because there's a secrecy inherent to magic that is not so for other art forms.

• 45:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good point.

• 45:34Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm not telling you how I'm doing it.

• 45:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 45:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Don't ask.

• 45:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. I'm not even gonna write it anywhere.

• 45:39Gary O'Reilly?

  No, that's just it.

• 45:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna tell it by word of mouth to my progeny. So, I wanna try to bring some final focus to this. There's your preconceptions as a, just as a human being, what is natural for everyone. But then, a person could have social-cultural preconceptions that will bias them to see a trick in one way versus another. And I came to Teller with just a question about the skeptics movement, because there are many people who believe something is true.

• 46:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 46:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how do you demonstrate that it's not? You know, they famously had a show on Showtime called Bullshit.

• 46:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 46:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where someone made a claim and they would just show that it's not true. So, I'm intrigued how people think about fixing a preconception you might have if that preconception is false. But let's see what Teller has to say.

• 46:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Teller, what's the association between magicians, or your style of magic, and the skeptics movement?

• 46:43Speaker 03

  After Houdini tried to get in touch with his mother with spirit mediums, he became disillusioned at that and began to become angry about it. And that anger has continued through a number of generations of magicians. We all know Randy, whose anger on that was-

• 46:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Amazing Randy.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  Very high. But other people like, I think John Avilmascoline was also a spirit exposor. "It is very unpleasant to see your art form turned into a crooked operation that hurts people."

• 47:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, when you say hurts people, aren't people, don't people believe they're being served by charlatans who enable them to think they're communicating with the dead? Does it bring any solace to the people at all?

• 47:30Speaker 03

  It may for some, but there's something that's very disturbing about someone ta- The most important thing, the most important memories I have of my parents, I wouldn't want to see those disrupted, destroyed, poisoned by being cheapened to the kinds of things that people are told by their spirit mediums.

• 47:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But so much of the world's religions have something to say about what happens to you when you die. That's a thing. I mean, somehow the human state of mind, I don't want to say it requires it, but it certainly desires it. And this is just another branch of that exercise, isn't it?

• 48:12Speaker 03

  You're just teasing me, aren't you? You're just teasing. You don't believe that for one second.

• 48:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, just people pray to their dead loved ones? I mean, probably billions of people do this, right?

• 48:23Speaker 03

  And probably billions of very evilly earned dollars come out of it.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  You know, there is something wrong about teaching people a false view of the universe. Just something fundamentally wrong about it.

• 48:39Gary O'Reilly?

  So what I found interesting was right at the end, there says, "A false view of the universe."

• 48:45Gary O'Reilly?

  That surely must resonate for you.

• 48:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It does. I'd like objective reality, please.

• 48:49Gary O'Reilly?

  But did you expect it to come out of the mouth by a teller who doesn't speak, but of a magician? Did you think in a conversation with a magician?

• 48:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why he is a principled magician.

• 49:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 49:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He has a worldview of what role magic should play in all our lives.

• 49:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Listening to that, you hear a certain anger, but it's all calm. He's not ranting and thumping and ang-

• 49:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a calm anger because it's his own people.

• 49:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who are the charlatans and taking advantage of that.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  And because he's been dealing with this for so many years.

• 49:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Well, Susanna, this has been a delight. So do you have a footprint on the internet?

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Yes, you can Google me, you'll find me. It's no hard.

• 49:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what's your, so Susana Martinez Conde. Susanna with an S. S U S A N A. Susanna.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We will totally find you. So you're, the lab you direct, the Laboratory of Integrative-

• 49:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Neuroscience.

• 49:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neuroscience. That has a webpage as well.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so we can track your work there.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love it.

• 49:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm.

• 49:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me remind people of your two books. The one with the best title ever, "Slights of Mind."

• 50:00Gary O'Reilly?

  You like that, don't you?

• 50:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love it. By Holt, the publisher. They published my book, "Starry Messenger."

• 50:07Gary O'Reilly?

  So they should.

• 50:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And more recently, a book, "Champions of Illusion." What was that book about? We forgot to talk about it.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  "Champions of Illusion" is about the, some of the best illusions that have competed and won in the Best Illusion of the Year contest, which I host every year.

• 50:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, very good.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  That's for another episode.

• 50:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 50:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Well, again, thank you for being a guest.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.

• 50:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Gary, always good to hang out with you.

• 50:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Pleasure, my friend.

• 50:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. This has been yet another episode of StarTalk Special Edition. The Mind, Brain, and Illusion. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.