I am not a neuroscientist. I am a strategy consultant who discovered magic in his thirties, who practices in hotel rooms, who co-founded a magic company with Adam Wilber, and who spends an unreasonable amount of his free time reading about how the brain works. I say this upfront because what I am about to discuss — functional magnetic resonance imaging, prefrontal cortex activation, and cognitive conflict processing — sounds like it belongs in an academic journal, not on a blog about performing magic. But I promise you, this is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. And it changed how I think about what I am actually doing when I stand in front of an audience.
Here is the finding that stopped me in my tracks. When researchers put people in an fMRI scanner — a machine that measures blood flow in the brain, which is a proxy for neural activity — and showed them magic tricks, specific brain regions lit up. Not the regions associated with entertainment, or pleasure, or visual processing. The regions associated with cognitive conflict. The brain’s error-detection system. The neural machinery that activates when the brain detects a mismatch between what it expected to happen and what it perceives actually happened.
Watching magic activates the same brain regions as trying to solve a logical contradiction. The brain, confronted with a coin that vanishes or a card that changes or an object that appears where it should not be, does not process the experience as fun. It processes it as a conflict. An error. A violation. And then, after the conflict is processed, it experiences wonder.
The Brain’s Conflict Detector
The two brain regions most consistently activated during magic viewing are the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). These are not obscure, niche areas. They are among the most studied regions in cognitive neuroscience, and they are associated with a very specific function: detecting and resolving conflicts between competing pieces of information.
The DLPFC is involved in executive function — the high-level cognitive processes that include planning, decision-making, and evaluating conflicting information. When you encounter a situation where two things you believe to be true are in conflict, the DLPFC activates. It is the region that says, “Something does not add up here.”
The ACC is involved in error monitoring. It detects discrepancies between expected outcomes and actual outcomes. When you predict something will happen and something else happens instead, the ACC flags the mismatch. It is the neural alarm system for prediction errors.
Together, these regions form the brain’s conflict-detection network. They activate when you try to name the color of the word “RED” printed in blue ink (the Stroop test). They activate when you encounter a logical paradox. They activate when reality violates your expectations.
And they activate when you watch magic.
This finding, which I first encountered through Gustav Kuhn and Alice Pailhes’ research on the psychology of magic, reframed my entire understanding of what magic is. Not philosophically. Neurologically. Magic is not simply entertainment that happens to involve deception. Magic is a specific type of cognitive event — a conflict between belief and perception — that activates dedicated neural circuitry designed to handle exactly this kind of conflict.
What Cognitive Conflict Feels Like
I want to bridge the gap between the neuroscience and the lived experience, because the neuroscience can feel abstract if you do not connect it to what actually happens in the room.
Think about the last time you saw something that genuinely surprised you. Not a pleasant surprise, like finding money in your coat pocket. A confusing surprise. Something that violated your understanding of how things work. Maybe a physical event that seemed to defy gravity. Maybe a piece of information that contradicted something you were sure of. Maybe a moment where reality simply did not behave the way reality is supposed to behave.
Remember the feeling? It is not a single emotion. It is a complex state. There is a jolt — a physical, almost electric sensation that hits before you have time to think. Then confusion. Then a rapid search for an explanation. Then, if no explanation is found, something that sits between frustration and fascination. You are stuck between “that cannot have happened” and “but I just saw it happen.”
That state — that specific combination of surprise, confusion, search, and unresolvable tension — is cognitive conflict. And the fMRI data shows that it has a specific neural signature. The DLPFC and ACC are doing their jobs. They have detected a conflict between your prediction (coins do not vanish) and your perception (that coin just vanished). And they are working to resolve it.
In most situations, the conflict gets resolved. You figure out why the word is in a different color. You realize the optical illusion is not what it seemed. You get the joke. The conflict is detected, processed, and resolved. The DLPFC and ACC do their work and quiet down.
In magic, the conflict does not get resolved. That is the point. That is the entire point. The performer has designed the experience so that the conflict between belief and perception has no resolution available. The spectator cannot figure out how the coin vanished because the performer has eliminated all the explanations the spectator might arrive at. The DLPFC and ACC keep firing, keep searching, keep trying to resolve a conflict that cannot be resolved.
And that unresolved conflict is wonder. The feeling of being overwhelmed by something incomprehensible. That is not a poetic description. That is what the neuroscience suggests is actually happening in the brain.
The Evening in Salzburg
I had a conversation about this with a neurologist at a dinner party in Salzburg — one of those lucky moments where your professional world and your passion world collide. She was fascinated by the fMRI findings because they mapped onto her understanding of how the prefrontal cortex handles prediction errors in clinical contexts.
“What you are describing,” she said, “is basically the brain running an error-detection loop that it cannot close. In clinical contexts, that would produce anxiety. In your context, it produces wonder. The difference is the framing.”
She was right, and her observation connected to something else from the research: the role of context in determining whether cognitive conflict is experienced as positive or negative. The same neural event — DLPFC and ACC activation in response to a prediction error — can feel terrible (anxiety, confusion, threat) or wonderful (amazement, wonder, delight), depending on the context in which it occurs.
In a threatening context — say, you are walking down a dark street and something happens that violates your predictions — the cognitive conflict activates the fight-or-flight response. The prediction error signals danger.
In a performance context — you are sitting in a comfortable room, watching a person you understand to be an entertainer, expecting to be surprised — the cognitive conflict activates wonder. The prediction error signals magic.
This is why framing matters so much. This is why the performance context — the lights, the introduction, the performer’s confidence, the audience’s expectation of being entertained — is not just window dressing. It is the difference between wonder and anxiety. It is the contextual frame that tells the brain how to interpret its own conflict-detection signals.
Two Sides of Impossibility
The fMRI research also supports a principle that Darwin Ortiz articulates with precision in his design work: the strength of the magical experience depends on the strength of both sides of the cognitive conflict.
Conflict, by definition, requires two competing beliefs. In magic, those beliefs are: (1) what I believe I experienced (a coin vanished), and (2) what I believe to be possible (coins cannot vanish). The stronger both beliefs, the stronger the conflict. And the stronger the conflict, the stronger the activation of the DLPFC and ACC. And the stronger the activation, the stronger the experience of wonder.
This means that to create stronger magic, you need to strengthen both sides. Make the audience MORE convinced that the effect really happened (this is what Ortiz calls conviction — ensuring the audience believes the initial conditions were fair, the procedure was clean, and the outcome is exactly as presented). And make the effect MORE clearly impossible (framing, presentation, elimination of possible explanations).
If either side is weak, the conflict is weak. If the audience is not fully convinced the effect happened (maybe they suspect the coin was already in the other hand), the conflict between belief and possibility is mild. If the effect does not clearly violate their model of reality (maybe it was just a clever move they could probably figure out), the conflict is mild. Either way, the DLPFC and ACC do not fire as strongly. The experience of wonder is diminished.
The performers who create the strongest reactions are the ones who maximize both sides of the conflict. Clean conditions. Fair procedures. Undeniable outcomes. Combined with effects that clearly, unmistakably violate what the audience believes is possible. Both sides cranked to maximum. That is when the brain’s conflict-detection system goes into overdrive. That is when wonder becomes overwhelming.
What the Brain Does After the Conflict
The fMRI data also reveals what happens in the brain after the initial conflict detection. The DLPFC does not just detect the conflict and stop. It initiates a search for resolution. The brain begins scanning its memory, its knowledge of physics, its understanding of how things work, looking for an explanation that would resolve the conflict.
This search is what the audience experiences as “trying to figure out how it was done.” It is not a deliberate, conscious choice. It is an automatic neural process. The brain cannot tolerate unresolved conflict, and it will search for a resolution whether the audience wants it to or not.
This has direct implications for performance design. If the brain is going to search for an explanation automatically, the performer needs to ensure that the search comes up empty. Not partially empty — fully empty. If the brain finds even a partial explanation, it will latch onto it. The conflict will be partially resolved. And partially resolved conflict produces not wonder but curiosity. Interesting, but not magical.
The best effects are designed so that the brain’s automatic search for an explanation hits a dead end in every direction. No matter which causal path the brain explores — “maybe they switched it,” “maybe they had a duplicate,” “maybe they used a hidden compartment” — each path is blocked. The brain cannot find any explanation. And when no explanation is found, the conflict remains fully unresolved. And fully unresolved conflict is wonder at its maximum intensity.
My Hotel Room Reframing
Sitting in a hotel room in Vienna at one in the morning, reading the fMRI studies for the third time, I had a reframing moment. I had always thought of magic as something I do to the audience. I create an illusion. I fool them. I deceive them. The performer is the active agent, the audience is the passive recipient.
The neuroscience suggests something different. The performer provides the stimulus. But the magic itself — the experience of wonder, the cognitive conflict, the neural activation, the search for resolution, the overwhelming feeling of impossibility — happens inside the audience’s brain. The performer does not create magic. The performer creates the conditions for the audience’s brain to create magic.
This is not a semantic distinction. It is a fundamental reorientation. If the magic happens in the audience’s brain, then the performer’s job is not to be a magician. The performer’s job is to be a brain architect. To understand how the audience’s neural systems process prediction, conflict, resolution, and surprise. To design experiences that activate specific neural circuits in specific sequences. To engineer the conditions under which the DLPFC and ACC fire in a sustained, unresolvable way.
That is what the fMRI reveals. Not just that magic activates conflict regions, but that the experience of magic is, at its foundation, a neurological event. It has a specific neural signature. It follows specific neural rules. And those rules can be understood, respected, and designed for.
The Science of Wonder
I want to end with something that matters to me personally, as someone who came to magic as an adult, from a completely different professional world.
Before I discovered magic, I was skeptical of it. My childhood experience with a clown performer in Austria had left me with the impression that magic was trivial — children’s entertainment, nothing more. When I started buying card tricks from ellusionist.com in those early hotel room nights, I was doing it to occupy my hands, not to pursue an art form.
What changed my mind was not a specific trick or a specific performer. It was the realization that magic touches something deep in how human beings process reality. It is not a party game. It is not a puzzle. It is a neurological event that activates the brain’s most sophisticated cognitive machinery — the same machinery that processes logical contradictions, evaluates evidence, and constructs models of how the world works.
When you perform magic for someone and they experience genuine wonder, you have not entertained them. You have activated their conflict-detection circuitry. You have given their brain a problem it cannot solve. You have created a state — measurable, observable, replicable — in which their prediction of reality and their perception of reality are irreconcilably at odds.
That is not trivial. That is not children’s entertainment. That is one of the most profound things one human being can do for another: reveal, through direct experience, that the reality our brains construct for us is not as solid as we think.
The fMRI does not lie. The brain lights up. The conflict regions fire. The search for resolution begins and fails. And in that failure — in the brain’s inability to reconcile what it believes with what it has witnessed — magic is born.
Not in the performer’s hands. Not in the method. Not in the props or the patter or the presentation. In the three pounds of neural tissue between the spectator’s ears. That is where magic lives. That is where it has always lived. And the fMRI, finally, lets us see it happening.