3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on the Magic of Magic
The Prestige, the Invisible Gorilla & How to Expose a Magic Trick
I. The Prestige
Magic tricks tend to be carefully planned and executed. Here’s stage engineer John Cutter (Michael Caine) explaining the anatomy of an illusion in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. [Read in Michael Caine voice]:
Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called ‘The Pledge’. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course...it probably isn’t.
The second act is called ‘The Turn’. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret...but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet.
Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call ‘The Prestige’.
—The Prestige (2006)
II. The Invisible Gorilla
Sometimes scientific experiments can seem like magic tricks. Here are psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons on their famous selective attention experiment involving a seemingly invisible gorilla:
Imagine you are asked to watch a short video in which six people-three in white shirts and three in black shirts-pass basketballs around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla?
Almost everyone has the intuition that the answer is “yes, of course I would.” How could something so obvious go completely unnoticed? But when we did this experiment at Harvard University several years ago, we found that half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible.
This experiment reveals two things: that we are missing a lot of what goes on around us, and that we have no idea that we are missing so much.
—Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla
On a related note, check out my essay on Intuitive Traps: 5 Common But Hidden Barriers to Critical Thinking.
III. How to Expose a Magic Trick
It almost seems like the thrill of watching a magic trick is to want to know how it’s done while simultaneously hoping we never find out. Here’s science communicator Carl Sagan on the importance of collaboration in magic:
Magic requires tacit cooperation of the audience with the magician — an abandonment of skepticism, or what is sometimes described as the willing suspension of disbelief. It immediately follows that to penetrate the magic, to expose the trick, we must cease collaborating.
—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
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Have a great week,
Chris
themindcollection.com