Teller Reveals His Secrets
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
People want to be amazed. All magic requires misdirection, sure, but the audience is usually in a frame of mind that's willing to suspend disbelief for a moment long enough for the magician to exploit it. Think about how a street magician works a group: "Would you like to see a magic trick?"
I know one magician who sets the frame of mind of his audience by doing something so ludicrous it attracts a crowd. He sits outside a fast food joint eating lunch and pulls an amazingly large straw out of the bag. It's more clever than "would you like to see a trick," but the effect is the same.
I've always been amazed how great magicians can take a relatively simple trick, like a forced card (which always offers an audience member a choice, but the card is always predetermined). Magicians do the sleight of hand right in front of a crowd of people, in plain sight, but nobody notices. Because they don't want to notice. They've allowed their minds to wander for a moment, which is why magicians rarely repeat tricks with the same audience and when they do, its usually a variation of the first that combines another trick (Teller's #5).
One of my favorite card tricks is a classic. Select a card and put it back in the middle of the deck. It keeps rising to the top of the deck every time you stick it in the middle. The reality is that you never actually get to put your card in the middle of the deck. You may have selected initially your card, but everything after that is controlled, down to how the magician makes you hold your card when it's handed back to you. My favorite way to start the trick is with a mental magic joke: Tell the subject to think of a card. Then flip over the top card in the deck, which is almost never the card, but would be pretty cool if it was. Then I pull their card out of the deck and begin controlling it through the routine. The whole point is to keep people off balance and to allow them to have what they truly want: entertainment.
Teller's story about the Cub Scouts is funny to me because I've found that children of a certain age (around 8-15 or so) are simply unwilling to get into the mindset.
Books are filled with advice for how to deal with members of the audience who are unwilling. They usually involve some kind of ridicule of the skeptics for the benefit of the rest of the audience (Teller's #2).
Could you define "in plain sight" in this context? Are card manipulations that are almost impossible to detect, even when known and watched for considered "in plain sight", just because they don't happen "out of frame" to use Teller's term. If so, it isn't "because you don't want to notice", it's because you can't see them even if you're looking.
And what of the crafty moves that do happen in plain sight, but are genuinely missed due to misdirection (selective attention) [1]. This isn't because you don't want to notice either. (Amusingly, at first glance I missed the hand dipping in Tellers back pocket in the photo sequence accompanying the article, because I was concentrating on the cards in Teller's hand).
Suspension of disbelief relates to the enjoyment of the effect in the full knowledge that it is an illusion, not that you willfully ignore the mechanics of an illusion that are otherwise apparent (although this can be a fun manipulation of the audience when the mechanism is apparently unintentionally revealed allowing the audience to "catch the magician out" , but subsequently shown to be inconsequential to the effect, catching the audience out in return).
There are exceptions - Penn & Teller's cups and balls springs to mind - where the joy is in watching just how much more trouble "the secret [is] than the trick seems worth". [2]
For example, I'm specifically referring to things like in the rising card, having the person place the card in the "middle of the deck" and holding out the entire deck minus a single card. That's not out of frame at all. It's a reframing of the definition of the middle of the deck. It's in plain sight and depending on the size of the crowd, it's impossible to completely control all your angles.
Another example would be the double or triple lift where the magician lifts more than one card as though they are a single card. This always happens in frame. Everyone is looking at the cards. Even sloppy lifts, from a magician's standpoint, usually pass without detection, regardless of the speed of the lift. I've always figured this is because people focus their attention on the pattern on the back of the card and not the edges of the card.
Lastly, in pickpocketing tricks, the lifts always happen right in plain sight. For example, I may ask you step forward "so I can do card trick," lift your wallet, and with your wallet in my hand (in plain sight to anyone looking at my hand) reach into my own pocket for a deck of cards. I'll try to limit people noticing the wallet by gesturing to something with my other hand. I'll do a card trick or two and then move into the routine that involves your missing wallet. This is what I think Teller means by "out of frame."
The misdirection needs to be there, but if you watch, they happen several steps before a reveal. Savvy members of an audience might watch other parts of a magician's body, but they don't have the correct timing. They're thinking cause, then effect. Not cause, some random things in the middle, then effect.
Anyway, in that time between, people tend to wander in and out. In one moment they may be trying to figure out the trick, in the next, they're being amazed by the trick.
So, I guess to clarify: Once the illusion is completed, people have given up trying to figure it out. They allow themselves to suspend their disbelief in that moment.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Mind-DERREN-BROWN/dp/1905026358...
Here's a great video of how this is done: http://bit.ly/yWQgQL
Of course this is done in one fluid motion, so he doesn't see the slight of hand switch - like the guy does at the very end of the video.
Does anyone else see a strong isomorphism between that and the advice Seth Godin usually gives? It definitely seems like something an entrepreneur or marketer could learn from - like a way to delight people.
It's a chapter in How to Play in Traffic: http://books.google.com/books/about/Penn_Teller_s_how_to_pla...
Pic: http://www.ldphotography.net/Graves/Famous/P/slides/Penn%20a...
Here it is on The Unpleasant World on Penn and Teller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JomTxDb_HfM
That about sums up American politics.
And what agenda is this?
That's a great aphorism.
I find this very useful while giving speeches. Most of the audience are quite critical before you can prove yourself worth their time. Putting an appropriate joke beforehand helps to grab their approval earlier.
OFF-TOPIC: Copying any part of the article automatically adds the url of an article to the clipboard. This is first time, I've seen this, very annoying!
Neuroscience is a 'bottom-up' field, starting from the smallest components and trying to understand how they're interacting. Psychology is the 'top-down' field, starting with complex phenomenon and trying to break them down. The psychology of cognition and attenion is the stuff that's relevant where magic's involved. Much of the things that Penn & Teller expose in the workings of magic is known to cognitive and attentional psychology - it's the flawless execution to make it work that is the trick, an idea supported by the magician's mantra 'practise practise practise'.
The problem with the two disciplines above is that there's so much we don't know - we're nowhere near being able to make them 'meet in the middle'. The human mind is incredibly complex.