Can I get comments/advice on this essay? Thanks!
Prompt: Stanford students possess intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.
As a child, I have always been fascinated by magic tricks. Whenever I watch a magician perform, his tricks leave an imprint that remains in my mind for hours. How did he make that card disappear? Where did that second coin appear from? These questions never ceased to plague me after leaving a magic show.
Seeing how magicians had the ability to provoke the audience's amusement and curiosity sparked my own interest in magic tricks. After buying a few kits and reading online tutorials, I started practicing my own tricks and performed in front of my family and friends. While some were fairly straightforward, I did not fully understand why others worked.
One day in my psychology class, Mrs. Hewitt played a clip. She told us to count how many times the people in white jerseys pass to the people in black jerseys. At the end of the clip, I felt confident that I knew the answer. "How many of you noticed the gorilla walk into the middle of the screen?", she asked. I was stunned. There was no way that a gorilla could have walked in the middle of the screen without me noticing. After replaying the video, the entire class was in disbelief after not having noticed the gorilla the first time. "Humans have a selective attention," Mrs. Hewitt explained. "We only focus our awareness on a limited aspect of all that we experience."
Suddenly it started to make sense. The reason why that magician was able to make that second coin appear in his left hand was because he took advantage of human psychology. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much many magic tricks relied on the blind spots of the human brain. As I learned more psychology, I understood connections between things such as perceptual organization and magic tricks. For the same reason that I loved magic tricks, I loved psychology. I realized that in order to be a successful magician, one must exploit the efficiencies of the mind. Learning psychology has not only allowed me to understand the intricacies of the human brain, but has also made performing magic tricks much more real to me.
Prompt: Stanford students possess intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.
As a child, I have always been fascinated by magic tricks. Whenever I watch a magician perform, his tricks leave an imprint that remains in my mind for hours. How did he make that card disappear? Where did that second coin appear from? These questions never ceased to plague me after leaving a magic show.
Seeing how magicians had the ability to provoke the audience's amusement and curiosity sparked my own interest in magic tricks. After buying a few kits and reading online tutorials, I started practicing my own tricks and performed in front of my family and friends. While some were fairly straightforward, I did not fully understand why others worked.
One day in my psychology class, Mrs. Hewitt played a clip. She told us to count how many times the people in white jerseys pass to the people in black jerseys. At the end of the clip, I felt confident that I knew the answer. "How many of you noticed the gorilla walk into the middle of the screen?", she asked. I was stunned. There was no way that a gorilla could have walked in the middle of the screen without me noticing. After replaying the video, the entire class was in disbelief after not having noticed the gorilla the first time. "Humans have a selective attention," Mrs. Hewitt explained. "We only focus our awareness on a limited aspect of all that we experience."
Suddenly it started to make sense. The reason why that magician was able to make that second coin appear in his left hand was because he took advantage of human psychology. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much many magic tricks relied on the blind spots of the human brain. As I learned more psychology, I understood connections between things such as perceptual organization and magic tricks. For the same reason that I loved magic tricks, I loved psychology. I realized that in order to be a successful magician, one must exploit the efficiencies of the mind. Learning psychology has not only allowed me to understand the intricacies of the human brain, but has also made performing magic tricks much more real to me.
