An empirical assessment of the magician's "off-beat

Magicians are informal cognitive scientists who regularly test their hypotheses in the real world. As such, they can provide scientists with novel hypotheses for formal psychological research as well as a real-world context in which to study them. One domain where magic can directly inform science is the deployment of attention in time and across modalities. Both magicians and scientists have an incomplete understanding of how attention operates in time, rather than in space.