Nearly 60 years ago, a decade before the counterculture erupted throughout the United States and beyond, Aldous Huxley described his first experience with psychedelic drugs in The Doors of Perception (1954). The book’s title cast back to the metaphorical language of the English Romantic poet and printmaker William Blake, who wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790):

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

Huxley likened the human brain to a reducing valve. It functions to limit your awareness to only those perceptions, ideas, and memories that might be useful for your survival at any given moment, eliminating all else.

Although narrowed awareness prevents you from becoming overwhelmed by a flood of images and impressions, it can become an overlearned habit, a self-limiting cavern that you become convinced is reality. But Huxley believed there were ways out:

Certain persons … seem to be born with a kind of bypass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary bypasses may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate ‘spiritual exercises’, or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs.

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Cognitive brain researchers have studied a magic trick filmed in magician duo Penn & Teller’s theater in Las Vegas, to illuminate the neuroscience of illusion. Their results advance our understanding of how observers can be misdirected and will aid magicians as they work to improve their art. The research team was led by Dr. Stephen Macknik, Director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology at Barrow Neurological Institute, in collaboration with fellow Barrow researchers Hector Rieiro and Dr. Susana Martinez-Conde, Director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience. The study, titled “Perceptual elements in Penn and Teller’s “Cups and Balls” magic trick” was published today, Feb 12th 2013, as part of the launch of PeerJ, a new peer reviewed open access journal in which all articles are freely available to everyone (https://peerj.com/). “Cups and Balls,” a magic illusion in which balls appear and disappear under the cover of cups, is one of the oldest magic tricks in history, with documented descriptions going back to Roman conjurors in 3 B.C. “But we still don’t know how it really works in the brain,” says Macknik, “because this is the first, long overdue, neuroscientific study of the trick.”

The Who asked “who are you?” but Dartmouth neurobiologist Jeffrey Taube asks “where are you?” and “where are you going?” Taube is not asking philosophical or theological questions. Rather, he is investigating nerve cells in the brain that function in establishing one’s location and direction. Taube, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, is using microelectrodes to record the activity of cells in a rat’s brain that make possible spatial navigation—how the rat gets from one place to another—from “here” to “there.” But before embarking to go “there,” you must first define “here.” Survival Value “Knowing what direction you are facing, where you are, and how to navigate are really fundamental to your survival,” says Taube. “For any animal that is preyed upon, you’d better know where your hole in the ground is and how you are going to get there quickly. And you also need to know direction and location to find food resources, water resources, and the like.”