Magic is an art — as capable of beauty as music, painting or poetry— Teller says, but the core of every trick is a cold, cognitive experiment in perception:
Does the trick fool the audience? A magician’s data sample spans centuries, and his experiments have been replicated often enough to constitute near-certainty. Neuroscientists — well intentioned as they are — are gathering soil samples from the foot of a mountain that magicians have mapped and mined for centuries.
He shares a few principles magicians employ when they want to alter your perceptions:
- Exploit pattern recognition.
- Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth.
- It’s hard to think critically if you’re laughing.
- Keep the trickery outside the frame.
- To fool the mind, combine at least two tricks.
- Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.
- If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely.
For instance:
I slip a queen of hearts in my right shoe, an ace of spades in my left and a three of clubs in my wallet. Then I manufacture an entire deck out of duplicates of those three cards. That takes 18 decks, which is costly and tedious (No. 2—More trouble than it’s worth).
When I cut the cards, I let you glimpse a few different faces. You conclude the deck contains 52 different cards (No. 1—Pattern recognition). You think you’ve made a choice, just as when you choose between two candidates preselected by entrenched political parties (No. 7—Choice is not freedom).
Now I wiggle the card to my shoe (No. 3—If you’re laughing…). When I lift whichever foot has your card, or invite you to take my wallet from my back pocket, I turn away (No. 4—Outside the frame) and swap the deck for a normal one from which I’d removed all three possible selections (No. 5—Combine two tricks). Then I set the deck down to tempt you to examine it later and notice your card missing (No. 6—The lie you tell yourself).
(Hat tip to Ross.)
I just figured out why I’m not impressed by magicians.
Whenever I find out how a trick is done, it never changes how I think the world works. I mainly just learn again that I can be fooled, which is a bit of a no-brainer.
This is why I listen to scientists at all. They have many tricks for detecting and rectifying foolage. As a bonus, they’re individually simple.
So I guess it does verify something else: magic tricks unambiguously set off the science klaxons. But then, if they didn’t, it would just seem normal, not counter-intuitive at all, and wouldn’t make a very good trick. Which sadly means it isn’t a good test. Which means I need tricks that aren’t supposed to be seen as tricks, for testing.