In this episode, the story of Clever Hans, the horse who changed psychology for the better. We also sit down with psychologist and magician Matt Tompkins. Matt is the author of The Spectacle of Illusion, a book about the long history of the manipulation of our own magical thinking and how studying deception, and especially self-deception, can help us better understand perception, memory, belief, and more.

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OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK

In The Spectacle of Illusion, professional magician-turned experimental psychologist Dr. Matthew L. Tompkins investigates the arts of deception as practiced and popularized by mesmerists, magicians and psychics since the early 18th century. Organized thematically within a broadly chronological trajectory, this compelling book explores how illusions perpetuated by magicians and fraudulent mystics can not only deceive our senses but also teach us about the inner workings of our minds. Indeed, modern scientists are increasingly turning to magic tricks to develop new techniques to examine human perception, memory and belief. 

Beginning by discussing mesmerism and spiritualism, the book moves on to consider how professional magicians such as John Nevil Maskelyne, Harry Houdini, and James Randi engaged with these movements – particularly how they set out to challenge and debunk paranormal claims. It also relates the interactions between magicians, mystics and scientists over the past 200 years, and reveals how the researchers who attempted to investigate magical and paranormal phenomena were themselves deceived, and what this can teach us about deception.

Highly illustrated throughout with entertaining and bizarre drawings, double-exposure spirit photographs and photographs of spoon-bending from hitherto inaccessible and un-mined archives, including the Wellcome Collection, the Harry Price Library, the Society for Physical Research, and last but not least, the Magic Circle’s closely guarded collection, the book also features newly commissioned photography of planchettes, rapping boards, tilting tables, ectoplasm, automata and illusion boxes. Concluding with a modern-day analysis of the science of magic and illusion, analyzing surprisingly weird phenomena such as ideomotor action, sleep paralysis, choice blindness and the psychology of misdirection, this unnerving volume highlights how unreliable our minds can be, and how complicit they can be in the perpetuation of illusions..

Matt Tompkins is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Lund University’s Choice Blindness Lab, where he is working on a project that involves adapting techniques from mentalism magic to study how people perceive and misperceive emerging technologies related to neuroscience and AI.

He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology, and he has freelanced as a writer, speaker, and consultant.

Well before he began his academic career, he worked professionally as a magicia, work that he continued to do part-time throughout his studies. Initially, his studies of visual cognition and performances were separate but parallel, but when he began his DPhil (PhD), he was able combine his passions for magic and psychology. His thesis was titled: Observations on Invisibility: An investigation of expectation and attention on visual awareness. The project involved a mixture of empirical studies as well as historical analyses of how scientists have approached the study of illusions.

He conducted experiments in inattentional blindness, misinformation, and metacognitive illusions. The historical elements of the work included considerations of ancient Egyptian fairy tales recorded on scraps of papyrus, witch trials, ghost hunts, and alleged empirical laboratory evidence of extra-dimensional immortal spirit beings.  

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