Fooling Houdini

First annotation on Apr 1st, 2022. Last on Sep 19th, 2023.

6 quotes

Misdirection has an uncanny ability to blind us to the obvious. Perhaps the most famous experimental example is a thirty-second film, created by University of Illinois cognitive scientist Daniel Simons, in which six basketball players—three in white T-shirts and three in black T-shirts—are seen passing a ball. The viewers are instructed to count the number of passes by the white team. Halfway through the film, a woman in a gorilla suit walks on-screen, stops in the middle of the tussle, and beats her chest repeatedly before exiting stage left. The gorilla remains on-screen for a total of nine seconds. Our intuition tells us that anyone not in a coma would notice the gorilla. But as Simons has discovered time and again, most people do not. More than half of all the subjects to whom he’s shown the film completely miss the gorilla because they are focused on the passing gameApr 1 2022 12:37PM
The same is true when watching magic. People tend to think magicians use misdirection to control where a spectator is looking. While this is certainly true some of the time, misdirection in magic is mostly about controlling a person’s attention—which can be totally independent from their gazeApr 1 2022 12:46PM

If magic is about being fooled, mentalism is about being understood.Sep 19 2023 12:25PM
As a mentalist, you appear to possess secret knowledge about other people, knowledge that they are often desperate to have. “Whereas magic creates questions,” Jeff McBride says, “mentalism is about answering them.”Sep 19 2023 12:25PM
Mentalism, I realized, was one part magic, one part acting, and three parts sales.Sep 19 2023 12:25PM
Mentalists speak a lot about the percent. A magician should pull off every trick perfectly; a mentalist should not. Mentalism should only be about percent accurate. Otherwise it’s too good, and it looks like a trick. “Error is a necessary element in mentalism,” observes Eugene Burger in his 1983 book Audience Involvement. “Without error, one is simply and very obviously doing magic tricks.”Sep 19 2023 12:26PM

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