I am not Susanna Martinez-Conday. My beautiful genius of a wife decided today to get sick. So unlike my fellow speakers, I've had four hours to prepare. Susanna and I are neuroscientists at the Barron Aralogical Institute and we study how magic works in the brain. What you are is a bunch of electrochemical signals inside your brain. You are getting information from your sensory systems, which your brain uses to create a simulation for you and with this simulation you drive around this meat robot that you call your body. So by studying visual illusions, we can find out the fundamental fabric of the universe just like any high energy physicist but with a lot less money if you could give us some please. One of the things we realize is we need to go to Vegas and we need to study magicians because they are the artists of attention and awareness. And just like visual artists create illusions that we can use to understand the brain, magicians are the artists of attention and awareness. So we went to Vegas, we hooked up with several world-class famous magicians such as Teller from Penn and Teller, James Randy, the amazing Randy, and we started studying how magic tricks worked in the brain. And it was really cool. We found out a lot of things that you can find out about in our book, Slice of Mind. We published a few papers with them including a Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper on magic in the brain. We've had a couple of scientific American papers that you can download. They cost about a million dollars, our book's 26. Now this is a painting of the conjurer, a painter by Horano's Bosch, showing that even in the middle ages, magicians did their thing. Now you'll notice that while people are watching the tricks that their pockets were being picked. This is how magic first started, was really about manipulating people. And there are several different types of illusions in magic. There's special effects, there's gimmicks, optical illusions, our physical effects of light, visual illusions are things happening in your brain that are very interesting to neuroscientists, and then of course there are cognitive effects, such as misdirection, which is really about how magicians control the attentional spotlight, such as this young woman in blue talking to this young woman in green, but really paying attention to the chocolate cake. There is a great illusion that allows you to see your attentional spotlight, fixate in the very center in the green dot, but pay attention to the upper right circle in the Venn diagram, and it'll get brighter than the other circles. Another great illusion is if you take a look at these faces here, you'll notice that magicians do this as well. They use their face in order to distract you from the fact that the little girl has six fingers on her right hand. This is Tom Messerall, the martial magician, and he is showing you the cups and balls trick. One of the reasons magicians do this is because they use it to distribute your attention. They do three balls and three cups in order to keep you on your toes at all times in order to keep you from paying attention to what exactly they're doing. The bottom line here is that multitasking is a myth, and magicians know it, and that's what they're doing. They're trying to get you to multitask, and by doing that, since you're going to fail, they can do a secret move while you're paying attention to the wrong thing. Before your life, this means that you shouldn't allow your children to text and derive. You should reduce distractions in your workplace so that it's not so hard for your spotlight of attention to pay attention to what's important. Remove the chocolate cake from your child's study space, turn off the TV, and they'll do much better. At the same time, don't pay attention to too much tunnel vision to one specific thing, or you might miss out on some of the great opportunities in your life, and magicians know this as well, and use it to their advantage all the time. They also use something called humor or mirth, and they know that when you feel humor or mirth in your brain, your attentional system is suppressed, and they can get away with magical murder. You can do the same. Use charm to disarm people in your business and negotiations in your personal life, and also remember that magicians make mistakes all the time, just like the rest of us, but they just keep moving on and no one ever seems to notice. Of course, they don't tell you what the trick is ahead of time. My name is Stephen Macnick. My wife is in Santa Martinez, Conde, and we have this new book, Slice of Mine, which just debuted in England at number 51 out of 8 million. So we're very excited. Thank you.