The Science of Illusion with Teller

Summary

StarTalk Radio: Episode Summary Title: The Science of Illusion with Teller
Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Guest: Professor Susanna Martinez Conde
Release Date: February 7, 2025

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Introduction to the Science of Illusion

Timestamp: 01:12

Neil deGrasse Tyson kicks off this special edition of StarTalk by delving into the intriguing intersection of neuroscience and magic. Joined by his co-host, Gary O’Reilly, and guest Professor Susanna Martinez Conde, the episode explores how magicians exploit the brain’s perceptual processes to create illusions that defy the laws of physics.

Understanding Illusions Through Neuroscience

Timestamp: 02:03 - 07:02

Gary O’Reilly poses a fundamental question: “How can magicians seemingly violate the laws of physics without actual magic?” This curiosity leads to the exploration of whether magicians possess a deep understanding of sensory perception and the complexities of neuroscience.

Professor Susanna Martinez Conde explains, “Illusions are a discrepancy between reality and perception. Understanding what the brain does during an illusion is central to neuroscience.” She emphasizes that even when aware of an illusion, the brain often cannot override its deceptive interpretation, highlighting a “disconnect in illusions” ([05:40]).

The Brain’s Constructed Reality

Timestamp: 07:02 - 10:31

Delving deeper, Professor Martinez Conde discusses how the brain constructs a simulation of reality:

• Simulation of Reality: “We take bits and pieces of information and make up a whole lot of the rest. We create a grand simulation.” ([07:38])
• Efficiency Over Accuracy: “We don’t need to see reality exactly as it is. Our brain prioritizes fast reaction times over complete accuracy.” ([06:38])

This construction is essential for survival, allowing humans to react swiftly without being bogged down by excessive data processing.

Magicians as Neuroscientific Collaborators

Timestamp: 10:04 - 17:54

Neil deGrasse Tyson highlights the collaborative potential between magicians and neuroscientists. Professor Martinez Conde points out, “Magicians manipulate attention and awareness using the same neural pathways that artists do when evoking emotions.” ([09:00])

Key insights include:

• Attention Manipulation: Magicians are adept at directing audience focus, akin to how scientists study attention mechanisms.
• Critical Thinking Promotion: “Magic can promote critical thinking, especially in younger people, without them realizing they’re learning.” ([25:48])

Techniques of Misdirection and Perception Manipulation

Timestamp: 16:52 - 31:07

The discussion transitions to specific techniques used by magicians:

• Misdirection: “Magicians manipulate where you’re paying attention, forcing you to multitask your senses,” ([16:52]) leading to inattentional blindness, where individuals fail to perceive unexpected elements in their environment.
• Change Blindness: “Change blindness is when a change occurs, but you're blind to it because you're not paying attention at the right time,” ([39:32]).
• Redundancy Reduction: “The brain operates to remove redundancy, focusing on edges and corners rather than plain surfaces,” ([31:25]).

These techniques exploit the brain’s reliance on shortcuts, allowing magicians to create seamless illusions without triggering immediate suspicion.

The Role of Everyday Objects in Magic

Timestamp: 43:13 - 46:36

Professor Martinez Conde elaborates on how magicians use familiar objects to enhance illusions:

• False Familiarity: “Using everyday items like coins or scarves creates a false sense of familiarity, making it easier to embed illusions without raising alarms.” ([44:49])
• Palming Techniques: “Palming is the art of concealing objects in plain sight, leveraging the audience’s assumption based on daily interactions with these items.” ([43:25])

By embedding tricks within the context of ordinary objects, magicians make the extraordinary seem plausible.

Magic and the Skeptics Movement

Timestamp: 50:38 - 53:38

The conversation shifts to the ethical dimensions of magic:

• Historical Context: “After Houdini exposed spirit mediums, subsequent generations of magicians became disillusioned with charlatanism,” ([51:01]).
• Promoting Objectivity: Teller expresses a strong stance against fraudulent practices, asserting, “There is something fundamentally wrong about teaching people a false view of the universe.” ([52:56])

This alignment with the skeptics movement positions magicians as advocates for critical thinking and truth, distancing themselves from deceptive charlatans.

Impact of Magic on the Brain and Society

Timestamp: 46:42 - 48:15

Exploring the broader implications, Professor Martinez Conde discusses how understanding magic can inform neuroscience:

• Cognitive Processes: “Magic manipulates attention, memory, and decision-making, offering insights into cognitive impairments and potential treatments.” ([47:04])
• Artistic Influence: “Great art, including magic, can have a lasting emotional impact, fostering wonder and surprise that enrich human experience.” ([48:08])

Magic serves not only as entertainment but also as a tool for deeper scientific inquiry into the human brain.

Conclusion: The Symbiosis of Magic and Science

Timestamp: 54:46 - 56:42

Neil deGrasse Tyson wraps up the episode by reflecting on the harmonious relationship between magic and science. He appreciates how magicians like Teller use their craft to enhance understanding of human perception without misleading the audience. Professor Martinez Conde emphasizes the ongoing collaboration, hinting at future explorations where magic continues to inspire scientific discovery.

---

Notable Quotes

• Gary O’Reilly:
  “Is it magic? Are they in your head? But how can you violate the laws of physics? It has to be magic, right?” ([02:03])

• Professor Susanna Martinez Conde:
  “Illusions are a discrepancy between reality and perception. Understanding illusions is central to neuroscience.” ([05:40])
  “Magicians are hacking into our brains, manipulating attention and awareness.” ([09:00])
  “We create a grand simulation of reality, optimizing for survival rather than accuracy.” ([07:38])

• Neil deGrasse Tyson:
  “Magic works because people are sensorily lazy, assuming shortcuts that aren’t true in specific cases.” ([32:38])
  “If I can teach you without you knowing, that’s a magic trick I appreciate.” ([26:10])

• Teller (via recording):
  “Familiarity can mislead you; repetition can assert false truths.” ([30:12])

Final Thoughts

This episode of StarTalk Radio masterfully intertwines the art of magic with the science of neuroscience, revealing how magicians like Teller exploit the brain’s perceptual shortcuts to create captivating illusions. Professor Susanna Martinez Conde provides invaluable insights into the neurological underpinnings of these tricks, while Neil deGrasse Tyson and Gary O’Reilly facilitate a thought-provoking dialogue that underscores the importance of critical thinking and scientific inquiry. Whether you're a science enthusiast or a fan of magic, this episode offers a fascinating exploration of the mind's vulnerabilities and the artistry that leverages them.

Transcript

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[Gary O'Reilly]

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Garrett, love me some neuroscience. I know you add magic to that. And my conversation with Teller, as in Penn and Teller.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Coming up on StarTalk, all about the mind and magic. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil Degrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me, of course, Gary O'Reilly. Gary.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Hi Neil.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Gary. And Chuck is on hiatus. We'll bring him back in it soon.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah, yep. We've just given a break.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Gary 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 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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Guest, I would be Delighted to.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Good.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We have Professor Susanna Martinez Conde, professor of ophthalmology. Yes, I'll learn how to pronounce that one day.

[Gary O'Reilly]

It can be said slowly.

[Neil 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 and where she's the director of the Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience. So. Welcome to StarTalk.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Hi. Thank you for having me.

[Neil 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.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Also an author.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Yeah. Even earlier.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

That's true.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I don't want to live in that world. Without magic, what would happen? That's not a good world.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Gary O'Reilly]

Nice.

[Neil 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, Penn 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.

[Gary O'Reilly]

This is gonna be hard work.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Gary O'Reilly]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Gary O'Reilly]

Spoiler. I'm gonna hear him.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, yes, we have him. Others will hear him. Yes, but not live. It's from a recording. So, yeah, I like knowing what the limits of the human mind are. And, Susana, this is your career, not just neuroscience, but that aspect of neuroscience.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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 illusions.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. We hear, we see, we smell, and taste and. And touch.

[Gary O'Reilly]

We're so easily fooled.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Teller]

Yeah.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You gotta explain to me how not seeing reality as it is is somehow to our survival benefit.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Interesting. Because we can't see the flapping of the wings of a hummingbird. But if we did, that would require much more processing power in our brain and in our eyes.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So we need upgrades.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Exactly. Maybe if you're a hummingbird, that would be important to your survival to see another hummingbird.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Don't say that.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That's scary, I know, but scaring me across the road.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

It is a construct. That's.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You're absolutely correct.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Yeah, Well, I like the word simulation too, because we're making it up. We construct more than reconstruct. 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.

[Neil 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.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I know. So if that's the case, it's so succinct.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Of course, I have nothing else to add to this whole show.

[Gary 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 brain's wiring to against us.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Well, magicians are not using any type of neural pathways that we don't use otherwise.

So they're.

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 brain, so to speak, to produce certain sensations, certain emotions. And magicians are great manipulators of our attention and our awareness.

[Neil 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? Think about it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Well, no, it's the dark art.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

I think there'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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We both would be you and Teller himself.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Yeah, we care about the workings of the mind.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, let's go to my first clip.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah, I mean, the first clip. Basically, Teller tells us he's in our.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Heads, he's in our head, and then.

[Gary O'Reilly]

We'Ll talk on the back of it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Let's see what he's got.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Say, plot is the right word.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Plot. Yeah. I have time to say, if I were in that position where 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?

[Neil 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. Stupefied. So you know where those limits are.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. On the frontier of the limits, how.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Far can we be taken with that perceived boundaries of our senses and still be fooled? Is there that limit where. Oh, that's, that's never going to be. It's too, 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?

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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 magician 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.

[Neil 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. You're not too far beyond too much.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. The Bond villains.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yes. So, all right, using the title of your book, Sleights of Mind.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Best title ever. Still, best title. Sleights of Mind. I love it. I love it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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 that 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 is 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. Like the magicians play with our attention, they manipulate our attention. We talk about misdirection, 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. So, again, it's a feature.

[Neil 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.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So, and then I run away or I climb a tree. So what information would be distracting to.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Me in that moment, 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?

[Neil 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.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I'll let it get closer.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

I want to make absolutely sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Actually, it's not clear what continent that would be on. I don't think they coexist. They do in the wizard of Oz. Lions and tigers and bears.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

And bears.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Gary O'Reilly]

So this is. This is the point Teller's making in that last clip. Ascertain 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?

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Gary O'Reilly]

So that's a different thing completely.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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 gonna be different from the truth from the hummingbird's brain and the tiger brain and so forth you all but still the truth. See different truths and that maybe none of them is the complete truth. She's just a little brain.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I mean she knows me so well. Only just met the professor's worked me.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Foreign.

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[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

I'm Alikan Hemraj and I support Star Talk on patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

[Neil 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, 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. Okay, let's check it out. So are you a part time or full time psychologist?

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

I certainly. We deal with psychology.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Do psychologists come to you?

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil 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?

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

One of the things that smell doesn't move at the speed of light.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

No.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Nor the speed of sound.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, okay. This is your live show at the Rio.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

In Las Vegas. This is your own theater, if memory serves.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

This is our own theater. It's. We've been there for more than 20 years. We're the longest running headliners in the history of Las Vegas. Crazily, I would never.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

More than Elvis. Come on now.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

No. Yes. We are the longest running headliners in the history of Las Vegas. Not better. Not better than Elvis. God, no.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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 that, 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.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Yes, that's. That's the visual component. But. 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.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Yeah, absolutely. Some magicians, I believe it was Arturo de Ascanio and that Juan Tamaris 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 wear a scarf, you're not paying attention to what's happening on stage.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Distraction.

[Neil 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 up front, 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 the, you know, whatever is the belief system. 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 wanna 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 Pen, of course.

[Gary 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.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

I don't think that we typically dig so much beneath the surface. I think that we use your smartphone.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Can you figure it out? You trust your smartphone.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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 Pen 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.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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

[Neil 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.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil 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.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Got another clip coming up.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, yeah? What's that for me?

[Gary O'Reilly]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, let's see.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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. 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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Why not?

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Of course, in magic, we take advantage of that by doing something one way. Let's Say I produce a coin and then I, I, 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 it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What a devil.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah, but it, so what, what would a neuroscientist phrase that? As if, if we, it's just, okay, I'm just like predictive text. I'm predicting that because the balls get thrown up and it 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.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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, but it's a whole.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Where it's not sensitive to light.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

No.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

To any information.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Damn. Damn.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

But that's a very sensory process. But 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 introduce 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 we apply this.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

If A likes B and B like C, then A likes C. Yeah, we.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Do this without realizing.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But that's different from this case where you assume it's true because it's repeated in front of you.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Gary O'Reilly]

As Susanna says, you're filling in so.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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.

[Neil 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?

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Knowledge that it's false.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

The familiarity effect.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Yeah.

[Gary 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 miss really what is being said, but it plants. There's another word that your brain puts in front of you. You probably don't do that because you concentrate exceptionally well. It's just bird brains like me.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Were you ever taught how to read?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Not properly.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Obviously you've seen this text where you have the word the repeated twice and you don't see the repetition cause you sort of skip over it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Especially if it ends one line. It begins another line. Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Possibly.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Simple as that.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Perhaps I'm just thinking of it being the awareness of a magician to think I'm going to set you up with 1, 2, and then the third one is not going to be what you think it is, then the assumption, and the fact is that as you've said already, they do not pay enough attention.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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 insides, 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.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Thank you. Yeah.

[Neil 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. And let's find out. All right. Magic works because people are lazy, are sensorily 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.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

And the example that I gave earlier of 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 you couldn't live. No. You have to use these shortcuts and.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Evolutionarily that probably helped us survive.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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. 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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Nobody does. Nobody wants to do that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The fun part is trying to figure it out and failing at that.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Gary O'Reilly]

So magic's all about being happy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That was a brilliant take on it.

[Gary 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, but is so conscious of our mind and where the cracks are and.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

How do you use the word crack?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah, I mean, how many sensory mind, little chasms and cracks do we have that people like Teller can just wander through?

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

All of them.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That many?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Yes. And all artists have to be. A successful artist has to produce some kind of emotion. All great artists about 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. In Rubens, when he was.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Oh, the painter Rubens.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

The painter Rubens. So Rubens was, for nine months of his life, he was actually copying paintings of Titian. 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 he's 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. 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 the attention of the observer? You can ask the same questions about magicians.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

We did this with eye tracking.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

The depth perception and the placement of certain figures in certain areas. You're always drawn to the center.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You see the vanishing points.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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. 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.

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We'Re here with bolt cutters.

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[Lily]

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[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

How do you get inside people's heads to do your research? Or is it all from the exterior? Do you put in probes and things? But my nightmare of the neuroscientist is you just find any way you can to get inside people's brains.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Well, we do a lot of eye tracking and we also do occasionally fmri. But we're very interested in eye movements because the oculomotor system spans the whole brain, like from the frontal lobes to the brain stem, cerebellum, you name it. So it's virtually impossible. I have never found the situation in which neurological condition or impairment or brain state doesn't affect the pattern of your eye movements. So the eyes are very much in the sense of movements, the windows to the mind in this case.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So when you talk about the windows in the mind, I mean, I've read magicians talk about change blindness, where you organize an event and the brain doesn't quite cope. And then there's something called after discharge. Is this the same thing, that this is being manipulated?

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Well, these are different kinds of phenomena. Change blindness, that's a type of attention illusion. Basically, there's a change and that often there's an interruption, a before and an after, but you don't notice the change. So you're blind to the change that has happened. And it tends to be a very obvious change that you would think beforehand I would catch that for sure, when that is not the case.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But why? So, I mean, maybe as a scientist, things that are different especially interest me. So if I see something different, I'm all on it. Like, I will not miss. Now, how do. I don't know. You think you won't miss? I don't know how many changes I've missed.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Can I have this back?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

If I didn't, I don't know how many changes missed, but I'm pretty good at continuity in movies. Okay.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yes.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, except that if I wouldn't notice the continuity error if I had changed blindness. So there's someone in the scene, and they were, like, carrying some kind of thing over their shoulder. And there was another scene, like, instantly later, and he's on its other shoulder now. I didn't remember noticing that. But the fact that it was different is saying, wait a minute, something's wrong about this scene. I went back. Yep. They didn't. The continuity. Missed it. So I'm picking up the change that seemed like the opposite of what you're saying.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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 want. And also magicians, they rely on the majority.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So it's hiding in plain sight.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Yes, 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.

[Gary O'Reilly]

You've been misdirected.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So this is what they always said, that the male magician always has a beautiful woman on stage with him, and everyone's looking at the beautiful woman. But anytime he needs you to, so that he can slip something else in.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

And that the audience attention is going to be focused on the volunteer.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And I've seen more of that lately than the old style. You know, scantly clad woman on the.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Stage and even humor. Johnny Thompson, the great Tomsoni, 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.

Ooh.

[Gary O'Reilly]

That's the secret to the universe. If you want a time travel, just get the universe to laugh.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Time stops.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Exactly.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

So.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right, let's go to our next clip. Strangely enough, manipulation and Teller's thinking about manipulation.

[Neil 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?

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Floating in the air.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Gary O'Reilly]

So is he in saying all of that, using these every so called everyday items, does that create a comfort zone for the audience 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.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right?

[Neil 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. They bring their own. Right. So if I get your top hat in the day, that was a familiar object 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.

[Gary O'Reilly]

You like a hat, don't you?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Right, Right. And that's why James Randi, the Amazing Randy used to say that in magicians that are claimed to have supernatural powers and they were bending keys and spoons, the power of that illusion was that these are everyday objects. 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, but they're not. We just don't do it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Yes, exactly.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Cool. Okay, 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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's what you're asking?

[Gary O'Reilly]

That was the shorter version, yes. Are we learning anything from magicians?

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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 ephemeris that we can't hold that feeling, I think that makes it more powerful.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's a good answer.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That was a damn good answer.

[Gary 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, they weren't trusted. They were seen as what Neil called charlatans before.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, very good point.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I'm not telling you how I'm doing it. That's right, don't ask.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I'm not even going to write it anywhere. That's just it by word of mouth to my progeny. So I want to 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 can have social, cultural preconceptions that will bias them to see a trick in one way versus another. And I came to tell her with just a question about the skeptics movement because many people believe something is true. And how do you demonstrate that it's not? You know, they famously had a show on Showtime called Bullshit.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yes.

[Neil 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. Let's see what Teller has to say. So, Teller, what's the association between magicians or your style of magic and the skeptics movement?

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, the Amazing Randy.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil 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?

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

It may for some. But there's. There's something that's very disturbing about someone. Take 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.

[Neil 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?

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Gary O'Reilly]

So what I found interesting was right at the end there, it says, a false view of the universe. That surely must resonate for you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Gary O'Reilly]

But did you expect it to come out of the mouth? A teller who doesn't speak, but of a magician?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Did you think that's why he's a principled magician? He has a worldview of what role magic should play in all our lives.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's a calm anger because it's his own people who are. Who are the charlatans. And taking advantage of that, and because.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

He'S been dealing with this for so many years.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Yes. You can Google me. You'll find me. It's not hard.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We will totally find you. So the lab you direct, the laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience. Neuroscience. That has a webpage as well. Okay, so we can track your work there. Yes, love it. And let me remind people of your two books. The one with the best title ever, Sleights of Mind.

[Gary O'Reilly]

You like that, don't you?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Gary O'Reilly]

So they should.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, Very good.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

That's for another episode.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

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

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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

[Gary O'Reilly]

Pleasure, my friend.

[Neil 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.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Welcome to Nadia island, next on Metro's Nadiata island podcast.

[Professor Susanna Martinez Conde]

I almost fainted when the four new bombshells arrived. Four free Samsung Galaxy A16 5G phones at Metro.

[Lily]

No way.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And finding out the fourth line is free. Thanks God heated.

[Lily]

That's wild. Join Metro and get four free Samsung 5G phones only at Metro plus tax. Bring four numbers and an ID and.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Sign up for any Metro Flex plan not available.

[Lily]

Currently at T Mobile or been with Metro in the past 180 days. My name is Lily and I've had hydradinitis suprativa HS for years. I finally found some relief since taking Cosentyx. Relief means I can show up more.

[Teller]

Cosentyse Secukinumab is prescribed for adults with moderate to severe Hidradenitis Suprativa hs. Don't use if you're allergic to Cosentyx before starting, get checked for tuberculosis. An increased risk of infections and lowered ability to fight them may occur. Like tuberculosis or other serious bacterial, fungal or viral infections, some are fatal. Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms like fevers, sweats, chills, muscle aches or cough, had a vaccine or planned to, or if inflammatory bowel disease symptoms develop or worsen serious allergic reactions and severe eczema like skin reactions may occur. Learn more at 1-844-cosentyx or cosentyx.com Ask.

[Lily]

Your dermatologist about cosenty.