Dr Gustav Kuhn magical psychological experiment

[Graham Lappin]

Interesting stuff on the BBC website.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today...00/7520043.stm

I would quite like to see this guy post on these boards - assuming he doesn't already of course

[Bradford]

Dr Kuhn lectures me in reseach methods at uni, he is a great chap and has some fantastic ideas on research. I shall pass a link to this forum along to him.

[Bradford]

You might be interested to know that he is giving a guest lecture on the 10th March @ Goldsmiths
Dr Gustav Kuhn: The Science of Magic: How Magic Changes our Expectations About Autism

http://www.skeptic.org.uk/index.php?...&task=3&cid=16

[Dr B]

Gustav is a real psychologist and gifted magician. He knows his stuff and its great to see him involved in promoting science etc in the public domain.

He had a good paper out in TICS about a year ago.

My hunch is that other, shall we say, less academic individuals who claim to represent this area might be feeling the pressure with such a talent around. . But that's just my personal opinion.

[endless_psych]

It interests me how magic is used as a tool for skepticism and how well/how badly it fares.

Derren Brown for instance divides opinion and perhaps shows some of the issues with being both an entertainer (particulalry a magician) and a skeptic.

Mainly that you can't really reveal how you do your tricks without somehow making people feel that you have "ruined" them.

But thanks for the link and bringing this guy to my attention - I've been thinking of doing something about magic and science and skepticism and it seems there are a few more folk who do stuff in this area than I had been aware of.

(John C Brown - the Astronomer Royal of Scotland also does magic to illustrate cosmology BTW - which is quite interesting.)