Shut your eyes and picture a sound, somebody’s voice, coming out of your left. It slowly shifts to come back from behind you, then strikes to your proper. Round and round, it circles. All of the sudden, the voice jumps. It was clearly in entrance of you however now it’s coming from elsewhere. How did it get there? Did it leap…magically?

That’s the premise of the profitable magic trick, introduced November 13, in a contest to craft a magical expertise based mostly solely on sound. The problem, proposed by researchers in England a number of months in the past, is a part of an effort to reply a easy query: Can magic methods, which usually depend on a shocking visible ingredient, ever be witnessed by the ears alone?

“Think about a world the place you’ve by no means heard music,” says magician-turned-psychologist Gustav Kuhn of the College of Plymouth. Magic methods, he says, could be like this for the blind.

Kuhn research magic to know the human thoughts (SN: 10/20/09). “A whole lot of the questions that psychologists are inquisitive about are actually central to magic: notion, consciousness, but in addition free will, how one can affect folks’s selections and perception,” he says.

His curiosity in nonvisual magic was sparked final 12 months by his scholar Tyler Gibgot, who’s visually impaired. Gibgot’s childhood birthday celebrations would function magic performances for his associates. “I used to be the one one which was within the nook not being attentive to the methods as a result of I couldn’t see what was occurring,” Gibgot says. 

Though Gibgot couldn’t see the magic methods as a baby, listening to his associates’ awestruck squeals ignited his curiosity. He taught himself card methods and took up cognitive science in faculty to find out how magicians manipulate folks’s notion of actuality — which led him to work with Kuhn.

The competition is, partly, an endeavor to make magic extra inclusive for folks like Gibgot. But it surely’s additionally a scientific exploration of why magic methods hardly ever contain the sense of listening to.

The dearth of auditory magic methods, Kuhn says, factors to elementary variations between how our minds encode sight and sound. “We don’t know why that distinction is.” One purpose might be that our eyes give us steady details about the world, however what our ears inform us is fleeting.

“Sounds continually seem and disappear … however that’s not magic. If a rabbit seems and disappears, that’s magic,” Kuhn says. 

On the heart of each magic trick is a battle: We imagine one thing is unattainable, however our senses inform us it’s taking place. “As a result of we don’t are inclined to belief our listening to fairly as a lot as our imaginative and prescient, it could be that it’s simply not sufficiently highly effective to elicit the sort of battle,” Kuhn says. People are visible beings, so we’re extra shocked when our imaginative and prescient fools us in comparison with our listening to. 

Typical magic methods that do contain listening to — like ringing a bell that doesn’t emit any sound — are both supported by different senses or depend on language. All the 11 submissions to the competition relied considerably on language. An auditory magic trick that doesn’t contain language might even be unattainable, Kuhn admits.

Kuhn plans to reopen the competitors subsequent 12 months and broaden its scope to have interaction all nonvisual senses, not simply sound. And he’s hoping future submissions will transfer even additional outdoors the field.

The nonvisual magic undertaking “brings a way of empowerment to folks like myself,” Gibgot says.

For this 12 months’s contest, three impartial magicians who submitted methods on the identical precept will share the $200 prize.