Teller explains the psychology of magic

http://boingboing.net/2012/11/13/teller-explains-the-psychology.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

“1.  Exploit pattern recognition. I magically produce four  silver dollars, one at a time, with the back of my hand toward you. Then I allow  you to see the palm of my hand empty before a fifth coin appears. As Homo  sapiens, you grasp the pattern, and take away the impression that I  produced all five coins from a hand whose palm was empty.

2. Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick  seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time,  money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to  invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top  hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks.  We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches  (the kind from under your stove don’t hang around for close-ups) and taught us  to pick the bugs up without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we built a  secret compartment out of foam-core (one of the few materials cockroaches can’t  cling to) and worked out a devious routine for sneaking the compartment into the  hat. More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to  magicians.

3. It’s hard to think critically if you’re laughing. We  often follow a secret move immediately with a joke. A viewer has only  so much attention to give, and if he’s laughing, his mind is too busy with the  joke to backtrack rationally.

4.  Keep the trickery outside the frame. I take off my  jacket and toss it aside. Then I reach into your pocket and pull out a  tarantula. Getting rid of the jacket was just for my comfort, right? Not  exactly. As I doffed the jacket, I copped the spider.

5. To fool the mind, combine at least two tricks. Every  night in Las Vegas, I make a children’s ball come to life like a trained dog. My  method—the thing that fools your eye—is to puppeteer the ball with a thread too  fine to be seen from the audience. But during the routine, the ball jumps  through a wooden hoop several times, and that seems to rule out the possibility  of a thread. The hoop is what magicians call misdirection, a second trick that “proves” the first. The hoop is genuine, but the deceptive choreography I use  took 18 months to develop (see No. 2—More trouble than it’s worth).

6. Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.  David P. Abbott was an Omaha magician who invented the basis of my ball trick  back in 1907. He used to make a golden ball float around his parlor. After the  show, Abbott would absent-mindedly leave the ball on a bookshelf while he went  to the kitchen for refreshments. Guests would sneak over, heft the ball and find  it was much heavier than a thread could support. So they were mystified. But the  ball the audience had seen floating weighed only five ounces. The one on the  bookshelf was a heavy duplicate, left out to entice the curious. When a magician  lets you notice something on your own, his lie becomes impenetrable.

7. If you are given a choice, you believe you have  acted freely. This is one of the darkest of all psychological secrets.  I’ll explain it by incorporating it (and the other six secrets you’ve just  learned) into a card trick worthy of the most annoying uncle.”

Read more:  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Teller-Reveals-His-Secrets.html#ixzz2CseP685U

I saw Penn & Teller (He’s the silent one but not in the Smithsonian Magazine!) lasrt month in Las Vegas.  They’re awesome.

Maybe he can explain librarian magic too.

Stephen