But his latest magic gig is even more unusual: performing for Eurasian jays at Cambridge University's Comparative Cognition Lab. Birds can be harder to fool than tourists. And to do magic for the jays, he had to learn to do sleight-of-hand tricks with a live, wriggling waxworm instead of the customary coin or ball.
In just the last few years, researchers have become interested in what they can learn about animal minds by studying what does and doesn't fool them. Magic effects can reveal blind spots in seeing and roadblocks in thinking, says Nicky Clayton, who heads the Cambridge lab and, with Garcia-Pelegrin and others, cowrote an overview of the science of magic in the Annual Review of Psychology.
What we visually perceive about the world is a product of how our brains interpret what our eyes see. Humans and other animals have evolved to handle the immense amount of visual information we're exposed to by prioritizing some types of information, filtering out things that are usually less relevant and filling in gaps with assumptions.
Many magic effects exploit these cognitive shortcuts in humans, and comparing how well these same tricks work on other species may reveal something about how their minds operate. Clayton and her colleagues have used magic.
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