At last something interesting among all those old magazines in the doctor's office. I came across this recently from Scientific American Mind November/December 2010.

Mind over Magic? Conjuring Reveals How Our Neural Circuits Can Be Hacked
Magicians dazzle us by exploiting loopholes in the brain's circuitry for perceiving the world and paying attention

Excerpted from Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions, by Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, with Sandra Blakeslee, by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC (US) and Profile Books (UK). Copyright © 2010 by Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde.

Apollo Robbins, master pickpocket and celebrity magician, demonstrates his kleptic arts to a roomful of neuroscientists who have come to Las Vegas for the 2007 Magic of Consciousness Symposium.

Humans have a hardwired process of attention and awareness that is hackable. When people focus on one thing, their brains automatically suppress everything that happens around it. Magicians have devised many techniques that exploit this “tunnel vision.”

People can pay attention in various ways. Magicians exploit “top-down,” or deliberate, attention by, say, asking a person to scan a book. They capture “bottom-up” attention with distracting displays such as doves fluttering out of a hat."

If you follow the mind spinoff of scientific american you can enjoy some more articles by those two, and they have a book out.

Stephen and Susana also did a presentation at the Magic and Meaning gathering in Las Vegas in 2011. Sleights of Mind is an interesting read.