Magic Tony @ The Dragonfly Cafe

I am now the house magician at a wonderful restaurant in north Scottsdale, the Dragonfly Cafe. You can see me there every Friday evening from 7:00pm-9:00pm, performing table-side illusions for the patrons. If you follow this blog, it probably means you have an interest in psychology, so be sure to request some psycho-magic! Hope to see you there!

What: Strolling illusions by Magic Tony
Where: The Dragonfly Cafe, 10135 E. Via Linda, Scottsdale, AZ 85258 (map)
When: Every Friday night from 7:00pm-9:00pm

A review of the Dragonfly Cafe's cuisine can be found here.

Let the Blogging Resume

I've neglected this blog for too long. I must come to my senses on this. Unfortunately, this semester is kicking me in the head, so there's no way for me to keep up with the blogging schedule I was able to establish over the summer. I'm planning to resume blogging, but with a reduced schedule...Possibly one or two posts per week. Thank you for your kind attention. I hope that you continue to drop by.

More Time Off

The new school year has me completely swamped, which means that I've neglected this blog terribly. For the next week, I'll be attending the conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and will likely be unable to attend to this blog in any meaningful fashion. To keep you occupied, here is a collection of videos from the 2007 Magic of Consciousness Symposium organized by the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, featuring a number of well-known magicians opining on the psychological basis of what they do.

James Randi on Assumptions:



Apollo Robbins:



Teller:



More from James Randi:



Johnny Thompson:



Mac King:

Friday Magic Showcase: Blood

This Friday Magic Showcase is devoted to magicians who aren't afraid to push the envelope, who willingly present their audiences with discomforting, disturbing situations. If you're not comfortable with a little gore, then this may not be the blog entry for you. I'll begin with a relatively benign, dark effect performed by the Scottish magic team, Barry & Stuart. Here is their "Suicide in C-Sharp."

Turning away from the light-hearted presentation of gory magic, we must not ignore the most notable purveyor of "horror magic," the Peruvian magician, Richiardi. He took audience discomfort to a new level by rarely providing any closure on the gruesome acts he performed. The audience was often left wondering about the reality of what they had just witnessed. Here is his contribution to the sawing illusion, with commentary by Teller.


Another great Richiardi video can be found here, in a clip from his TV show, "Chamber of Horrors." Finally, Penn & Teller rarely shy away from gore in their magic. Here is their homage to Richiardi.

Help in a Pilot Experiment! (Version 2)

Hi, friends. Please help me out by watching the video below (in full screen mode) and then clicking this link to answer some questions about what you've seen: http://tinyurl.com/VideoExperiment. Some of you may have participated in a previous version of this pilot experiment. If you did, please feel free to watch the video, but do not respond to the questionnaire. Please excuse my disheveled appearance. Thanks!

Friday Magic Showcase: Christopher Hart

The video does a good job of introducing this week's Friday Magic Showcase, Christopher Hart. My only questions is, which came first?...this act or his film career?

Lennart Green Presentation @ "TED Talks"

This video has been sitting in my inbox for months, now. I just took the time to watch it yesterday. Lennart Green, one of the world's foremost card magicians, was invited to perform at the well-known "TED Talks." In this presentation, which is mostly performance-based, Lennert relates his magic to evolutionary short-cuts. It's definitely worth watching and is a great example of how magicians take advantage of our inability to recognize or understand randomness. I'll expound on this perceptual limitation in a blog entry later this week.

Mirror Neurons & Sign Language

The discovery in the early 90s of mirror neurons in macaques, neurons that fired both when the monkeys were performing a specific goal-directed hand action and when they viewed another monkey performing the same action, spurred a great deal of research and theorizing in the psychology and neuroscience communities. Unfortunately, many of the theories derived from the discovery of mirror neurons stepped away from the original empirical findings of Di Pellegrino et al. (1992), presuming at the outset (sans evidence) that mirror neurons in humans have evolved dramatically from those found in monkeys. That said, theorists have suggested (among other things) that mirror neurons are the source of human empathy, the evolutionary precursor to language (via action understanding), and that a mirror neuron deficiency is the cause of autism. These theories are all well and good...except that they all assume mirror neurons have behavioral consequences beyond those seen in monkeys, and they assume that humans have large circuits of mirror neurons (which have never been found in the human brain). Hickok (2009) provides one of the most well-constructed critiques of the limitations and exaggerations inherent to theories of action understanding through mirror neuron activity.

Germane to my field of study is the proposition that mirror neurons form the foundation for language (and serve an important role in the understanding of speech, providing the neural basis for the motor theory of speech perception, previously discussed here). It has been suggested that the earliest forms of communication were likely to be gestural (Arbib, 2002; Corballis, 2003; Fogassi & Ferrari, 2007). Arbib (2002) outlined seven theoretical stages in the evolution of linguistic capabilities. The first four stages involve adaptations in the ability to grasp objects with the hand and understand the grasping behaviors of other animals. Each of these evolutionary steps entails a further development of the Broca’s area homolog, including the development of mirror systems, yielding the ability to interpret the actions of others through simulation. As Arbib explained, “The evolution of mirror neurons extended ‘knowing’ from the individual to the social,” (pp. 14). Further imitative abilities allowed for a rudimentary manual communication system. As Corballis (2003) pointed out, modern wild chimpanzees exhibit a variety of manual gestures. He posited that they are one evolutionary component away from the ability to communicate effectively through mime: bipedalism. Indeed, it is likely that the earliest bipedal hominids communicated through pantomime, and this communication was accompanied by facial expressions and simple vocalizations that provided emotional valance (Fogassi & Ferrari, 2007).

A paper in press at Brain & Language (which I've made available here) examines one of the core premises of the Arbib theory of language evolution. If mirror neurons are at the heart of communication (allowing language recognition through simulation), and if language evolved from gesture, then a language that is overtly gestural, such as sign language, should be largely reliant on mirror neurons and mirror networks in the brain. Knapp and Corina (in press) evaluated three predictions derived from the mirror neuron theory of language, primarily through an examination of research in sign language:

1. "Damage to the human mirror neuron system should non-selectively disrupt both sign language and non-linguistic action processing."
2. "Within the domain of sign language, a given mirror neuron locus should mediate both perception and production."
3. "The action-based tuning curves of individual mirror neurons should support the highly circumscribed set of motions that form the ‘‘vocabulary of action” for signed languages."

A thorough examination of the literature revealed that only one of these predictions was supported by current evidence. The second prediction receives a modicum of support from research employing fMRI. Unfortunately, fMRI is essentially useless when it comes to validating mirror neuron theories, as it lacks the resolution necessary to pinpoint activity at the level of the individual neuron. Even though an individual voxel may demonstrate activation during both perception and performance, one cannot assume that this pattern is indicative of mirror neurons. It could simply be the case that neurons active during perception happen to be near neurons active during performance.

As I see it, this paper is something of a nail-in-the-coffin for the mirror neuron theory of language understanding. A language that should be most in-touch with the theoretical origin of spoken language, sign language, does not appear to be moderated by mirror neurons or mirror networks in the brain. Do we need to continue this fiasco?

References:

Arbib, M. (2002). The mirror system, imitation, and the evolution of language. In C. Nhaniv & K. Dautenhahn (Eds.), Imitation in Animals and Artifacts. The MIT Press.

Corballis, M. C. (2003). From mouth to hand: Gesture, speech, and the evolution of right-handedness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 26, 199-260.

Di Pellegrino, G., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., Gallese, V., & Rizzolatti, G. (1992). Understanding motor events: A neurophysiological study. Experimental Brain Research, 91, 176-180.

Fogassi, L. & Ferrari, P. F. (2007). Mirror neurons and the evolution of embodied language. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 136-141.

Hickok, G. (2009). Eight problems for the mirror neuron theory of action understanding in monkeys and humans. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21, 1229-1243. (link)

Knapp, H. P. & Corina, D. P. (in press). A human mirror neuron system for language: Perspectives from signed languages of the deaf. Brain & Language. (link)

Taking the week off.

My master's thesis defense is scheduled for next Monday. That said, I'm taking this week off from blogging, returning next week with renewed vigor. Thank you for your kind attention.