IMPOSSIBLE
Magicians are honest deceivers. Unlike most liars, they are completely open about their intentions to cheat. Despite this, they still have to convince an audience that objects can disappear into thin air, that women can be sawn in half, and that the future can be predicted with uncanny accuracy.
For more than a hundred years, a handful of psychologists have investigated the secret psychology used by magicians to fool their audiences. In the 1890s, the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow teamed up with two world-famous illusionists to discover whether the hand really is quicker than the eye. Jastrow is one of my academic heroes. In one of the first experiments into subliminal perception, this amazing character analyzed the dreams of blind people and figured out the psychology behind the Ouija board. Unfortunately, Jastrow also suffered from mental illness: One Chicago newspaper reported the onset of his illness with the headline “Famous Mind Doctor Loses His Own.”
To investigate the psychology of magic, Jastrow collaborated with two illusionists named Alexander Herrmann and Harry Kellar. 33 Herrmann and Kellar were among the most famous magicians of their day and were locked in a constant rivalry throughout most of their professional lives. If one made a donkey disappear, the other would make an elephant vanish. If one made a woman levitate above the stage, the other would have his assistant float a few feet higher. If one plucked a fan of cards from thin air, the other would perform the same feat blindfolded. Jastrow invited these two great performers to his University of Wisconsin laboratory and had them participate in a range of tests measuring their reaction time, speed of movement, and accuracy of finger motion. Jastrow’s results revealed little out of the ordinary, roughly matching those of a control group of nonmagicians collected a few years before.
But Jastrow scientifically demonstrated what most magicians already knew. Magic has little to do with fast movements. Instead, conjurors use a range of psychological weapons to fool their audiences. Suggestion plays a key role in the process. In the same way that people can be made to believe that they once went on a nonexistent trip in a hot-air balloon, or became lost in a shopping mall, so magicians have to be able to manipulate people’s perception of a performance.
The concept can be illustrated with a simple laboratory-based experiment that I recently conducted into mind over matter. 34 I showed a group of my students a videotape in which a magician apparently used the power of his mind (actually sleight of hand) to bend a metal key. He then placed the key on the table, stood back, and said, “Look, it’s amazing, the key is still bending.” Afterward, all the students were interviewed about what they had seen. More than half were convinced that they had seen the key continuing to bend as it lay on the table, and they had no idea how the magician could have achieved such an impressive trick: a dramatic illustration of how an expert deceiver can draw upon years of experience to deliver a sentence with such confidence that people believe they see the impossible happening before their very eyes.
PSYCHOLOGY IN THE SÉANCE ROOM
Perhaps my most memorable set of studies examined the role of suggestion in the séance room. 35 Much of this work was carried out with a friend of mine, Andy Nyman. Andy is a skilled actor and magician who helps create material for Derren Brown, the highly successful British television illusionist. I first met Andy many years ago at a conference on magic, and we discovered that we were both interested in the techniques used by fraudulent mediums in the nineteenth century to fake ghostly phenomena in the séance room. We were curious about whether the hundred-year-old techniques would fool a modern-day audience, and so we decided to stage a series of unusual experiments.
The plan was
Magicians are honest deceivers. Unlike most liars, they are completely open about their intentions to cheat. Despite this, they still have to convince an audience that objects can disappear into thin air, that women can be sawn in half, and that the future can be predicted with uncanny accuracy.
For more than a hundred years, a handful of psychologists have investigated the secret psychology used by magicians to fool their audiences. In the 1890s, the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow teamed up with two world-famous illusionists to discover whether the hand really is quicker than the eye. Jastrow is one of my academic heroes. In one of the first experiments into subliminal perception, this amazing character analyzed the dreams of blind people and figured out the psychology behind the Ouija board. Unfortunately, Jastrow also suffered from mental illness: One Chicago newspaper reported the onset of his illness with the headline “Famous Mind Doctor Loses His Own.”
To investigate the psychology of magic, Jastrow collaborated with two illusionists named Alexander Herrmann and Harry Kellar. 33 Herrmann and Kellar were among the most famous magicians of their day and were locked in a constant rivalry throughout most of their professional lives. If one made a donkey disappear, the other would make an elephant vanish. If one made a woman levitate above the stage, the other would have his assistant float a few feet higher. If one plucked a fan of cards from thin air, the other would perform the same feat blindfolded. Jastrow invited these two great performers to his University of Wisconsin laboratory and had them participate in a range of tests measuring their reaction time, speed of movement, and accuracy of finger motion. Jastrow’s results revealed little out of the ordinary, roughly matching those of a control group of nonmagicians collected a few years before.
But Jastrow scientifically demonstrated what most magicians already knew. Magic has little to do with fast movements. Instead, conjurors use a range of psychological weapons to fool their audiences. Suggestion plays a key role in the process. In the same way that people can be made to believe that they once went on a nonexistent trip in a hot-air balloon, or became lost in a shopping mall, so magicians have to be able to manipulate people’s perception of a performance.
The concept can be illustrated with a simple laboratory-based experiment that I recently conducted into mind over matter. 34 I showed a group of my students a videotape in which a magician apparently used the power of his mind (actually sleight of hand) to bend a metal key. He then placed the key on the table, stood back, and said, “Look, it’s amazing, the key is still bending.” Afterward, all the students were interviewed about what they had seen. More than half were convinced that they had seen the key continuing to bend as it lay on the table, and they had no idea how the magician could have achieved such an impressive trick: a dramatic illustration of how an expert deceiver can draw upon years of experience to deliver a sentence with such confidence that people believe they see the impossible happening before their very eyes.
PSYCHOLOGY IN THE SÉANCE ROOM
Perhaps my most memorable set of studies examined the role of suggestion in the séance room. 35 Much of this work was carried out with a friend of mine, Andy Nyman. Andy is a skilled actor and magician who helps create material for Derren Brown, the highly successful British television illusionist. I first met Andy many years ago at a conference on magic, and we discovered that we were both interested in the techniques used by fraudulent mediums in the nineteenth century to fake ghostly phenomena in the séance room. We were curious about whether the hundred-year-old techniques would fool a modern-day audience, and so we decided to stage a series of unusual experiments.
The plan was
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