There is a face that people make when they experience real magic. Not the polite smile of mild amusement. Not the confused frown of someone working through a puzzle. There is a specific expression — mouth slightly open, eyes wide, a brief shake of the head — that I have come to recognize as the marker of genuine cognitive conflict.
It is the face of a person who believes two contradictory things at the same time.
I saw it clearly for the first time at a corporate event in Linz. I was performing a mentalism piece where the outcome appeared to violate something fundamental about how information can travel between people. The woman I was performing for made that face. And then she said something that has stayed with me ever since.
“I know that’s not possible. But I saw it happen.”
Not “how did you do that.” Not “that was a good trick.” She stated two contradictory beliefs in a single sentence and held both of them as true simultaneously. She believed what she had witnessed. And she believed it was impossible. Both beliefs were fully present, neither canceling the other.
That is the experience of magic. Not surprise. Not confusion. Not puzzlement. Cognitive conflict.
What the Brain Scans Show
When I discovered Gustav Kuhn’s research at the MAGIC-lab at Goldsmiths University of London, one finding stood out above all others. Kuhn and his colleagues used fMRI brain imaging to observe what happens in the brain when people watch magic. The results were illuminating.
Watching magic tricks activated two specific brain regions: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. These are not the brain’s “wonder centers” or its “entertainment circuits.” They are the brain’s conflict detection system. These regions activate when the brain encounters two pieces of information that contradict each other — when the brain is simultaneously holding two beliefs that cannot both be true.
This means that the experience of magic is, at its neurological foundation, a conflict. The brain is saying two things at once: “I saw this happen” and “this cannot happen.” Both signals are real. Both are strong. And the brain cannot resolve the contradiction.
This finding changed how I think about everything I do as a performer. Because it means that magic is not primarily about surprise, or wonder, or entertainment, or fooling people. Those are downstream consequences. The primary experience — the thing that makes magic unique among all performing arts — is the creation of a cognitive state where the audience believes something impossible is true.
Not “thinks it might be true.” Not “entertains the possibility.” Believes it. With the same conviction that they believe the floor is solid and that gravity pulls downward. They witnessed something, and their perceptual system encoded it as real. And simultaneously, their knowledge about how the world works tells them it cannot be real.
The Teller Principle
Teller, the silent half of Penn and Teller, described this experience as “unwilling suspension of disbelief.” That phrase is a deliberate inversion of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous concept of the “willing suspension of disbelief” that we apply to fiction. When you watch a movie or read a novel, you willingly set aside your knowledge that the story is not real. You choose to believe, temporarily, in the fictional world.
Magic is the opposite. The spectator is not choosing to believe. They are being forced to believe by their own perceptual system, against their better judgment. They know they are watching a performance. They know deception is involved. They do not want to believe that what they saw was real. But their perceptual experience is so vivid, so unambiguous, so sensorially complete that they cannot help believing it.
This is why magic occupies a unique position in the performing arts. A playwright can create empathy. A musician can create emotion. A comedian can create surprise. But only a magician can create the experience of witnessing something that the spectator simultaneously believes and knows to be impossible.
The cognitive conflict is not a side effect of magic. It is the magic.
The Joke Connection
Here is where things get interesting, and where I need to bring in a completely different source. When I studied Greg Dean’s work on joke construction in his book about stand-up comedy, I found a structural parallel to magic that was so precise it felt like discovering that two different languages share the same grammar.
Dean describes every joke as having two stories. The First Story is the narrative the audience constructs from the setup. The audience hears the setup, fills in assumptions based on their experience and expectations, and builds a mental model of what is being described. This construction happens automatically and unconsciously. The audience does not choose to build the First Story. Their brains do it for them.
The Second Story is the alternative interpretation revealed by the punch line. The punch line does not add information. It reframes the same information in a way that shatters the First Story and replaces it with a completely different narrative. The connector — the word or concept that bridges the two stories — is the pivot point that allows both interpretations to coexist.
The audience laughs because, for a brief moment, they are holding two incompatible narratives in their mind simultaneously. The First Story (which they believed) and the Second Story (which is now revealed to be the correct interpretation) create a cognitive conflict that resolves as humor.
Now consider magic. The spectator watches the performance and builds a narrative — the First Story — about what is happening. A card is selected and returned to the deck. The deck is shuffled. The performer searches for the card. This narrative is built from assumptions about how cards work, how shuffling works, how physical objects behave.
Then the climax reveals something impossible. The card is in the spectator’s pocket. Or the card has changed color. Or the entire deck has transformed. This is the Second Story — a version of events that shatters the First Story, that contradicts everything the spectator believed was happening.
The structural parallel is exact. Both jokes and magic tricks exploit the audience’s automatic narrative construction. Both rely on the audience building a First Story from assumptions. Both deliver a reveal that replaces the First Story with a Second Story the audience never anticipated. And both create their effect through the cognitive conflict between the two stories.
The difference is in the resolution. In comedy, the conflict resolves as laughter. The audience recognizes the reinterpretation and finds it funny. In magic, the conflict does not resolve. The audience cannot find a reinterpretation that makes sense. The First Story has been destroyed, the Second Story is impossible, and there is no Third Story available. The result is not laughter but wonder — the sustained experience of holding an unresolvable contradiction.
Two Sides of the Same Mechanism
This parallel has practical implications that I think about constantly.
First, it explains why magic and comedy work so well together. Both operate on the same cognitive mechanism. A performer who understands how to build and shatter First Stories can use the same skill set for both comedic and magical purposes. The audience’s brain is already primed for the pattern. A well-placed joke trains the audience to build First Stories quickly and confidently, which makes them more susceptible to the magical shattering of a subsequent First Story.
I use this in my performances. I will often precede a major magical moment with a comedic sequence that follows exactly the same setup-shatter structure. The comedy tells the audience’s brain: you are good at predicting what comes next. The magic then proves them wrong in a way that is not funny but impossible. The comedy builds confidence in the First Story mechanism. The magic exploits that confidence.
Second, the parallel explains why timing matters so much in both comedy and magic. In comedy, the punch line must arrive at exactly the moment when the First Story is most fully constructed. Too early, and the First Story has not had time to solidify. Too late, and the audience has already begun to suspect that the First Story is incomplete. The timing of a joke is the timing of the shatter — it must hit the First Story at its peak.
The same is true of magical climaxes. The moment of revelation must arrive when the audience’s First Story is most firmly established, when they are most confident in their understanding of what is happening. If the magic happens too early, the audience has not invested enough in the First Story for its destruction to be meaningful. If it happens too late, the audience may have already begun to suspect that their First Story is wrong, which weakens the conflict.
Strengthening Both Sides
The research suggests a specific design principle: to create the strongest possible magical experience, strengthen both sides of the cognitive conflict. Make the spectator more convinced that the effect really happened, and make it clearer that what happened is impossible.
This sounds obvious, but it has non-obvious implications. Most performers focus on one side or the other. They either work on making the effect more visually convincing (stronger perceptual evidence that it happened) or on making the conditions cleaner (stronger logical evidence that it could not have happened). Few work on both simultaneously.
But the research shows that both sides contribute independently to the strength of the experience. A moderately visual effect under extremely clean conditions creates strong magic. An extremely visual effect under moderate conditions also creates strong magic. But an extremely visual effect under extremely clean conditions creates the most powerful magic of all, because both sides of the conflict are maximized.
I have started evaluating my effects along both dimensions. On a scale of one to ten, how convincing is the perceptual evidence that the effect occurred? And separately, on a scale of one to ten, how clear is it that the effect should be impossible? The product of these two numbers — not the sum — gives a rough estimate of the magical impact. Both sides multiply each other. Weakness in either side collapses the whole experience.
The Sustained Conflict
What makes magic different from other forms of cognitive conflict is that the conflict does not resolve. A joke resolves in laughter. An optical illusion resolves when you see the other interpretation. A plot twist in a movie resolves when you reinterpret the earlier scenes.
But a well-designed magic effect resists resolution. The spectator’s First Story has been destroyed. The Second Story — the true state of affairs — is apparently impossible. And no Third Story is available. The spectator is left holding the conflict, unable to dismiss either side, unable to find a synthesis.
This sustained conflict is what creates the unique emotional quality of great magic. It is not surprise, which fades in seconds. It is not confusion, which is merely unpleasant. It is the ongoing experience of believing something you know cannot be true. And it persists. Hours later, days later, the spectator still holds both beliefs. They saw it happen. It cannot have happened. Both are true.
That woman in Linz was not describing a puzzle she wanted to solve. She was describing a state of mind she could not escape. “I know that’s not possible. But I saw it happen.” She was reporting, accurately, on the cognitive conflict that the fMRI research shows is the neurological signature of the magical experience.
And that report — that simple sentence containing two contradictory beliefs held simultaneously — is what I am trying to create every time I step in front of an audience. Not surprise. Not confusion. Not the satisfaction of a puzzle. The sustained, unresolvable conflict between what they believe and what they know.
That conflict is not a by-product of magic. It is not a stage on the way to some deeper experience. It is the experience. It is the thing itself. And understanding its structure — understanding that it shares a mechanism with comedy, that it can be measured in the brain, that it can be deliberately designed and strengthened — is, for me, one of the most exciting discoveries I have made on this entire journey.
The brain believes what it sees. The brain knows what is possible. When those two things contradict each other, something extraordinary happens in the space between.
That space is where magic lives.