The Conjurer by Hieronymus Bosch

The Conjurer, by Hieronymus Bosch, depicts a medieval magician performing for a small crowd, while pickpockets steal the spectators' belongings. The painting, on display at the Musée Municipal in St.-Germain-en-Laye, France, illustrates that magicians have long known how to hack into our mental processes. The principles of magic, refined and perfected over the centuries, provide neuroscientists with new ways to study the brain and could help them in their quest to reveal how the organ performs the greatest trick of all - consciousness itself.
Studies of inattentional blindness show that focused attention can make us oblivious to sights that would otherwise be glaringly obvious, while studies of change blindness show that dramatic changes in a scene can go unnoticed if they occur during a brief interruption, even when we look directly at the scene.

Magicians take advantage of this to manipulate their spectators' attentional spotlight. They know, for example, that the eyes give off important social cues, and that people have a natural impulse to pay attention to the objects that others are attending to. They exploit this 'joint attention' by using their eye movements to divert the audience's attention away from the 'method' – the secret action behind the trick – and towards the magical effect.
They also know that the sudden appearance of a new and unusual object will immediately draw the audience's attention. Hence, producing a flying dove gives them an opportunity to perform other hidden manoeuvres.

"11th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness," Martinez-Conde explains. "Traditionally, this was a very academic conference that had no impact outside the specialist field. We wanted to reach the general public as well, but we weren't sure exactly what to do."

The wife-and-husband team went to Las Vegas, where the conference was to be held. It was then, while scouting for potential conference venues, that the idea first came to them. "We saw a lot of ads for magic shows and realized that was the connection we were looking for. We contacted a number of magicians, such as Penn and Teller, James Randi and Apollo Robbins and invited them to a special symposium [at the conference], to share their insights into what makes magic work in the mind of the spectator."