Benedict Carey has a NY Times article today, While a Magician Works, the Mind Does the Tricks. Cognitive neuroscience and magic has been receiving a lot of attention lately. Mind Hacks has written extensively on magic and Neurophilosophy has a more general post.

Carey covers much the same ground, beginning with the recent paper “Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic: Turning Tricks into Research” (full paper) by Stephen Macknik and colleages in Nature Neuroscience Reviews. Carey writes about the visual and tactile tricks of magic, of a red flash that lingers in vision to hide the stripping away of a white dress or gripping the wrist to leave a “somatosensory afterimage” before neatly stealing a man’s watch.

Carey also links to an extensive collection of videos that accompanied the Nature article. That’s one of the things I definitely want to highlight. These are videos of magicians doing their tricks, as well as some talks at a recent conference.

Magic would make a great neuroanthropology research project, similar to the placebo effect or video games. Anthropologists have long studied “magic, witchcraft and religion” (a typical course title), and are well placed to understand the techniques and training of magicians, the cultural knowledge and biases that magic seems to subvert or surprise, and how audiences read intentions into actions by the magician.

One can take the New York Times today to illustrate a basic dichotomy we frequently discuss on this site. To understand ourselves and the world, is it better to examine complex interactions and the mixing of human action and natural cause, or to draw on simpler explanations and the old cause-effect scientific model?

Given that this site is neuro-anthropology (which the Times has nicely illustrated), we obviously favor interdisciplinary over one-field approaches. Given today’s world, that matters.

Handle with Care by Cordelia Dean takes on technology, science and ethics. She specifically examines planet-level environmental engineering or “geoengineering”, but also mentions robotics and nanotechnology. We could add gene therapy and increasingly sophisticated pharmaceuticals to that list. Her basic point?

This technology might be useful, even life-saving. But it would inevitably produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo. So a growing number of experts say it is time for broad discussion of how and by whom it should be used, or if it should be tried at all.

As Dean notes, it is an extremely difficult proposal, contravening the way many scientists approach their work, highlighting necessity of global systems to manage our increasing technical power, and raising the specter of “knowledge-enabled mass destruction.”

Just one example of this appears in today’s Times with Surpassing Nature, Scientists Bend Light Backwards which points both to the potential impact on microscopes and on invisibility cloaks.

In Handle with Care, Dean highlights that science for science’s sake is not the answer. Rather, Prof. Sheila Jasanoff argues that the “first step was for scientists and engineers to realize that in complex issues, ‘uncertainty, ignorance and indeterminacy are always present.’ In what she described as ‘a call for humility’ [in her Nature essay], she urged researchers to cultivate and teach ‘modes of knowing that are often pushed aside in expanding scientific understanding and technological capacity’ including history, moral philosophy, political theory and social studies of science — what people value and why they value it.”

David Brooks in Harmony and the Dream brings us directly into that debate of what people value. He argues that “The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.”

Continue reading “Today in the NY Times: Interactions or Causes?”