About Magicology
The Magicologist is an online magazine all about magic: future, modern and ancient. If life-forms are the universe looking at itself, magic is about playing clever tricks on the universe. Magical thinking has existed from the day human imagination began to evolve. As part of that evolution, the magician was born, and humankind hasn't been the same since.
Magic is about unabashed trickery, the goal being to confound the spectator with miracles. The performance of magic has its roots in magical thinking, where things that look similar are really not so. The magician takes pride in distorting the perception of cause and effect. Rabbits do not really emerge from empty hats. That is the reality. The trick is to make the spectator think that an impossible effect comes out of a possible cause.
The magician has always been powerful, and in the service of those in power. Even today, the magician is thought by many to be truly capable of reading minds, capable of making things disappear and of changing one thing into another. Is it any wonder that the magician/priest has been second only to the monarch, and in many cases has been royal in fact.
The human mind is not as consistent, informed or observant as we might like to think.
Magicologyis a new science, and it is indeed science, not trickery. Magicology deals with the psychology of magical illusion, and the effects of magic on the human mind.
How are people fooled into thinking that the magician has made something disappear or change into something else? What goes on in the brain when we are tricked? Why are we still in awe of the magician even though we know how the trick is done?
Magicology is not about superstition, fakery or influencing the gullible. It is legitimate science, and this blog will be a discussion of magic, magicians and psychological experiments aimed at discovering the secrets of illusion.
Magic is performance art, an art of the mysterious and unexplained. The goal is not to debunk magic acts but to understand how people are manipulated psychologically to see things that are not "there."