Montreal: Dr. Amir Raz to talk about hypnosis, magic and placebos in medicine

Dr. Amir Raz will be giving his lecture, "The Placebo Effect," on his Oct. 23 lecture at this year’s Trottier Public Science Symposium “Mind Matters: The Body-Mind Connection.”

From the article "Trottier Symposium speaker Dr. Amir Raz on hypnosis, magic and placebos in medicine" McGill Reporter:

Before he was a psychiatry professor and researcher, Amir Raz was a magician — and the two occupations aren’t as different as you might think. As Canada Research Chair in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention, Dr. Raz is interested in deception and how people’s physiology is influenced by their expectations of what is about to happen.

Read the interview.

Jay Olson and Amir Raz in Consciousness and Cognition

From UBC News:

Magicians have astonished audiences for centuries by subtly, yet powerfully, influencing their decisions. But there has been little systematic study of the psychological factors that make magic tricks work.

Now, a team of researchers from McGill University and UBC has combined the art of conjuring and the science of psychology to demonstrate how certain contextual factors can sway the decisions people make, even though they may feel that they are choosing freely – a finding with potential implications even for daily decision-making.

“We began with a principle of magic that we didn’t fully understand: how magicians influence audiences to choose a particular card without their awareness,” explains Jay Olson, lead author of a new study published in Consciousness and Cognition. “We found that people tend to choose options that are more salient or attention-grabbing, but they don’t know why they chose them,” says Olson, a graduate student in psychiatry in McGill University’s Raz Lab, which investigates psychological phenomena such as attention and consciousness. 

Read more.

This article was also picked up at:

• the Medical Xpress 
• the Science of Us and
• Science 2.0