Stephen L. Macknik

fact that your brain does a staggering amount of outright confabulation in order to construct the mental simulation of reality known as “consciousness.”

The idea behind [was] to show these researchers that magicians have much to teach them about the subjects of their life’s work: attention, perception, and even the holy grail, consciousness.

We’ve given some answers as to why you (and we) are so gullible: our brains create sensory afterimages, our memories are fallible, we make predictions that can be violated, and so on. But as we reflect on the reasons, we are drawn to one that stands above all others in explaining the neurobiology of magic—the spotlight of attention.
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A crucial take-home lesson from this journey through neuromagic is that when you are confronted with the uncertainty of a complex decision with lots of variables, you cannot always anticipate what will turn out to be most important factor, because of the suppressive and enhancing effects of your own attention. To overcome this, you must cast your attentional spotlight over each detail of the decision in turn, even if some initially appear insignificant or ephemeral.

“Much of our life is devoted to understanding cause and effect,” Teller says. “Magic provides a playground for those rational skills. It is the theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality but that, in our hearts, ought to. It is rather like a joke. There is a logical, even if nonsensical, progression to it. When the climax of a trick is reached, there is a little explosion of shivery pleasure when what we see collides with what we know about physical reality.”

Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, and an authority on the malleability of memory, is famous for having shown in the 1990s that some psychiatrists and other mental health professionals implanted so-called repressed (and later recovered) memories in the minds of their patients.
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Our colleague Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University who studies memory and emotions, says that he used to think a memory was something stored in the brain and accessed when needed. But a researcher in his lab, Karim Nader, convinced him otherwise. Nader demonstrated that each time a memory is used, it has to be re-stored as a new memory in order to be accessed later. The old memory is either gone or inaccessible.
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Thus your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it.