Benedict Carey at the NYTimes writes an entertaining piece today, While a Magician Works, the Mind Does the Tricks, which dives deeper into a recent article published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience that highlights how magicians "take advantage of glitches in how the brain constructs a model of the outside world from moment to moment, or what we think of as objective reality."

One great illusion explained in the article revolves around how our visual cortex processes stimuli has is seen in this trick by the Great Tomsoni. "The magician has an assistant appear on stage in a white dress and tells the audience he will magically change the color of her dress to red. He first does this by shining a red light on her, an obvious ploy that he turns into a joke. Then the red light flicks off, the house lights go on and the now the woman is unmistakably dressed in red. The secret: In the split-second after the red light goes off, the red image lingers in the audience’s brains for about 100 milliseconds, covering the image of the woman. It’s just enough time for the woman’s white dress to be stripped away, revealing a red one underneath."

The paper with many more explanations and links to video of a magician's performance can be found here.