Magicology: Casting a spell on the mind

Good to see that this is being taken seriously: for several years I've been thinking that we should be paying more attention to the mindgames that come out of the work of illusionists and mentalists. So ...Magicology: Casting a spell on the mind - life - 24 December 2008 - New Scientist: "neuroscientists and magicians have been getting together to create a science that might be called 'magicology'. If successful, both sides stand to benefit. By plundering the magicians' book of tricks, researchers hope to develop powerful new tools for probing perception and cognition. And if they find any tricks they can't explain, that could lead to new knowledge about how the brain works. Similarly, magicians hope that the collaboration will lead to new magic tricks by alerting them to perceptual or cognitive weaknesses that they didn't already know about."
And briefly, this is why it works: "in neuroscience terms, misdirection relies on the fact that the brain has a very limited supply of attention. Over the past decade or so it has become clear just how scarce attention is: focusing on one thing can make you oblivious to other things that would otherwise be obvious."
Which relates to my point (well, not mine but a point I think is important to pick up when discussing language and communication) about language having necessarily to pick out particular features of our experience/world. Language is a way of communicating the things that we attend to -that is give our attention to. It's lack of being able to say everything is not a weakness; it's a necessity. It is also what enables a lot of interesting and creative things that we value.