The show begins. A woman with her sleeves rolled up and a deck of cards in hand appears on stage, ready to chat. He chooses a brave young man to volunteer and offers him the deck, asking him to choose a card, sign it and return it. Then the real show begins. The magician sequentially shuffles the deck of cards with one hand, showing different styles that captivate the audience. “Now the card is lost in the deck, but if I tap on it, I can make it bounce,” says the magician. However, it doesn’t work. She looks confused: “Wow, sometimes the card jumps too high.” Suddenly he puts his hand behind his ear, pulls out a rolled-up letter and hands it to the young man. He unfolds it and is amazed to see that the letter bears his signature.
Apparently, at some point during the performance, the magician rolled up the letter and held it behind her ear, but the volunteer was unaware. It did this by diverting your attention and giving you something more noticeable to focus on, such as: B. Showing off your shuffling skills. This strategy is so successful that magicians use it in countless tricks. Ultimately, it’s still a hoax, a ploy to achieve its ultimate goal, which is none other than entertaining an audience.
Scientists believe that among the birds there are real experts in the art of deception, but the aim is not playful
Now we are placed in a radically different scenario. A dog has gone for a walk and is running free through the swamp. Suddenly something catches his attention. It is a bird, more precisely a plover, which seems to have suffered an accident since it moves a wing as if it were broken. The dog runs at full speed, eager to hook the bird, but when it tries to do so, the plover flees without difficulty. The trick worked and the plover’s nest that the dog would have stumbled onto had it not been for the distraction is intact. In this case, the goal of deception is not playful, but the strategy is the same.
At other times, mages make very fast movements, making it impossible to follow an object’s trajectory well. An example is the typical trick of the three inverted glasses. Viewers fix our eyes on the glass concealing the coin as he moves it, but when the magician lifts the glass, that’s not what we thought. It turns out that at some point the glass coin changed unnoticed. The California jay, a bird in the corvid family, keeps food in various hiding places and employs similar tactics to prevent it from being stolen. When other people are watching, it changes the location of the treasures several times, making it very difficult for its observers to understand where the food ended up.
Another resource widely used by magicians is masking, that is, hiding visual information, as in boxes with a false background. In many cases, the surprises are hidden between fingers or other nooks and crannies and suddenly a bunch of red balls appear out of nowhere. It turns out crows have their secret pockets too. When observed, they will pretend to hide a food item on the ground, but actually store it in a throat pouch, which they can use to store food.
shell birds
For these and many other examples, scientists believe that among birds there are true experts in the art of deception. Of course, as we mentioned earlier, they differ from mages in their ultimate purpose. After a show, the audience applauds and cheers, fascinated that they have been duped. Magic could never have evolved in our species if we didn’t have the ability to tell the difference between a benign lie and a malicious lie. Therefore, not only the trick counts, but also the reaction it evokes.
There are numerous videos on the Internet in which different animals react in funny ways to a person’s tricks. However, not only can we assume from these videos that the animals were really surprised, there must be scientific evidence. We know there are quite a few species that play, and magic is a form of social play. However, there is currently no evidence that animals incorporate deception into their play activities.
However, these videos have actually piqued the interest of some animal behavior experts. There is a research group at the University of Cambridge that incorporates magic into their methodology. According to these scientists, “Probing whether animals can be fooled by the same tricks that fool humans provides information about our cognitive similarities in aspects such as attention, perception, and mental time travel.”
In one video, Elias García-Pelegrin, a psychobiology doctor from the Cambridge group, can be seen performing various tricks in front of an expectant jay. First he shows her a small worm held by the fingers of his left hand. Then, with his other hand, he makes the gesture of taking the little worm, but in reality he is holding it in his left fist. The jay, trained to point where it expects food, touches its left hand with its beak. This famous trick, which humans usually fall for, has no effect on a bird, which, after all, has never manipulated an object with its hands.
In another trick, García-Pelegrin extends both palms up. The desired little worm rests on one of them. The scientist-magician skillfully passes the food from one hand to the other and clenches his fists. The movement is so fast that it is impossible for us humans to detect the worm’s change of position, leading us to believe that it is still in the same hand. The results of the study indicated that the jays here are just as easily confused as we are, so their perceptual abilities may be similar in this case.
Once we know the blind spots in other animals’ perceptions and whether or not they can be fooled, the next step is to study how they respond to magic. Eventually, the anecdotes from the videos become data that can be used to draw conclusions. We’ll continue to watch what this impressive mix of magic, science, and animal behavior can bring us.
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