(Video link here.)
Magic history has reached a new milestone. For the first time ever, magicians were headliners not only at the Washington Symposium on Magic History, but also at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
The latest ASSC meeting featured a tutorial called "The Science of Magic." The abstract, on page 41 of the program linked above, concludes: "There are numerous areas in which magic is not merely a sufficient, but a necessary way of investigation."
As reported at the Washington Symposium, the prime mover in this new nexus of magic, science, neurobiology, psychology and evolutionary studies is the guy featured above - our friend, the late and much missed Jerry Andrus. Though he, like Houdini, lacked formal education, he lectured at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford on epistemology, philosophy, perception and why the brain evolved in a way that allows it to be fooled. He was the world's foremost creator of optical illusions, an original thinker of such high caliber that Marvin Minsky of MIT, the father of artificial intelligence, said: "When we scientists run out of ideas, we just go visit Jerry Andrus."
Part two of this video, in a future post, will complete the recap of our presentation on Jerry at the Washington Symposium, which ended April 27. The response there to Jerry's story was overwhelming, and that tough room had no hesitation in pronouncing him one of magic's true "geniuses."
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