Reply to comment

I was intrigued--and puzzled--by Mary-Angela's presentation about the Villanova Magic Show: impressed by many dimensions of the program (especially its melding of arts and science, and by its using a group of older children to teach younger ones), but also struck by/stuck on two aspects. First: if magic functions as a great way to hook kids into doing science because of the "perceived discrepancy between observation and firm beliefs," it'll only work if such a dissonance exists; otherwise, they're unlikely to actively seek for explanations. In a world where so many kids believe in magic, that might well be a non-starter. Like Bill, I was also caught by the fact that some of the sciences seemed to catch on less well in this program, and was intrigued by his counter-suggestion of seeking some alternative narratives. If chemistry is more akin to "magic," what "mechanic" stories might facilitate the teaching of physics, what "organic" stories the teaching of biology...?

In a first semester writing seminar I have twice co-taught with a biologist here,  we introduced a section on "interpretation" with these two texts:

Stephen Macknik, Mac King, James Rand, Apollo Robbins, Teller, John Thompson and Susana Martinez-Conde. "Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic: Turning Tricks into Research." Nature Reviews Neuroscience. July 30, 2008.

Benedict Carey. "While a Magician Works, the Mind Does the Tricks." The New York Times.  August 22, 2008.

Abstracting from the neuroscience article, Carey explains that magic tricks take advantage of how our brain constructs model of world: the fact that we all engage in "neural approximating," focusing on one thing @ a time, @ the expense of others. Basically: a magician misdirects his audience, and exploits phenomenon--like inattention blindness, change blindness, memory illusions, illusory correlations--to distract his observers from what he's doing, segregating what he wants them to be aware of from what he doesn't...

After reading and discussing these ideas, we had our students perform magic tricks for their hall mates, monitoring and reporting on their responses. That intrigued them with some of the possible ways in which magical techniques that manipulate attention can be used to understand the behavioral and neural basis of consciousness. This also worked quite well for their stepping off next into a project of literary interpretation, w/ an increasing awareness that "incoming information is always ambiguous, and subject to multiple interpretations"; that in a world in constant flux, our brains "locate and give meaning to randomness," by relying on "the presumption that things don't change a lot over time."