Do you believe in magic? This professor does and thinks it can help teach students about health care and medicine.
When Stephen Wood was growing up in Auburn, New Hampshire, he watched his grandfather perform simple magic tricks — pulling an egg out of his mouth or making a coin disappear.
Wood knew he wanted to do the same. He soon acquired his own Mickey Mouse magic book and a beginner magician’s kit.
It would kickstart what turned into a lifelong love affair with magic.
“I fell in love with magic immediately,” said Wood, now a visiting associate clinical professor and program director in the adult/gerontology acute care nurse practitioner program at Northeastern University. “I started doing magic for my family probably at age 6. We always played around with it.”
Little did he know, this hobby would eventually shape his career in academia. Wood, who is also a lead in Northeastern’s school of nursing, now teaches a course on how magic can be used in health care and is conducting research on whether magic can help teach students complex pharmaceutical concepts — all born from his childhood hobby.
“I love seeing magic,” Wood said. “I love performing magic. We’re also creating this scaffolding of using magic theory and performance to think about how we provide health care and how we educate students. It’s really mixing the best of both worlds for me by being able to do magic but also integrate it into scientific exploration and into academia.”
Wood continued practicing magic into his teen years, joining the Society of Young Magicians’ New Hampshire chapter. Every Saturday morning, his mom would drive him to Nashua, New Hampshire, where he spent an hour meeting other magicians who’d perform and teach tricks.
It was here that he met his mentor, Wendel Gibson, and learned not only how to complete certain tricks but how to perform them in front of a crowd. While many teens worked fast food and retail jobs, Wood earned money by putting on magic shows at kids parties.
Wood fell out of practicing magic in college but returned to it at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Wood works in intensive care units as a nurse practitioner and spent the early days of the pandemic serving in an emergency room in a dedicated COVID hospital. He later joined an ICU dealing exclusively with COVID cases.
“I just really needed some sort of escape,” Wood said. “So I came home, and I would watch magicians performing and then I started picking it back up.”
Wood then joined a local magic group where he connected with other magicians interested in the neuroscience of magic. He collaborated with some fellow magicians to work on a course looking at the neuroscience of magic and how the practice can be used in health care.
Wood brought this to Northeastern, where he teaches a course called “Magic and Healthcare” that explores the neuroscience of magic and how it can be applied to health care.
“If we think about what magicians do, a lot of people think about sleight of hand and misdirection,” said Wood. “But a lot of it actually is neuroscience and attention. … It’s about how we manipulate attention, how we manipulate people’s feelings so that they might have to make decisions on their own. But in reality, we’re making the decisions.”
Wood gives this as an example: A patient comes into a health care practice with a fever and a headache and insists they have West Nile virus. The practitioner knows this is unlikely. But they can offer to test the patient for it while showing them the large needle that’ll be used for the lumbar puncture and emphasize that it will be a difficult test. This way the patient is the one making the call on their decision, but the use of props and shifting their attention will make them more likely to decide against the unnecessary procedure.
“I’m going to show you that needle, and I’m going to talk about how I’m going to place that needle into your spine,” Wood said. “All of those things that really influence you away from wanting to have that done. Instead, I can give you some fluids and some Tylenol and you feel better and go home. We do that in magic all the time, explaining different things in the way that we want you to view them.”
Wood also recently helped run a hackathon at Northeastern in which students were challenged to use magic props to figure out how to better organize kits used for central lines. This is the second hackathon he’s done that involved using the principles of magic to redesign medical devices.
“We gave them all a kids magic kit and taught them some of the effects,” Wood said. “People used a lot of principles from these props to make the kit work better and make it more user-friendly. There were two or three teams in the end that came up with some really good ideas … making things disappear when you’re done using them or allowing for you to make things appear when you need them. It was fun to see the creativity people had and see them take these magic props and use them to be part of a medical kit.”
Wood is continuing to build on his work with new research that’ll examine if surprise can help as a learning tool when it comes to complex pharmacologic principles, testing whether doing experiments with magic effects will help students better understand certain concepts over something like a standard lecture. He’s also in the process of developing a workshop on using magic in theater.
He also continues to do magic as a literal party trick when he’s with family and friends. His practice these days involves learning through magic books, watching magic videos, and learning from his fellow magicians. He’s part of the Science of Magic Association and the Society of American Magicians.
He’s also known to perform a few tricks for his students, his favorite being “the matrix,” which involves magically moving coins around.
“I like doing magic for myself,” Wood said. “It’s a fun thing to learn and perfect, but the whole idea of magic is that there’s also a lot of storytelling. If I just showed an effect but didn’t really have any story behind it, it’s not as engaging. A lot of magic … is about storytelling. That’s what I really like about it. I love doing the effects, but I also like developing those stories and telling the story and getting people engaged.”