A few years ago, he investigated Swami Premananda, an Indian guru who apparently materialised trinkets out of thin air. These psychological swindles are also used by fake psychics, and Wiseman has exposed several cases of bogus psychic phenomena. By that time, it is too late for them to figure out the real method. They think they know the method, but at the end are shown to be wrong. If the magician can direct the audience's suspicion towards a false method, they will be less likely to discover the real one. This hinders the audience's attempt to figure out how the trick is done. In addition to physical misdirection, there is mental misdirection, which misdirects suspicion rather than attention. As Lamont explains, however, this is a rather crude example. As the magician and audience turn to see what happened, the magician sneaks a rabbit into the hat. Hence, a magician shows a hat empty, then introduces his glamorous assistant. This exploits several psychological principles, such as the fact that the human mind is easily distracted by novelty or movement, and the tendency to look where others are looking. Misdirection generally means directing the audience's attention towards a particular area, enabling the magician to perform the vital conjuring action unnoticed elsewhere. This is achieved using the psychology of misdirection. The challenge for the magician is to divorce the effect from the method so completely that the audience has no hope of reconstructing the method after the trick is over. Ideally, the audience fully appreciates the effect, but cannot deduce the method. The effect is what the audience sees and the method is the magician's secret way of achieving the effect. Lamont and Wiseman refer to the coin vanishing as the "effect" and label the so-called false transfer at the heart of it the "method". The trick under scrutiny is the vanishing of a coin, whereby a magician appears to pass a coin from one hand to another, closes the hand around the coin, then opens it to show that the coin has disappeared. It outlines the nine types of conjuring effects (for example: vanish, penetration and restoration) and then examines one particular illusion in detail. Magic in Theory is an intriguing text, despite its analytical, clinical and dry approach. The book has three aims: to help magicians improve their performance, to provide psychologists with knowledge from a previously untapped source and to teach parapsychologists some of the ruses used by pseudo-psychics. However, this has never been formally documented until this week, as Lamont and Wiseman publish Magic in Theory. For a magician to perform a successful trick, it is not enough to have nimble fingers or a clever gadget - it is also necessary to exploit the psychology of the situation.įor centuries, magicians have accumulated a whole series of psychological insights. This evening they have organised a unique seminar devoted to the psychology of magic. I am being escorted by Peter Lamont and Richard Wiseman - not only magicians, but also psychologists working at the Universities of Edinburgh and Hertfordshire respectively. It is rare that journalists are allowed to visit the Circle, located in an alley behind London's Euston station. Its motto is "Indocilis Privata Loqui", which roughly translates as "Keep Your Trap Shut". Founded in 1905, the Magic Circle is a clandestine organisation for magicians, conjurors and illusionists, allowing them to discuss their ideas in an environment where their secrets are safe.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |