Most magic tricks require a fairly sophisticated understanding of how humans perceive the world. To fall for a trick, people have to see things they perceive as important and ignore things that are ...

IN HIS right hand, Elias Garcia-Pelegrin holds a worm. He pretends to grab it with his left but, while his fingers obscure it, he lets it drop back into the right – a classic sleight of hand called ...

A small experiment using sleights of hand and illusions offers insights into how birds and people perceive the world. By Veronique Greenwood The coin is in the illusionist’s left hand, now it’s in the ...

Source: Funkdooby, via Wikimedia Commons. Distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Elias Garcia-Pelegrin first learned to perform magic as an undergraduate student. Now, as part of his doctoral ...