Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

Guitar learning diary: As I learn to play the guitar, I realised that I might be able to make musical associations without mental awareness. It’s probably because I am not familiar enough with the language of music to surface musical feelings to a conscious level. For example, yesterday, I tried to play some dominant 9 chords in a book. I was learning the fingering so I wasn’t attending to the sounds of the chords.

My family has been watching the Penn & Teller: Fool Us TV series. I was reminded of a 2008 paper published in Nature Review Neuroscience about the psychological aspects of magic. Teller was listed as a co-author (among several well-known magicians). There is a very remarkable sentence in the paper: “One of the authors of this Perspective (referring to Apollo Robbins) is a professional thief.”