Sleights Of Mind Part 11

When Steve's right hand travels across his body, he is actually retrieving a fake thumb tip-a rubber gimmick that looks just like a real thumb-that was used to sequester the salt inside his left fist. His right hand delivers the fake thumb tip to Susana's waiting gloved left hand. When the undulating duet is done, Steve removes Susana's left glove, which serves to get rid of his thumb tip. Susana is also wearing a fake thumb tip filled with more salt in her right hand, under her glove. At the end of her dance number, she removes her right glove, palms the thumb tip into her right fist, and pours her salt supply into the dovepan.

It appears as if the salt has traveled through two bodies.

END OF SPOILER ALERT.

With the salt now in her right hand, Susana says, "And now, the postsynaptic neuron has been activated." She pulls up her lab coat lapels and moonwalks over to the dovepan as Steve plays a Michael Jackson tune on his iPhone. Steve hears a few members of the jury say, "Ch.o.r.eography!" as if crossing one performance element from a list.

The music stops as Susana pours salt into the dovepan. She places the lid on the device, presses the three-second timer b.u.t.ton, and says, "Now, we wait."

As we embellished our dovepan before heading off to the Magic Castle, we realized that essentially, in magic, there are no new tricks. Nearly all the illusions you see in modern magic shows were invented in the nineteenth century or earlier by showmen in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Modern magicians have been updating and elaborating the same basic tricks ever since.

Moreover, magicians have long excelled at engineering. In the second century BC, Heron of Alexandria, a Greek-Egyptian inventor, made temple doors open and close magically during religious ceremonies. The secret mechanism was a predecessor to the steam engine. Magicians also used to be famous for inventing self-operating machines, called automata, with purely mechanical moving parts. For example, in 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson invented the digesting duck, which appeared to have the ability to eat kernels of grain, metabolize the grain, and defecate.46 "Heron's Temple." Heron of Alexandria invented the automatic opening of doors. The secret mechanism, called aeolipile, consisted of a vessel with two curved pipes connected to it. When the water in the vessel boiled, the steam came out of the tubes, activating a rope mechanism that opened the doors slowly and majestically. (Ill.u.s.tration by Victor Escandell for the Fundacion "la Caixa" museum exhibit "Abracadabra, Ilusionismo y Ciencia") In the mid-nineteenth century, Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, who is considered the father of modern magic (and the main inspiration for Ehrich Weiss, better known as Harry Houdini), used his engineering skills as a clockmaker to construct amazing mechanical contraptions that seemed to operate by magic. A device similar to two different famous Robert-Houdin automata called "Orange Trees" is featured in the 2006 movie The Illusionist. Robert-Houdin also invented the first electric house security alarm and other Rube Goldberg contraptions such as a three-tiered alarm clock system that set off alarms at different places around the house and at different times while also triggering the release of morning oats to his mare in the barn. Other renowned magicians, such as Andre-Jacques Garnerin and John Nevil Maskelyne, made important technological advances by inventing the parachute (Garnerin) and the first ribbonless typewriter and the coin-operated lock for vending machines and, unfortunately, pay toilets (Maskelyne).

We read Robert-Houdin's 1860 autobiography-Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, Amba.s.sador, Author, and Conjurer, Written by Himself-to learn more about this period. This guy's life story reads like a rip-roaring Victorian novel. One of his tricks stands out as an example of how devious magicians are and how little has changed over the past century.

While visiting a prominent local sheikh at a remote desert compound, Robert-Houdin demonstrated his bullet trick. Penn & Teller have a killer bullet trick that is based on this earlier version.

In the trick, which he demonstrated to large audiences in Algiers, Robert-Houdin dared a volunteer from the audience to shoot him point-blank. Having prepared his apparatus in advance, he "caught" the bullet in his teeth.

But here, in the desert, Robert-Houdin was taken by surprise. A skeptic challenged him then and there: "I will lay out two pistols. You choose one. We will load it and I will defeat you."

Robert-Houdin had to buy time. "I require a talisman in order to be invulnerable," he replied. "I have left mine at Algiers. Still, I can, by remaining six hours at prayers, do without the talisman and defy your weapon. Tomorrow morning at eight o'clock, I will allow you to fire at me."

SPOILER ALERT! THE FOLLOWING SECTION DESCRIBES MAGIC SECRETS AND THEIR BRAIN MECHANISMS!.

The magician spent two hours that night ensuring his invulnerability. He took a bullet mold out of his pistol case. Then he took soft wax from a candle, mixed it with a little lamp black, and made a wax bullet. He hollowed it out so it would not be hard. Next he made a second ball and filled it with blood. Robert-Houdin later explained that an Irishman once taught him how to draw blood from the thumb without causing any pain.

The next morning, Robert-Houdin stood fifteen paces from the sheikh, who held the loaded pistol. The gun went off and the bullet appeared between Robert-Houdin's teeth. Furious, the sheikh lunged for the second gun, but Robert-Houdin reached it first. "You could not injure me," he said, "but you shall now see that my aim is more dangerous than yours. Look at that wall." The Frenchman pulled the trigger and on a newly whitewashed wall there appeared a large splotch of blood.

Robert-Houdin had used sleight of hand to put the wax bullet into the first gun, and it broke into pieces when fired. He held a real bullet in his mouth and-voila. With equal dexterity, he placed the blood-filled bullet in the second gun before firing it. The sheikh nearly fainted.

END OF SPOILER ALERT.

The Mechanical Turk.

The first magical contraption to become world famous was "the Turk," an automaton that played master-level chess, invented by the Hungarian baron Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1769. Spectators were welcomed to see the calculating machinery inside its box after each show. Stories about the Turk, especially who discovered its secrets, are legion. One account states the real workings of the Turk were revealed in 1827, when two skeptical young boys from Baltimore hid and watched backstage as a man climbed out of a hidden compartment. The local newspaper broke the story that the chess-playing "automaton" was a hoax.

Perhaps we'll never know the full truth, but Robert-Houdin's account of its origin is as plausible as any. He writes that in 1769, a revolt broke out in a half-Russian half-Polish army regiment stationed at Riga, in what is now Latvia. The leader of the rebels was an officer named Worousky, a man of great talent and energy. Troops were sent to suppress the revolt, and in the rout both of Worousky's thighs were shattered by a cannonball. He threw himself into a ditch behind a hedge and at nightfall dragged himself to the adjacent house of a kindly physician named Osloff. After gangrene set in, both of Worousky's legs were amputated.

Not long after, Wolfgang von Kempelen, a celebrated Viennese inventor of mechanical devices, visited Osloff. Together they devised a plan to help Worousky, who had a bounty on his head, to escape. Worousky was a brilliant chess player, which gave von Kempelen the idea for an automaton chess player. In three months, they built the device-an automaton represented as the upper body of a Turk seated behind a box the shape of a chest of drawers. In the middle of the top of the box was a chess board.

Before each game, von Kempelen opened the doors to the chest so people could see various wheels, pulley, cylinders, springs, and so forth. The Turk's robes were raised so the "body" could be inspected.

After closing the doors, von Kempelen wound up one of the wheels with a key. The Turk nodded its head in salutation, placed its hand on one of the chess pieces, raised it, and deposited it on the board. The inventor said the automaton could not speak. It would signify "check" to the king by three nods and to the queen by two.

The legless Worousky was stowed away in the body of the legless Turk. As soon as the robes fell, he would enter the Turk's upper body, pa.s.sing his arms and hands into the figure and his head into the mask.

According to Robert-Houdin, the magical machine gave Worousky an escape and a livelihood. The Mechanical Turk toured Europe extensively and won nearly all of its chess matches.

"Turk automaton." The operator could hide under the sh.e.l.l of the automaton. (Ill.u.s.trations by Victor Escandell for the Fundacion "la Caixa" museum exhibit "Abracadabra, Ilusionismo y Ciencia") *

Throughout the nineteenth century, magicians were at the forefront of technology and invention, but at some point the development of new effects essentially stopped and magicians clung to their (now) old traditions and technologies. Much of the low-hanging fruit had been plucked, and it was easier to continue to do the same old tricks. More recently, a few magicians, such as Jason Latimer, the winner of the world championship of magic (FISM) in 2003, have embraced modern technologies-lasers, holography, fiber optics, electronics, robotics-and used them to make wholly modern magic and live onstage special effects.47 The basic effects on the brain are still the same (to the best of our knowledge, they haven't developed truly new categories of magic effects yet), but they make fresh and exciting new variants on old tricks using high technology.

Magicians and Spies, Unite!

In 1952, the CIA asked one of the nation's most respected magicians, John Mulholland, for help. Could the master close-up sleight-of-hand artist teach American spies a trick or two in their escalating cat-and-mouse game with Soviet spies?

The reasoning made sense. Both spies and magicians must elude detection. The CIA's many dirty tricks-poison darts, knockout powders, drugs, poisons, tiny cameras-would be operationally useless unless field officers and agents could manipulate them. If Mulholland could deceive an audience that was studying his every move from a few feet away, it should be possible to use similar tricks for secretly administering a pill or a potion to an unsuspecting target.

Mulholland obliged by writing two ill.u.s.trated spy manuals. The first describes and ill.u.s.trates (with delightful drawings) numerous sleights of hand and close-up deceptions for secretly hiding, transporting, and delivering small quant.i.ties of liquids, powders, or pills. The second manual describes methods used by magicians and their a.s.sistants to secretly pa.s.s information.

The George Smileys48 of the day embraced the techniques and, to read modern accounts, became adept at misdirection, change blindness, escapology, and creating cognitive illusions. As the Cold War heated up, the CIA's field officers grew ever more inventive under Mulholland's guidance.

By the 1970s, however, attempts to a.s.sa.s.sinate Fidel Castro with exploding cigars and similar escapades began to embarra.s.s the CIA. In 1973, the agency's director, Richard Helms, ordered all copies of the cla.s.sified magic manuals to be destroyed. The results of such chicanery were just too unpredictable.

For decades, rumors of the manuals' existence circulated in intelligence circles, until parts of them were unearthed and published in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2007, a retired CIA officer, Robert Wallace, discovered a complete set of the lost manuals and published them, with the historian H. Keith Melton, under the t.i.tle The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.

The book reveals that our spies knew about change blindness. An intelligence officer would always park his car at the curb directly in front of his house. On the day a "drop" was to be left for another agent, the officer would park his car across the street from his house. The agent would notice this and pick up the secrets, but the enemy's surveillance team would not see anything out of the ordinary.

This ploy was successful in Moscow, home to the heart of the KGB's surveillance operation. The American intelligence officer would adopt unvarying patterns of daily movements in and around the city. After a few months of this unchanging travel pattern, the American spy would "disappear" during his "normal" commute for a brief time-enough to accomplish a dead drop or post a letter-before reappearing at his normal destination only minutes behind schedule. The watchers, lulled by the monotony of his routine, were not alarmed.

In magic, a larger action covers a smaller action as long as the larger action itself does not attract suspicions. One CIA officer took his dog out for long walks at night (the large action), which gave him numerous opportunities to secretly mark signal sites and service dead drops (the smaller actions). The surveillance teams became used to the pattern and never got suspicious.

Magicians manage "sight lines" to create illusions. Your vantage point in the audience can be used to trick your visual system, as we saw with Vernon's Depth Illusion in chapter 2. A CIA officer discovered that when he was walking in urban areas, on routes he used frequently, the surveillance team trailing him was always a few steps behind. When he made a right-hand turn on foot, he would be in the clear-"in the gap"-for a few seconds. He used that gap to conduct his clandestine moves, out of sight.

Mulholland also gave lessons on misdirection. In the days when many people smoked cigarettes, he instructed officers to lift a flaming match to light a target's cigarette while using the other hand to drop a pill into the target's drink.

To make a miniature camera "disappear" after taking a secret photo, the spies borrowed a magician's tool called a holdout-a simple piece of elastic that retracts an object up a sleeve. They hid toolkits and micro-film in b.u.t.tons, coins, boot heels, and suppositories.

Houdini inspired many of the spies' techniques, including the Identical Twin Illusion (which they called "ident.i.ty transfer"), which involves disguising two people to look like the same person. One spy went a step further and dressed up in a giant Saint Bernard dog suit so that when he was "taken to the vet" (actually a safe house) he could pa.s.s on doc.u.ments before returning home in the dog suit. A real 180-pound Saint Bernard also lived there.

When the timer chimes, Susana lifts the lid of our dovepan and reveals that the ingredients have been transformed into a human brain. Well, not a real brain, but as realistic as one made of Jell-O can look.49 *

Jell-O and Magic.

We made a human brain out of Jell-O using a cla.s.sic Halloween brain recipe.

Spray a small amount of cooking spray inside a plastic brain mold.50 Place contents of 2 large boxes gelatin mix (peach or water-melon) into a large bowl.

Add 21/2 cups boiling water. Stir gelatin with a whisk until it is completely dissolved, about 3 minutes.

Stir in 1 cup cold water.

Add 1 can nonfat evaporated milk and stir for 2 minutes.

Add a few drops green food coloring (to make the brain grayish pink); stir.

Pour gelatin mixture into plastic brain mold.

Set mold in refrigerator overnight.

Stick card into brain once it's solid while still in mold. The small entry point cut will be unnoticeable on the bottom of the brain.

Add cerebral arteries using sparkly red cake decorating frosting.

Steve says, "And here we have it, ladies and gentlemen-an exact replica of Scotto's brain!" Steve removes it from the dovepan and places it on a second small table, visible to all.

"You all must be asking yourselves, how does this incredible DOVEPAN technology work?" says Susana. "Well, it's based on genetic manipulation, leading to rapid neural growth, directed by the model provided by Scotto's Hemi-roid."

At this point, we each carry out a rope trick to ill.u.s.trate various aspects of how the DNA is manipulated in the dovepan so as to rapidly grow an exact replica of Scotto's brain. The strands of rope represent strands of DNA, and our scientific explanations are nutty, but we handle the ropes okay.

We are feeling pretty good about the show. A little more than halfway through, we've completed the trickiest sleights in the act. The methods thus far have been standard magic fare, and we are entering the portion of the show with the cool mentalism tricks.

So it comes as a shock when one of the jurors says, "I think I've seen enough."

We are now in a much larger bar upstairs at the Magic Castle, consoling ourselves with expensive Perrier-Jouet champagne. Magic Tony joins us. We tell him that we have just been summarily dismissed from our audition, halfway through. Now we know how those poor talentless saps from The Gong Show felt. But we are determined to celebrate, no matter what. We are so embarra.s.sed that we are overtaken by the giggles, like that poor Spanish politician who had admired the firefighters' "equipment."

The conversation inevitably turns to what went wrong. We know we are no Penn & Teller, but we do think we achieved what we set out to do. A few minor rough spots, to be sure, but nothing horrifically bad. Did we fail to earn their trust? Were we an embarra.s.sment to the professionalism of Magic Castle members? Did we flub our tricks?

Disappointingly, we didn't even get to show our coolest tricks! The rest of our act is a humdinger. Here's what we had planned.

We bring two volunteers on stage and have them play our version of a mentalism puzzle called kirigami, invented by Max Maven. It involves folding and cutting paper with letters of the alphabet to find four-letter words. The volunteers think they are free to find a variety of words, but we have set up the puzzle to force them to choose only two: "cage" and "head."

We bring out homemade "mind-reading helmets" constructed out of spaghetti strainers adorned with flashing lights and buzzers-they look like Acme bombs purchased by Wile E. Coyote-and each push a secret remote b.u.t.ton in our jacket pockets to make the helmets buzz as the volunteers concentrate on their words, which are being "transmitted" through the air to the dovepan.

After three seconds, Susana lifts the cover of the dovepan and what do you see? Why, it's the confluence of the words "head" and "cage": our technology has generated the head of the actor Nicolas Cage! (It's amazing what you can buy on the Internet.) Finally, Susana uncovers the goblet containing the card bits but finds that the pieces are missing. They have been replaced by brain matter-bits of Jell-O. Susana takes a taste just to be sure. Yep-definitely human brain matter.

SPOILER ALERT! THE FOLLOWING SECTION DESCRIBES MAGIC SECRETS AND THEIR BRAIN MECHANISMS!.

The goblet actually consists of two halves separated by a double-sided mirror. One half contains the card shreds and the other the brain matter. Susana spins the goblet under the cover of the drape when she wants the transformation to take place.

END OF SPOILER ALERT.

We express puzzlement at this unexpected event. If the card has turned into brain matter, then what happened inside the brain?! We tell Scotto that we must perform exploratory surgery on his Jell-O brain to find out.

In the brain, we find Scotto's card with a piece missing, which, of course, exactly matches the jagged edge of the fragment he still has in his hand. Scotto literally kept his card in mind, and our devices produced a replica of his brain, memories, thoughts, and all!

If only they had let us finish! We're sure that this finale would have impressed the judges.

Just then Tim, the head of the committee, approaches us in the bar. Yes, there were a few problems with our act-we definitely shouldn't quit our day jobs-but there's nothing to keep us from joining the Magic Castle as Gold Pin members.

In response to our confused expressions, he says that they cut our act short because we showed proficiency and they had four other auditions to do that night.

"Congratulations!" he said, shaking our hands.

"We made it!" we whooped, clinking our gla.s.ses.

Will The Magic Go Away?

Now, because it is relevant, and witchcraft so apparently accomplished through the art of sleight of hand, I thought it would be worthwhile to explain it. I am sorry to be the one to do this, and regret any effect this may have on those who earn their living performing such tricks for purposes of entertainment only, whose work is not only tolerable but greatly commendable. They do not abuse the name of G.o.d in this occupation, nor claim their power comes through him, but always acknowledge what they are doing to be tricks, and in fact through them unlawful and unpious deceivers may be exposed.

-Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 158451 When we tell people that we are studying the neuroscience of magic, the same questions invariably come up: Was it difficult to get magicians to reveal their secrets? After all we have learned, do we still enjoy magic? By explaining how magicians hack the human brain, do we worry that we'll ruin the mystery for everyone else? Will the magic go away?

We have been fortunate to work with some of the world's greatest magicians who have been generous in sharing their ideas about the essence of magic and, yes, often willing to reveal their secrets. The reason is that great magic is not about secrets. Nor is it all about the tricks or the methods behind the tricks. You can find complete descriptions and explanations on the Internet of just about every magic trick ever invented.52 A great magician makes you experience the impossible by disrupting normal cause-and-effect relationships. Sure, he can use secret methods, but his act will be even more magical if you know the secret and yet the impossibility still occurs. Successful magicians hijack your brain's attentional mechanisms without your knowing it-you believe you've been paying attention the whole time. No matter what trick they are doing, the real trick is in your head, so secrecy is not as important as many believe.

As we have noted before, magicians are masters of live performance who have spent thousands of hours practicing their art. We learned to do a few magic tricks pretty well, but we are not good enough to expect anyone to pay to watch us. Consider an a.n.a.logy to live music performance: anyone can learn to play a Beatles song on the guitar, but not everyone can be Paul McCartney. Being a great magician involves many things, and knowing the secrets behind certain tricks is only one of them.

Noel Daniel, the editor of Taschen Books and author of Magic: 1400s1950s, writes, "Magic does something really that no other kind of performing art can do, and that is, it manipulates the here and now-our reality. When we're watching a movie, we don't think that what we're watching is real. We know it's not. We stare in a dark room at a lit screen. But in magic, we're watching someone manipulate a coin, or cards or fire or sawing a woman in half, right on stage, right in front of our very eyes. And this is the power of magic."

Many successful magicians have told us that "exposure," or giving away secrets, will not be a problem for their own business. They have their show, their public, their fans, and they have no qualms about talking shop with scientists. Many of these folks sell magic books and trick sets directly to the public in big-name toy stores and bookstores as well as in the gift shops of their own shows. But they nevertheless exercise caution, because magic is their livelihood. In addition, if a magician is perceived as giving away too much-as lifting the veil of secrecy-he might be shunned by the magic community at large.53 It's not worth the risk.

Indeed, this is a contradiction-it's okay to give away secrets and it's not okay to give them away-and we sympathize with magicians caught in the middle. Throughout this book we have used spoiler alerts to warn readers whenever secrets are about to be revealed. We did this to ensure that we adhere to the letter of the ethical guidelines of the magicians' a.s.sociations to which we belong, which insist that the public must not learn a secret by accident. We are members of the Academy of Magical Arts, the Society of American Magicians, the International Brotherhood of Magicians, and the Magic Circle in England.

The various organizations representing magicians consider exposure a punishable ethical violation and have guidelines to determine if a magician is guilty of malicious exposure. These guidelines appear designed to protect the public from the "ravages" of magical knowledge, as if protecting virgins from carnal knowledge. Or maybe it's more about protecting the bottom line. Modern ethics statements stipulate that secrets should be distributed only in return for payment (selling a book, teaching a lesson), lest the secrets run rampant through society and make magic shows impossible. Ironically, no magic a.s.sociations that we know of have ethics committees dedicated to protecting the public from false claims of paranormal abilities by magician members.

Sitting outside the Rio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas late one night after his show with Penn, Teller described the code of ethics as an outdated mind-set. It's as if magic were some sort of medieval guild that needs to guard its secrets, he said, transmitting its esotery only from master to apprentice. In fact, Teller was personally criticized by some of his peers for exposing, in step-by-step photographs, the Miser's Dream trick in a New York Times article on our neuromagic collaboration.54 Teller doubted he hurt any magician's business.

Magic Boycott.

David Pogue, the New York Times technology writer, recently wrote a story about a curious iPhone app called iForce.55 The application presents itself as a drawing program called Doodle v1.2, but it's really a sophisticated trick that uses the iPhone's internal accelerometers to create a mentalism effect based on precognition.

After you buy this app for $3, you write a prediction on the iPhone screen, using your finger in a painting app. You lay the phone facedown on the table. You ask your friend to choose a number between one and eight. Or to pull a bill out of his wallet. Or flip a coin three times and remember the sequence of heads and tails.

You then ask your friend to tell you the number, show the bill, or reveal the coin toss sequence. You turn the iPhone back over, and-will wonders never cease-that is exactly what you wrote on the screen. It might be seven, $20, or tails, tails, heads. Your prediction was correct.

SPOILER ALERT! THE FOLLOWING SECTION DESCRIBES MAGIC SECRETS AND THEIR BRAIN MECHANISMS!.

The app works because when you appear to be making the prediction, you are really running two fingers side by side down the face of the iPhone, and that opens a secret screen in the program. You select what type of trick it is (numbers 18, type of bill, coin toss, and so on) and then set the phone facedown as if to hide your prediction. When you flip the phone over to reveal the prediction-note that there are only eight possible answers to the questions-you can flip it to the left or right, over the top or the bottom, fast or slow. In other words, you have eight possible ways of flipping the phone faceup, depending on your friend's answer.

The phone interprets the way it is being flipped, and the iForce app draws the correct response on the screen.

END OF SPOILER ALERT.