Magic is helping to unlock the mysteries of the human brain

In a brightly coloured shipping container in east London, Rubens Filho is asking me to pick a card. "Any card," he says, fanning the pack out face down. "And don't worry, you can show me. I pull out the seven of spades, and show it to him; he gets me to sign my name on it with a marker pen. Then he slides it back into the middle of the pack, puts the cards back into their box and puts the box on the table in front of us. "Now," he says with a grin, "the magic begins." Filho is 51, tall, handsome and infectiously enthusiastic about the power of magic tricks and illusions. Born in Brazil, he's been a keen magician since adolescence. He came to Britain in 2012 to work in advertising, before, in 2015, setting up Abracademy, a startup dedicated to bringing magic – and in particular the skills needed to perform it – to the rest of us. "I think magic has a such a positive twist," he says. "It brings this soft approach that's hard to explain, this role of creating something beautiful." But he is also fascinated by the relationship between magic and neuroscience and psychology, and set up Abracademy Labs, an offshoot of Abracademy, to explore this connection. "Magic has lived in the'glitches' of the brain for a long time," he says. "How you see things, how you form beliefs, how you experience wonder.