Humans are apt to be taken in by hand-magic tricks because they bring to their observations an expectation of how hands work and what certain movements mean. If it looks as if a magician has passed an object from one hand to another, then surely that is what has happened. Corvids are not so easily fooled, in part because they do not expect to be fooled. In a fascinating paper by Elias Garcia-Pelegrin et al (2021), the experimental team discovered that Eurasian scrub-jays were not misled by sleight-of-hand techniques that fooled humans – specifically, “palming” and the “French drop” – whereas they were deceived by magic effects that relied on speed of movement. (The question remains: what would a magic technique that capitalises on corvids’ expectations, if such there be, look like – and would the birds be fooled by it?)
In the human domain, writers of fiction have long been fascinated by magic, and by our species' tendency to confuse the probable with the actual. Among contemporary authors Christopher Priest (The Prestige) and Robert Irwin (Satan Wants Me) have written excellent novels about trickery and magic, and have wondered what sort of world it would be that allowed some tricks to be true. Here we tiptoe closer to a different category, the Uncanny, which is magic-adjacent because it raises the possibility that the world of familiar objects may be concealing something from us (like a jay hiding its food). H. G. Wells’s 1905 short story “The Magic Shop” plays on these notions. In it, an innocent child (Gip) accepts the reality of wonderful goings-on in a shop on Regents Street. Has he been fooled, or is he seeing things his father cannot? Wells gives the scrub-jay experiment a twist, substituting the child’s point-of-view for the birds’. Instead of seeing through a stage-trick, the young idealist sees that his imaginative perceptions help to create reality. In that sense, his lead soldiers really do run about on their own – “and I would not like them if they did not!”