SPECIAL EDITION SEPTEMBER 2022

PUBLISHER
EDITOR’S NOTE
Paul Romhany & Joomag

SCIENCE
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & DESIGN LAYOUT
Paul Romhany

COVER ART

& MAGIC
Jim Westbrook

GUEST EDITORS
Adam Fleischer and Vito Lupo

CONTRIBUTORS
Adam Fleischer, Dr. Parag Mallick, Peter
Prevos, John Harris, Michael Ammar,
Jason Leddington, Paul Harris, Anthony
Barnhart, Professor Richard Wiseman, Mark
Setteducati, Jeanette Andrews, Stefan
Thomke, Gustav Kuhn, Carlo Mariconda,
Jamy Ian Swiss, Vito Lupo
ADVERTISING COORDINATOR
Jennifer Holden
CREATIVE DESIGNER & LAYOUT
Paul Romhany
VANISH CONVENTION DIRECTOR
Steve Hocevar
CIRCULATION & SUBSCRIPTION
Joomag
ADDRESS
PLEASE NOTE:
New address starting in APRIL so email
prior to posting anything.
The connection between Science and Magic has been a fascination of mine
for many years. You can imagine how excited I was when a few months ago
I got a call from Adam Fleischer. I knew of Adam from The Magic Manuscript,
magic’s first full-color glossy magazine that he launched and edited during
the 1980s. It was a trend-setting publication and was part of what inspired
my path in magic and in publishing and editing VANISH. During that
period, Adam, along with America’s first FISM Champion Vito Lupo, also
produced The New York Magic Symposium conventions in the 80s. The New
York Magic Symposium was known to set a new bar for the quality of talent
and production for magic conventions. The event featured some of the last
appearances by the likes of Slydini and Dai Vernon.
Now, 25 years since the last Symposium, Adam and Vito are launching a new
event. The International Magic Symposium will be an academic conference
on how magic inspires science, technology, teaching, and creativity to be
held in Venice, Italy (dates for the first event have yet to be announced).
While the event will feature a handful of the brightest minds in magic and
a select group of top performers, the event’s attendees will predominantly
be scientists, academics, and technologists. Driven by their interest in this
area, both Vito and Adam collaborated with me to produce this special issue
of VANISH on how magic inspires science and creativity. I’m fascinated by
the confluence of magic with science and academia, and I think we have an
issue chock full of articles that will be of interest to both scientifically inclined
magicians as well as magically intrigued scientists and academics.

Paul Romhany
Editor

Science is
VANISH is a monthly magazine
magic that
published by Paul Romhany. All
rights are reserved. Contributions are
welcome online.
works.
www.vanishmagazine.com
– Kurt Vonnegut
CONTENTS
SPECIAL EDITION SEPTEMBER 2022

04 ADAM FLEISCHER
How Magic Inspires Math,
44 JASON LEDDINGTON 76
Magic: Art of the Impossible
JEANETTE ANDREWS
Magic, Surprise, and Machine
Medicine, and Neuroscience Learning
at Stanford

12 PAUL HARRIS
The Art of Astonishment
52 ANTHONY BARNHART
The Science of Magic as a
82 JAMY IAN SWISS
Spooky Science: How Scientists
Sandbox for STEAM Education. Were Fooled by 19th Century
Spiritualism

CARLO MARICONDA
18 PARAG MALLICK
Your Mind is Deceiving You: A
58 RICHARD WISEMAN
Creativity and Conjuring:
86 ALBERTO TONOLO
Magician-Scientist’s Perspective Does learning magic help people The BoardOnAir™ Lightboard
on How Magic Can Help You Do be more creative?
Better Science

28 STEFAN THOMKE 62 MICHAEL AMMAR

JASON RANDAL
The Magic of Business Innovation
90 GUSTAV KUHN
Experience The Impossible
Window of Opportunity:
How Magic Can Help Teach
Today’s Device-Obsessed Kids
Curiosity and Creativity

36 PETER PREVOS
The Bidirectional Relationship
66 MARK SETTEDUCATI
How Studying Magic Helps
Between Magic and Science Scientists Avoid Blind Spots and
“Think Outside of the Box”

40 JOHN HARRIS
Magic Mondays: The Benefits of
72 JASON LATIMER
The Magic of Seeking Answers
Magic in University Mathematics
Classes
 How Magic
Inspires Math,
Medicine,
and
4 1 Neuroscience
at Stanford
ADAM J FLEISCHER
 Persi Diaconis, currently the Mary V.
Sunseri Professor of Statistics and
Mathematics at Stanford
D Magic at Stanford
oes studying magic make one a
better or more creative scientist,
technologist, researcher, or teacher?
Best-selling creativity author and Wharton
professor Adam Grant has an answer, and it’s
a resounding yes! As covered in Forbes, Grant
says that artistic hobbies train us to think
creatively and give us access to new ways
of solving problems. For example, Einstein
described his theory of relativity as a musical
thought, and Galileo recognized the moon’s
mountains through a telescope because of
drawing instruction that made him mindful
of shading.
At the top of Grant’s list of creativity-
enhancing hobbies is practicing magic.
Getting good at the element of surprise,
“helps with making new scientific discoveries.
It also reinforces curiosity, focused attention,
and the desire to have an impact on an
audience.”
I’ve found several stellar examples of
accomplished scientists at my Alma Mater
Stanford (MBA ’91) who demonstrate how
studying performance magic has been
a critical training ground or source of
inspiration for their success in scientific and
academic work.
Mathematical achievement inspired by
card magic
When Persi Diaconis, currently the Mary
V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and
Mathematics at Stanford, was a teenager, he
ran away to study and perform magic with
legendary magician Dai Vernon. Diaconis’
study of a deck of cards and magic led to a
fascination with numbers and math. He was
a professional magician for many years, then
went on to study mathematics at Harvard,
came to Stanford in the mid-1970s, and won
a MacArthur Fellows “genius” grant back in
1982.
A search for the hidden workings of
magic led Diaconis to math
Diaconis has attributed his interest and
achievements in mathematics to his study
of magic and the mathematics of a deck of
cards. According to a profile in the Chronicle
of Higher Education, when Diaconis first
came to Stanford he planned to keep his
magic background a secret from academic
colleagues. His concern was that they
wouldn’t take seriously a man of hocus-pocus
who did research on card shuffling.
Then he stumbled upon a book in the
Stanford library that changed his mind.
It described an experiment by one of his
intellectual heroes, French mathematician
Paul Lévy, analyzing the phenomenon known
as perfect shuffling – in which a standard
deck of cards is carefully shuffled eight times
and ends up returning precisely to its starting
arrangement. “I let out a whoop,” Diaconis
said.“ I thought, if Paul Lévy can study perfect
shuffling, I can say I study perfect shuffling.
I wrote up my work on perfect shuffling, A graduate course on the mathematics the world’s top magical thinkers. Following a
and it got on the front page of The New long-held magicians’ tradition, Persi is an avid
York Times.” Since then, Diaconis has
of card shuffling collector and has one of the largest libraries
Over a Peking Duck lunch in a quiet
continued to leverage what he knows of magic books and periodicals on the West
neighborhood near the Stanford campus,
from the magic world to inform both his Coast with more than 15,000 items in his
I asked Persi how magic is informing and
research and teaching. library.
inspiring his work today. “More than usual,”
Persi replies. “I’m currently focused on
Over the years, Diaconis has taught How relevant is magic to questions that
finishing my next book, a graduate course
numerous classes at Stanford on the science is examining today? The study of
textbook on The Mathematics of Shuffling
mathematics of magic tricks – including magic tricks based on complex mathematical
Cards.” Several of the book’s chapters are
freshman seminars, graduate classes, principles, according to Diaconis, “can be
based on magic-related principles, and Persi
and as part of multi-disciplinary applied to make and break codes for spies
enthusiastically talked about his research into
programs – with magic woven in to bring and for analyzing DNA strings. The magic
obscure magic journals of nearly a century
the mathematics to life. Persi enjoys angle suggests wild new variations. Some
ago that is informing his work today.
performing magic tricks for students lead to math problems that will be challenges
when it helps demonstrate and teach the for the rest of the century.”
Persi has long stayed abreast of
principles under study, and these classes
developments in the magic community by,
have been, not surprisingly, very popular
as they say, reading the literature, as well as by
with students.
maintaining close relationships with many of

‘‘ …the mathematics behind this card trick

‘‘
underlies a promising technique for reading DNA.
6 – Persi Diaconis, Prof. of Math, Stanford University

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIGJH12vVCY&list=PLt5AfwLFPxWLoz8cdew3MHrwfswn-HUrT&index=4
 7

The universe is almost like a

huge magic trick and scientists
are trying to figure out how it
does what it does.”
- Martin Gardner
A cancer researcher sharing how magic
can make science better
Parag Mallick, PhD, currently an Associate
Professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine,
is also a professional magician, as well
as Founder & Chief Scientist at Nautilus
Biotechnology, a company pioneering a
single-molecule protein analysis platform
for quantifying the human proteome. A
long-time member and performer at The
Academy of Magical Arts, aka The Magic
Castle in Hollywood, Mallick also once shared
the concern that Persi Diaconis had early
in his career – that being open about one’s
interest in magic with academic colleagues
might best be avoided due to how it might be
perceived.
For years, Mallick kept his two worlds
of science and magic separate. He was
concerned that scientists wouldn’t take him
or his research seriously, and that magicians
and other performers he worked with would
question his dedication to his craft. A few
years ago, he reconciled this and unified
The best scientists and magicians share
a healthy disregard for the impossible
Mallick, who arrived at Stanford a decade ago,
shared some insights on how magicians and
scientists look at the world in a similar way.
“As a scientist, you are constantly looking at
and dealing with the impossible – and then
making it possible. For example, 25 years ago
sequencing the genome was impossible, yet
today it’s commonplace.”
Mallick says that this process is quite like
what magicians deal with when they make
“impossible” things appear possible. “The
very best scientists and magicians share a
healthy disregard for the impossible and a
near-obsessive attention to detail,” says Mallick.
In addition, to achieve the highest levels of
success, both scientists and magicians must
become comfortable with a process that
repeatedly involves being wrong and failing
along the way.
The influence of magic on
neuroscience
Over the past decade, significant research
in neuroscience has been driven by
scientists inspired by magic and doing
research in collaboration with magicians. A
major turning point came in 2008 with the
publication of “Attention and awareness in
stage magic: turning tricks into research” in
the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience,
written by neuroscientists Stephen L.
Macknik and Susana Martinez, along with
a cadre of professional magicians including
Teller and Apollo Robbins. Macknik and
Martinez are Laboratory Directors at the
Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix,
Arizona, and are also members of the
Academy of Magical Arts. The authors
state:
“By studying magicians and their
techniques, neuroscientists can learn
powerful methods to manipulate attention
and awareness in the laboratory. Such
methods could be exploited to directly

‘‘ concepts
Being able to talk about magic openly and discuss
from magic in science – like the fundamentals
8
of misperception and how that might influence scientists’
ability to interpret data – it’s made me both a better
‘‘
scientist and a better magician.
- Parag Mallick, Associate Professor at Stanford School of Medicine

his dual life, and the change has been
overwhelmingly positive.
Mallick now embraces sharing with academic
colleagues that he is a magician – and that
he believes the study of magic can improve
and inform scientists’ work. Mallick developed
an academic presentation entitled “Your
Brain Is Deceiving You: A Magician-Scientist’s
Perspective on How to Do Better Science” that
he’s delivered at MIT, ASU, and Cambridge to
enthusiastic audiences. When Parag gave his
talk at MIT, it was the first time he received
a standing ovation for an academic lecture.
Mallick has found that sharing his interest in
magic with academic colleagues has helped
his science and was liberating.
A neuroscientist-surgeon who learned
skills and confidence from practicing
magic
Prominent Stanford neuroscientist, James
Doty, MD, Clinical Professor of Neurosurgery
at Stanford School of Medicine, is the author
of the best-selling book Into the Magic
Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the
Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the
Heart. Doty has also declared his appreciation
of studying magic on his path to becoming
an accomplished neurosurgeon. In his book,
Doty partly attributes his skill as a surgeon
to the confidence and dexterity he learned
when diligently practicing difficult sleight-of-
hand magic in his youth.
study the behavioral and neural basis of
consciousness itself, for instance through
the use of brain imaging and other neural
recording techniques.”
This work led to the publication in 2010 of
Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of
Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions,
which helped popularize the legitimacy of
scientific researchers studying magicians –
and their semi-guarded body of knowledge
on the theory of perception, deception and
illusion – to help advance scientific research
in this era.
 A leading magician helping professors
teach more effectively
A different way magicians and scientists
collaborate is exemplified by magician Vito
Lupo. Lupo was the first American to win the
prestigious international Grand Prix of Magic
competition and later spent a decade as a
consultant to Disney, designing illusions to
make some of their highest profile events
more magical.
Lupo, who currently resides in Venice Italy,
was recently invited to participate in Padua
University’s Teaching 4 Learning project,
which promotes innovative methods
to improve and modernize teaching.
Lupo’s talk, “Magic and Teaching…Magic
Transformations,” gave a magician’s
perspective on how to engage students
and teachers. The lecture was well
received by Padua’s faculty,
and Lupo was energized
10 by experiencing how the
magician’s perspective can
catalyze more effective education
and communication.
About The Author
Adam Fleischer earned his B.A. in Ancient
Studies, focusing on a cross-disciplinary
examination of the philosophy of Socrates,
from Columbia University in New York City
in 1987.
At the same time, he was a magic impresa-
rio producing The New York Magic Sympo-
sium, an international magic convention,
and publishing magic’s first full-color glossy
magazine, The Magic Manuscript. He also
Can studying magic increase the odds
of a scientist winning a Nobel prize?
What makes one an Olympic medalist, or a
Nobel prize-winning scientist? While part
of it is winning the genetic lottery, are there
unexpected, non-traditional activities or
skillsets that up the odds for exceptional
achievement? For example, according to
University of Michigan research, scientists
who are musicians are twice as likely to
win a Nobel prize. The hotly debated and
oft-reputed research finds that scientists
who are amateur magicians are 22 times
more likely to win a Nobel prize. Even if
this research is highly skewed, it suggests
that scientists with creative, performance-
oriented pursuits (music, magic)
outperform scientists who don’t.
Even as we live in an era where new
“technological marvels” that would have
been seen as utterly “magical” just a
few years ago become more and more
commonplace, the influence of the
conjuring arts on science and technology is
on an upswing. When magicians share their
knowledge with scientists, technologists
and researchers, new possibilities are
revealed.
We believe the time is ripe for a symposium
where the top minds in the magic world
collaborate with researchers, technologists,
and academics to progress this unique
confluence. In fact, we’ve got one in the
works – if you’re interested in supporting
such a symposium, contact:
info@themagicsymposium.com ■
produced off-Broadway theatricals in New
York City and prime-time TV specials, all
before attending Stanford’s Graduate
School of Business and earning his MBA
in 1991. He then founded and was CEO of
E.ON Interactive Design, one of Silicon Val-
ley’s earliest boutique creative interactive
marketing agencies. Today, Adam serves
as a technology marketing consultant with
clients including Microsoft, IBM, Panasonic,
SAP, Analog Devices, Arrow Electronics,
Coupa, MuleSoft and other technology
leaders.
Adam can be contacted via -
adam@adamjf.com
The most beatiful thing
we can experience is the
mysterious. It is the source of
all true art and all science.”
- Albert Einstein
12

2 The Art of
Astonishment
PAUL HARRIS
Founder, Institute of Adanced Astonishment
 “If you take any activity, any art, any discipline,
any skill, take it and push it as far it has ever been
pushed before, push it into the wildest edge
of edges, then you force it into the realm of real magic.”
- Todd Robins

What?
Astonishment Is Our Natural State Of Mind.
The magic arena is a place of infinite possi-
bilities and there’s room to play whatever
game you want. But just for a moment let’s
play the game of pushing the art into the
wildest edge of edges.
All right. Here we go. Think back to your first
magical encounter. The seed experience
that first excited you then compelled you to
do magic yourself. Someone did a trick
for you that made you gasp. For me it
was when my uncle Paul smashed
a newspaper-covered glass
through a tabletop. A moment
of ecstatic bliss where every
thought was pulled from my face
leaving nothing more than empty
space.
My first instinct was not to hear a joke or
to be entertained or to be told a story or
to make small talk but to experience that
moment again and again. And it’s natural to
think if you could learn to do magic yourself,
then…well, you could have this experience
all the time. But then about three seconds
later you realize that it’s fun to know secrets
and to do things for people that they can’t
figure out. And suddenly you’re out of the
astonishment game and into the ego game
and with hard work and some good jokes
and maybe even into the money game.
So now you’re a long way from home and
from that virgin gasp that motivated the
journey. And now you’re performing some
of your high-entertainment-value effects
and despite yourself a profound moment
of astonishment is unleashed. It doesn’t
happen every time but when the moon
is right and the conditions are just so…
there it is, a moment of total white-light
astonishment. And you look at those as-
tonished faces and maybe you’re not sure
what to say, or you feel a little guilty, or a
bit uncomfortable because it’s stopped the
flow of your show or changed your easy
relationship with the audience.
Something powerful has happened. But
everyone knows it’s just a trick and you’re
“just a magician” so there’s this dysfunc-
tional relationship going on and no one’s
sure what to do with this strange experi-
ence including yourself.
But in general you’re pretty happy because
on some level you realize this is a big win
until someone says, “I wish the children
were here to see this.” And for a moment
you feel your whole game fall apart.
Doing magic for children can be glorious.
But the frequently voiced opinion that the
experience of astonishment is a childish thing
makes you wonder about what’s really going
on.
If you listen carefully, you’ll also hear things
like “that made me feel like a child again”
or “you made me feel like a little kid at
the circus.” And if you think about this,
you’ll see that what these astonished
adults are really trying to say, even
though they’re not consciously
aware of it, is that for a brief
moment, they experi-
enced a clear, primal state 13
of mind that they associate
with a child’s state of mind.
Somehow the adult experience of
astonishment triggered some feel-
ing of what it felt like to be a child.
I’m going to say this again because it’s so
much fun using the italics button: The expe-
rience of astonishment is the experience of a
clear, primal state of mind that they associate
with a child’s state of mind.
It’s the same experience that seduced you
into performing magic in the first place. And if
you follow these footprints it takes you right
up to the crumbling edge of everything we

YOU’RE USING MAGICAL ILLUSIONS

TO DISSOLVE CULTURAL ILLUSIONS
IN ORDER TO EXPERIENCE
A MOMENT OF SOMETHING REAL.
PAUL HARRIS,
 think we are…and just beyond to a state of mind
we experienced naturally as small children but
that society devalued then made taboo as we
became adults.
Here’s basically how it works, give or take
a few metaphors.
You came into this world a blank slate. No ideas
about who you are or what anything is. You’re
just being. And it feels great…because there are
no options, or opinions or judgements. There is
no right or wrong.
Everything is everything. That’s what you see in a
baby’s eyes. Pure child’s mind. Then, very quickly,
we learn stuff. The names of ten thousand
things, who we are, what we’re supposed to be,
what’s good and bad according to the current
rules of the game. And you organize all of this
information into little boxes. And when any new
information comes along you file it into the
appropriate box.
Right now you might be filing these very
thoughts into the whack-o ideas box. I under-
stand. You’re just doing your job. You’ve been
14 trained to do this since birth. You have thus
created your worldview.
There’s no particular reality to any of this. But
it’s in your head and you know the territory, and
it’s where all your thoughts do their thinking.
But we quickly forget what was there in the
first place because these thousands of little
thought-boxes are stacked up so tight that the
original clear space of child’s mind is completely
covered up. It’s not gone. It’s just blocked by this
wall of over-stuffed boxes.
And then along comes a focused piece of
strange in the form of magical effect. Let’s say
this book vanishes from your hands. “Poof” no
book. Your trained mind races into action and
tries to put this piece of strange into one of its
rational boxes. But no box will hold it. At that
moment of trying to box the un-boxable your
world view breaks up.
ASTONISHMENT IS NOT AN EMOTION.
IT‘S AN EXISITNG STATE THAT‘S REVEALED.
The boxes are gone. And what’s left? Simply what
was always there. Your natural state of mind. That’s
the moment of astonishment. The sudden experi-
ence of going from boxes to no boxes. If you can
keep the fear-response from arising, you have the
experience of going from a cluttered adult mind to
the original clear space. Gee, it almost makes you
feel like a kid again.
For most people the moment lasts less than ten
seconds. Then because we crave the security of our
missing world view, we quickly build a new box. The
“it-went-up-his-sleeve” box or the “it-was-all-done-
with-mirrors” box or even the “I-don’t-know-what-
happened-but-I-know-it-was-a-trick” box. And that’s
all it takes. One thought, one guess, even a wrong
one, and the boxes all come back, natural mind gets
covered up, and the moment of astonishment is
over.
Astonishment is not an emotion that’s
created. It’s an existing state that’s re-
vealed.
So what’s the point?
This new model redefines the magician’s valuable
role in our culture as an “astonishment guide” who
can help others experience their natural state of
mind. This is a galactic leap from the magician’s cur-
rent role as a novelty entertainer, or super conman
or Mr. Ego. The center of magic has always been the
therapeutic experience of our natural state of mind.
But that primal experience is so powerful and the
taboo of “losing” our mind is so great that we water
down the experience with jokes and excuses and
“hey, it’s just a trick.”
When the experience of astonishment starts to
be recognized as a highly valued destination, the
win/lose magician vs. spectator game starts to
dissolve. Suddenly you’re both on the same team…
equally responsible for getting the most out of the
moment.
More experienced astonishee’s who’ve learned
to surrender to the moment and sink into the
astonishment will be rewarded with a deeper, more
sustained experience. Others who feel compelled to

fight the moment or treat it as a puzzle
to be figured out will get what they pay
for…non-astonishment.
There is a genuine difference in the
quality of people’s experience of magic
once they understand the new model
and take responsibility for the moment.
I’ve had the participants who “get it”
trying to explain it to those who don’t.
One astonishee said it was like the
difference of tossing down a beer and
savoring a fine wine. Someone else re-
ferred to it as “gourmet astonishment.”
This model reshapes the perceptions
of people who feel “I was astonished
but I know it was just a trick, so what
I experienced couldn’t have been real
or very valuable.” Because now it’s
understood that the astonishment and
the tricks are not the same thing. The
astonishment is real. It’s a brief flash of
our natural state of mind.
A place we should all experience more often.
The tricks are helpful tools to help
unleash the moment.
You and your astonishee can still have fun
and tell jokes and play together, but now
there’s an understandable therapeutic value
to the
game. A definite win for all players.
In a nutshell: You’re using magical illusions to
dissolve cultural illusions in order to experi-
ence a moment of something real.
So now it’s up to you. This is not something
that can be mass-produced and stuffed into
a vinyl packet-trick wallet. This will take ev-
erything you’ve learned about how people’s
perceptions and illusions interact and then
some. You may even want to stop performing
for awhile to break free of old patterns.
15
Until then, even if magic is just your way to relax
and have fun (which is a profoundly worthwhile
goal in itself ), there are still a few things you can
do to help create this new game. If the situation is
right, let your audience know that the moment of
astonishment is a quick flash of their natural state
of mind. Tricks are tools.
Astonishment is real. You’re just helping them
unleash the moment.
Some people will instantly relate to this, while
others will make funny faces. But if this one idea
gets out and takes hold, it could dramatically
transform people’s perceptions of magic and
magicians…quickening the evolution of the art.
A bigger challenge is to train yourself not to step
on the moment. I’m still working on it myself.
When you hit that real white-light moment of
pure astonishment, don’t tell a joke or apologize
or hurry on to the next trick. Resist the urge to
run away from the fire you’ve worked so hard to
build.
Relax and enjoy the heat and let your
astonishees have a complete experience. PAUL HARRIS
Surfing in the center of the big gasp is at the heart of magic.
Paul Harris is an American inventor,
magician, and writer. Described by the
Gasp-surfing isn’t always possible because theatrical or com-
magic magazine Genii (December 1996) as
mercial considerations will take center stage. Although even
“the most innovative magic mind of our day,”
here you can splash around in the moment an extra beat or two
Harris is listed in Magic magazine (August
to let it resonate.
1999) as one of “the 100 [magicians] who
shaped the art [of magic] in America”.
But if you’re in a relaxed setting and you’ve already helped your
participants understand the new game, then you can start
exploring the edges. These experimental performances are
your laboratory. So whenever possible check the results by
interviewing your subjects to find out their real experience and
perceptions…so you can learn how to better extend or deepen
or enhance their astonishment experience next time. ■

16

TODAY’S LEADING-EDGE PHYSICS IS MAKING IT CLEAR

THAT MOST LIKELY THERE IS NO ACTUAL MATTER, JUST AN
ILLUSION OF MATTER. THE NATURE OF REALITY IS LOOKING
MUCH MORE LIKE A GIANT THOUGHT THAN ANYTHING YOU
CAN HOLD IN YOUR IMAGINARY HAND. SO, IN THIS WAY,
MAGICIANS ARE ACTING AS SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS
OR POETS, PREPARING PEOPLE FOR A COMING PARADIGM
SHIFT.”

– PAUL HARRIS, FOUNDER, INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED

ASTONISHMENT
Isn’t it astonishing that all these secrets
have been preserved for so many years
just so we could discover them!”
- The Wright Brothers
 Your Brain is
Deceiving You:
A Magician-
Scientist’s
18 3 Perspective
on How to Do
Better Science
DR. PARAG MALLICK
Associate Professor at Stanford University
and Chief Scientist at Nautilus Biotechnology

Editor’s Note: By day, Dr. Parag Mallick is a professor at
Stanford who runs a lab that uses systems biology and big
data to develop cancer diagnostics. He also serves as Chief
Scientist at Nautilus Biotechnology, a publicly traded biotech-
nology company that he cofounded. By night, Parag wears
a very different hat, that of a professional magician. He is a
member of the Magic Castle in Hollywood and has performed
all over the world for audiences of thousands. This essay was
based upon a lecture/one-man show he first created for a
scientific symposium at MIT.
Scientists and magicians both live in worlds full of unex-
plained phenomena and spend their days contemplating
the impossible. Despite their mutual focus, modern scien-
tists seldom look to magicians for inspiration or guidance.
The gulf between scientists and magicians is understan-
dable. After all, a scientist’s mission is to expand the fron-
tiers of knowledge by asking questions about the nature
of our world and finding evidence that either supports or
refutes a posited perspective or explanation. By expanding
the frontiers of knowledge, scientists help to make the
impossible possible. Magicians have an entirely different
mission. At their core, magicians are entertainers focused
on engendering astonishment by making the impossible
appear to be possible. In putting the impossible on display,
magicians help audiences believe – if even for a moment
– that there is magic in the world and that the currently ac-
cepted laws of nature are merely suggestions
not shackles. Among the most important
tools in a magician’s toolbox is their unders-
tanding and awareness of cognitive deficits
and biases. By exploiting these gaps in our
perception, magicians make impossible
phenomena appear possible.
Simply put, magicians help us believe that
it is possible to challenge the impossible
whereas scientists actually challenge the
impossible.
While many may see the roles of magicians
and scientists as irreconcilable, magic and
science are historically interconnected.
Below, I share examples of how closely
intertwined the science and magic commu-
nities have been throughout history. I also
discuss how much modern scientists have to
learn from the deep investigation of perception
and gaps therein that magicians have known
about and exploited for centuries.
‘‘
It is not our senses that
deceive us, it is our mind.”
- Alfred Binet, 1894
I was motivated to share my perspective
because I believe that NOW is the time to 19
encourage more conversations and collaborations
between scientists and magicians.
Magic was central to the emergence and popularization
of modern science.
The story of magic and science is one of estranged siblings
who were once extremely close, but then spent the last
century drifting apart. In their younger days, the high-brow
magic of the court and salons matured side-by-side with
science, and each played a crucial role in shaping the other.
Demonic and ceremonial magics, such as astrology and
alchemy, ultimately evolved into astronomy and chemistry.
Additionally, there is evidence to suggest that another
popular form of occult magic, necromancy, influenced
modern medicine: the Court of Lorenzo de’ Medici included
noted necromancers like Giovanni Francesco Rustici along-
side artists like Michelangelo who were pushing the boun-
daries of anatomy, and humanists like Lorenzo Marsilio
Ficino who was the son of a surgeon and studied medicine.
From the 14th to the late 19th century, there was a close
integration between magic and the sciences. Magic was
not strictly the entertainment magic common today. Many
of this period’s magicians also worked at the forefront of
scientific advances.
John Dee – “Celestial Necromancer” and
Science Advisor to Queen Elizabeth I
Ideas surrounding perception are perhaps
the most important links between magic and
science. The works of one of the earliest scien-
tist-magicians, John Dee, provides a perfect
example of this linkage. Dee was an astro-
nomer, mathematician, cartographer, alche-
mist, spy, and “celestial necromancer.” He was
also a scientific and medical advisor to Queen
Elizabeth I.

One of Dee’s most important achievements

was his translation of Euclid’s Elements, bringing
geometry into the modern world. Geometry is
the branch of math that is closest to providing
a framework for describing how perception
can alter observation. For example, projections
and cross-sections allow us to think about
how things appear when they are viewed from
different perspectives. (see digaram on bottom
of page 15).

Our perception and interpretation of the

world is significantly impacted by how we
choose to look at it. This is a fundamental
principle common to both modern science
and modern entertainment magic.
In one of Dee’s most important col-
laborations – and one that many
scientists will be familiar with – is
a map which Dee collaborated
20 with Mercator on in 1595, as
shown in the center image.
It represents one of the first
projection map views of the

Mercator, Gerhard, 1512-1594

Dee’s translation of Euclid Elements
“Septentrionalium Terrarum descriptio“ From Mercator’s posthumously published atlas,
Atlantis pars altera
 world. This perspective was quite different
from other maps of the time.

In the map, it looks incredibly easy to get

from Europe to Asia and the Americas. It’s
possible these views of the world influenced
people’s perception and interpretation of the
world, helping to make people believe that
sea voyages across continents were attai-
nable. Dee himself was an advocate of British
exploration.1 He helped lay the groundwork
for several English voyages of exploration
and played a role in teaching captains the
foundations of mathematical navigation and
preparing maps for their journeys.

With maps presenting a view that made it

look like people could easily traverse the
globe, the British empire did just that. In this
instance, the magician’s lens on the subtleties
of and the importance of perception may
have had very real impacts on the trajectory
of world events.

The intersections of science, magic, and

perception had – and continue to have – a
huge role in shaping our world.
A great example of the magician-scientist
of the 18th century went by the stage
name Comus (his real name was
Nicholas Filip Ledru). He was an
accomplished physicist and a
magician, an early advo-
cate of bringing science
and magic together, and
21
much of his magic dealt with
electricity. He was a professor

1. General and Rare Memorials Pertayning

to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (1577)

Right: Projections and cross-sections allow us to think about how things

appear when they are viewed from different perspectives.
of mathematics to the Duke of Burgundy and
is quoted as saying, “I want to both excite the
curiosity of the people and extend the progress
of physics.”
Nicolas-Philippe Ledru (Comus) – A
“Charlatan of Science”
Nicolas-Philippe Ledru became one of his
era’s most successful “charlatans of science.”
His show, billed as “Experiences Physiques et
Mathematiques,” combined fortune-telling
and sleight-of-hand with mental telepathy,
electrical healing, and optical illusions.
Catering to the popular taste for sound and
light shows, his alter ego Comus produced
lightning by discharging Leyden jars and
thunder by lighting a mixture of saltpeter,
sulfur, and tartar salt. He used electricity
allegedly to extract powder from diamonds,
and he claimed the ability to establish com-
munication between two people separated
by a barrier.
Despite all these theatrics, Ledru was also
a serious purveyor of science. In 1783 his
use of electrical shocks to cure people with
epilepsy was so well regarded that he was
able to establish a clinic for the treat-
ment of nervous disorders. In 1784
Louis XVI conferred on him the
title of Physician of the King and
named him to the Faculty of
Paris. With crown support,
22 Ledru made the transi-
tion from street conjurer to
electrotherapist. He was hailed
by Paris’ Faculty of Medicine for
‘his marvelous cures.’
At the time it was challenging to diffe-
rentiate true science from pseudo-science
from outright fraud, as a diversity of shows
emerged in which magicians were both
scientists – pushing the frontiers of physics
and bringing it to the masses – as well as
performers doing magic tricks and illusions
for entertainment.
Disney’s Pepper’s Ghost at Haunted Mansion
There are many more examples of magicians
being at the forefront of science and en-
gineering. Another scientist-magician whose
primary medium was electricity was Professor
Georg Matthias Bose of the University of
Leipzig. One particularly notable effect of his
(shown in the image above), debuted in 1737,
illustrating a process he termed beatification.
A participant would be asked on stage and
a crystal crown would be placed upon their
head. And then, untouched, a ‘fire’ would ap-
pear inside the crystal crown, creating a halo
around the person’s head.
This effect was created through electrical
currents being transmitted from the metal
disk into the crown that had been filled with
a gas, and it may have been one of the first
demonstrations of something akin to a neon
light bulb.
Later, in the 1850s, Henry Dircks – an ac-
complished inventor, engineer, and scientist
– created an effect known as the Dirksian
Phantasmagoria that would enable the
projection of a figure at a distance appea-
ring like a hologram. A collaboration with
John Henry Pepper, a lecturer and analytical
chemist for the Royal Polytechnic2 Institu-
tion, led to the Pepper’s Ghost illusion that
debuted in 1862 at the Royal Polytechnic. As
the underpinning of all modern translucent
ghost effects, Pepper’s Ghost can now be
found throughout the world and most fa-
mously at Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.
What scientists can learn from magicians
regarding observation and perception
At the root of all scientific investigation lies
observation. The scientific method depends
upon it. Unfortunately, despite scientists
best efforts, it is not always possible to
objectively observe the world or to objec-
tively analyze the data collected in scientific
experiments.
Are we scientists incapable of objective obser-
vation because the lens of our perception –
warped by our cognitive biases and blind spots
– is so powerful that much scientific observation
is flawed?
When looking through our microscopes
and at our next-generation proteomics
data, do we believe that we are
looking at one thing – but is there
really something completely
different going on?
If the answer to these questions is “yes,”
a lot of science, as we currently know
it, might require re-examining. As a scien-
tist-magician, I can tell you that these holes
in our perception prevent all of us, scientists
and magicians alike, from seeing the world as
it truly is.
The information our senses receive is often
ambiguous, incomplete, or misleading.
Nevertheless, our brains attempt to stitch
together a complex morass into a simple (but
not always accurate) picture. Additionally,
our brains try to filter out the vast amount
of incoming data to drive focus towards the
‘relevant’ information. Our brains achieve this
using prior information.
For example, when talking to someone, we
decipher each word by considering not only
the sounds and movements coming from
2. The Polytechnic Ghost
Pepper’s Ghost, Metempsychosis and the Magic Lantern
at the Royal Polytechnic Institution
Jeremy Brooker
Pages 189-206 | Published online: 07 Dec 2009
 We see things based on
autopilot. Our mind identifies
something in a certain way, no
matter what the eye sees. The
eye tells you one thing and the
brain tells you another.”

- Jerry Andrus
the speaker’s mouth but also the meaning
of preceding words, the topic of the conver-
sation, as well as our lifelong knowledge
of language. When driving, our brains fill in
the blanks of road signs that are partially
obscured by shrubbery. Likewise, walking
through a store, we focus more on the items
we are considering purchasing than the back-
ground hum of the lights. All this inferring
can happen because our brains are pre-co-
gnitively filtering, focusing, and interpreting
the gargantuan amount of information we
are able to sense at any given moment. This is
both amazing – and dangerous.
Every observation we make goes through
the blurry lens of perception shaped by a mix
of our experiences, biases, mood, and social
identity. We are particularly shaped by co-
gnitive biases – systematic errors in thinking
that occur when people are processing and
interpreting information in the world around
them, affecting the decisions and judgments
they make. All of these factors lead to massive
gaps in perception, observation, and reality.
How can magicians help?
Magicians are the world’s foremost
experts in perception.
Magic exploits holes and idiosyn-
crasies in our perception that mug-
gles, even scientist muggles,
may not be aware of. I posit
24 that these holes in our
perception are poten-
tially crippling our scientific
investigations and standing in
the way of our effective search for
answers.
Many people believe that magicians ope-
rate through a complex web of lies. Ironically,
this is entirely untrue. Most magic succeeds
(fools the audience) not because of a lie a
magician tells or conveys to the audience,
but instead because the magician-perfor-
mer exploits the audience’s cognitive gaps,
expectations, and biases that lead a person’s
brain to deceive itself. The most powerful and
effective lie is the one you tell yourself! It is
important to appreciate that these biases are
normal and typically unconscious processes
our brain uses to accelerate and improve the
quality of decision making. There are literally
hundreds of biases influencing us every day.
While it is challenging to overcome biases,
through awareness one can attempt to exa-
mine conclusions to determine if they were
the results of cognitive biases or are truly ob-
jective and logical conclusions from reliable
evidence. From first-hand experience, I know
that studying magic has helped me become
more aware of common cognitive biases in
others, and myself.
https://youtu.be/TPoKXtVjwOs
What magicians call misdirection is about
encouraging the audience’s brain to focus
on the wrong thing, the wrong place, or the
wrong time. Our brains like to do that natural-
ly. At a magic show, this is totally acceptable.
Unfortunately, in the context of a scientific
inquiry, misdirection can be catastrophic. The
term “inattentional blindness” was coined
by Arien Mack and Irvin Rock and is defined
as the failure to notice unexpected objects
when attention is focused elsewhere. While
we might like to believe that we are able
to infinitely multitask, the reality is that our
perception of the world is limited, not by
our sensory organs (e.g., eyes and ears), but
instead by our minds.
Perhaps my favorite example of inattentional
blindness in a magic context is the classic
card-under-glass trick. (Doc Eason and Jamy
Ian Swiss have card-under-glass routines
that are masterful. If you haven’t seen them,
I suggest seeking them out.) In this effect,
a selected card routinely ends up under the
magician’s cocktail glass (that everyone is
trying to focus on), seemingly impossibly
disappearing from plain sight.
In reality, the magician is directing the au-
dience’s attention to the wrong place (typical-
ly the mat or to themselves) instead of where
the action is happening. A related component
of inattentional blindness is the common
principle used in many magic effects that big
movements obscure small movements. This
is used extensively in tricks like ‘Hot Rod’ and
other related paddle tricks.
Why do our brains do this? Why do we have
these sorts of biases? I believe we have
evolved to be as efficient as possible. We are
constantly inundated with information. Just
like our home computers, if we had to fully
process every piece of input all the time,
we would rapidly become paralyzed. Our
brains do their best to focus on what
we need and fill in the blanks with
regards to missing information.
Inattentional blindness can
readily occur in science (and is often
coupled with confirmation bias, which
we discuss next). For example, consider an
experiment studying a gene that we believe
is the driver of a given disease process. By
focusing our attention on that gene, we may
dedicate less of our awareness to the thou-
sands of other genes that might actually be
the drivers. Likewise, if we believe a process
manifests on a time scale of weeks, we may
overlook events that occur on a time-scale of
seconds.
Combatting inattentional blindness is diffi-
cult. Modern ‘discovery’ science tools – like
whole genome sequencing or broadscale
proteomics profiling – can help because they
effectively force us to take a wide lens on our
experiments. Additionally, being critically
aware of how much of a phenomena is not
sufficiently explained by our hypothesis can
also help us avoid the risks of inattentional
blindness.
Occam’s Razor and Simplicity Bias
Occam’s razor3 states, “Non sunt multiplicanda
entia sine necessitate,” or “entities must not
be multiplied without necessity.” Attributed
3. https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/
scientific-experiments/occams-razor.htm
to English Franciscan friar William of Ockham
(1285-1347), a philosopher, logician and
theologian, Occam’s razor suggests that the
simplest explanation is preferable. Einstein is
attributed with a related aphorism: “Every-
thing should be made as simple as possible,
but no simpler.” In scientific investigation, sim-
plicity goes hand-in-hand with the scientific
method as a common tool of the trade.
While the concept of simplicity in explana-
tion is appealing, it is easy to overinterpret
Occam’s razor to suggest that the simplest
explanation is not just preferred but actually
correct.4 Unfortunately, this line of thinking
leads directly to yet another cognitive bias –
simplicity bias. Our brains are wired to favor
explanations with alluring narratives that are
easy to explain. Explanations that include
ambiguity, a large number of complex details,
or are hard to understand are more likely
to be questioned or dismissed. As covered
4 Feldman J. The simplicity principle in per-
ception and cognition. Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn
Sci. 2016 Sep;7(5):330-40. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1406.
Epub 2016 Jul 29. PMID: 27470193; PMCID:
PMC5125387.
‘‘ At the core of every trick is a cold, cognitive
experiment in perception.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4iu5FMaR2o
above, we have a limited cognitive capacity.
Consequently, simplicity bias allows us to
save energy by avoiding explanations that tax
or exceed our cognitive capacity.
Magicians love to exploit simplicity bias. The
most evident example where this arises is in
effects in which a magician appears to be re-
peating something over and over again, such
as in ambitious card routines. In this effect,
a magician will typically show the audience
a card, bury it in the deck, and then it will
magically reappear at the top. The magician
will repeat this process over and over again.
While audience members appear to see the
same thing happening each time, in reality
the magician uses many different methods
all throughout the routine, including a mix
of one-way force decks, double lifts, passes,
hold-outs, and other sleights and subtleties.
However, an audience member’s inclination
to generate a simple explanation would favor
explanations reliant upon just one of these
methods rather than a combination of all of
them. The observed data would fit the simp-
lest explanation (e.g., a one-way force deck)
‘‘
- Teller
– right up until the point that the magician
showed you a deck containing 52 different
cards. Pigeon-holing the audience into a
simple, but incorrect explanation provides a
basis for fooling them.
In science, simplicity bias is prevalent.
However, just because something is simple
and pretty doesn’t make it right. For example,
for decades one of the primary characte-
ristics that differentiated cancer cells from
healthy cells was their shape. Cancer cells
look distorted. Just like with the ambitious
card, the simplest explanation would be that
they are all distorted because of a common
underlying mechanism and that, accordingly,
they should behave similarly. At some level
of detail this is true – they all behave badly.
However, as the scientific community has dug
deeper into the molecular underpinnings of
cancers, it has learned that every individual
cancer cell (billions of them) may have their
own aberrations that govern the details of
their behavior influencing not only minute
details of their shape, but also other characte-
ristics or behaviors, such as how they respond
to drugs and move from place to place.
25
Combating simplicity bias and inappro-
priate reliance on Occam’s Razor starts with
recognizing how ingrained it is in our thought
processes. Quantitative measures (e.g., the
Akaike information criterion) can be used to
compare models with respect to both how
well they fit the data and how complicated
they are. A few other tips – when trying to
develop an understanding – challenge the
thing that seems like the ‘prettiest’ expla-
nation. Lastly, if you find yourself stuck in
binary thinking – where there are exactly two
explanations – call it out and ask why there
are only two explanations. Also ask if parts of
each of those explanations may be correct.
One other excellent resource for combating
simplicity bias is the book Thinking, Fast and
Slow by Danial Kahneman.
Confirmation Bias I believe that deeper awareness and conversation around how
Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for information that sup- effectively the magic community uses assumption blindness could
ports one’s preconceptions. It impacts how we gather, interpret, and help the scientific community develop new and more effective
recall information – for example, when a person gives more weight to approaches to combat it.
evidence that confirms their beliefs and undervalues evidence that
could disprove it. Closing thoughts — bringing magic and science back together
My experiences as a magician have shown me both how malleable
One of the early demonstrations of confirmation bias appeared in an perception is, and how prevalent cognitive gaps and biases are.
experiment by Peter Watson in which the subjects were told to find While, as a performer, I greatly enjoy taking advantage of these gaps
a rule by which a series of numbers were generated.5 This simple and biases to delight audiences, I’ve become acutely aware of how
study showed that subjects chose responses that supported their these same biases may be impacting my scientific studies.
hypotheses while rejecting contradictory evidence even though their
hypotheses were not correct. Ultimately the goal of science is to build a sufficient understanding
of the world so that we can derive models that effectively predict
More recently, a study observed researchers as they examined 165
6
future unknowns, such as what will happen when we drop a ball, or
lab experiments. In 88% of cases in which results did not align with someone takes a cancer drug. To develop accurate, highly predic-
expectations, the scientists blamed the tive models, we need to be able to
inconsistencies on how the experi- observe and interpret the world
ments were conducted, rather than on around us as accurately as possible.
their own theories. Consistent results, These days, I try to make sure to look
by contrast, were given little to no at my science through the lens of a
scrutiny. This particular bias is some- magician – examining all the ways I
times known as asymmetric attention. might be fooling myself. This inquiry
has become a routine part of every-
As magicians – we love to exploit thing from how I design experiments
confirmation bias. For example, to how I analyze data, and I believe
audiences will typically assume this has made me a better, and more
basic things like decks of cards are cautious, scientist.
‘normal’ and that dice aren’t
loaded. In designing effects,
magicians often bake in
Magic lives between the
‘provers’ that see- improbable, impossible, and
mingly validate for inexplicable.
26 the audience that
their assumptions
In addition to exami-
ning biases, there are
are correct. Once the many other ways in which
audience has been as- scientists might learn from
sured that their assumptions magicians. Afterall, much like
are correct, magicians have set science, magic lives at the intersec-
the boundaries of an audience’s tion between the improbable, the
perception and awareness and are impossible, and the inexplicable.
free to make the impossible happen. When developing a new magic trick,
While this is fantastic for magic – it is a magician often begins by thinking
extremely dangerous for science. of something impossible. Next, they
figure out a way to make it happen
Fortunately, the study of ways to com- – or at least to make an audience
bat confirmation bias has drawn much perceive that it happened.
attention in the scientific community
over the past decade.7 One approach, This willingness to wholeheartedly
known as ‘strong inference,’8 suggests dive into the impossible, to not be
scientists make themselves explicitly list alternative explanations for afraid of it, and to explore utterly ludicrous explanations as part of
their observations and debate the support for both the primary and the process, is something that scientists are often afraid of. Often-
competing hypotheses. An alternate approach gaining traction is times we only allow ourselves a narrow range of explanations. For an
known as blind data analysis. The general concept is to separate the educated and adept magician, no explanation (or possibility) is too
data analyzers from the hypothesis generators. Under these circums- hard, too complex, or too impossible to consider. Perhaps more inte-
tances, analyzers couldn’t possibly over-interpret the data, as they ractions between scientists and magicians will embolden scientists
have nothing to unconsciously look for. to dream a little bigger, to explore a wide range of possibilities and
hypotheses, and, ultimately, to accelerate the progress of science.

5. P. C. Wason (1960) On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual
task, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12:3, 129-140, DOI:
10.1080/17470216008416717
6. Fugelsang, J. A., Stein, C. B., Green, A. E. & Dunbar, K. N. Can. J. Exp.
Psychol. 58, 86–95 (2004).
7. How scientists fool themselves – and how they can stop. Regina Nuzzo Nature
volume 526, pages 182–185 (2015)
8. Platt, J. R. Science 146, 347–353 (1964).
Arthur C. Clarke said it well in his second law – “The only way of dis-
covering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them
into the impossible.” I hope one day to be able to look back at the sy-
nergies that emerge from renewed conversations between scientists
and magicians and see how magicians contributed to a new golden
age of science filled with amazing breakthroughs. ■
When a distinguished but elderly
scientist states that something
is possible, he is almost certainly
right. When he states that
something is impossible he is very
probably wrong.”
- Arthur C. Clarke
 i c
ag ess
28

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 Why do certain product and service experiences seem to have that undeniable “wow” factor, while
others disap- point customers? Perhaps there’s no better place to turn to than the world of magic.
Below, Stefan Thomke and Jason Randal consider that leading magicians are constantly under
pressure to come up with new “effects” that wow audiences. They have to innovate frequently and
rely on a systematic way of doing so.
T
he late science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once famously said,
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic.”1 Clarke, a prescient futurist, was right. New products like
the iPhone can indeed seem like magic, and companies have long
been trying to unlock the secrets of that wondrous quality. Why do
certain product and service experiences seem to have that undeniable
“wow” factor, making them all but destined for success, while other
items – even those that might boast superior technology and a glut
of features – somehow lack that pizzazz, relegating them to languish
on store shelves? The difference has less to do with catchy advertising,
and everything to do with the innovation process itself.
For a better understanding of that, perhaps there’s no better place to
turn to than the world of magic. Consider that the leading professional
magicians are constantly under pressure to come up with new “effects”
(often under very tight budgets) that will result in a magical, or trans-
formational, customer experience. As such, professional magicians
can’t just be innovative on a whim; they must have a systematic way of
doing so. In essence, they must do what managers have to do in their
organisations every day – derive creative solutions to difficult prob-
lems. But how exactly can they (and their organisations) become more
innovative and deliver magical product and service experiences that
consistently exceed customer expectations?
Our intent is to reveal a process of creation that is common
to both the “tricks” that awe a spellbound audience, such
as the “disappearance” of the Statue of Liberty (an early
illusion introduced by David Copperfield which may have
involved “moving” the audience rather than the statue) and
the products that give customers unforgettable experiences. In-
deed, all attempts to create something new, whether an experience
or a product, share a process of creative work that should begin with a
deep understanding of what needs to be solved, fol- lowed by how to
solve it, how to hide the solution, and how to sell the experience. We
don’t pretend to have all the answers to those difficult questions, but
we can provide some novel and practical insights that we have taught
to more than one thousand executives.2
What’s the Real Innovation Problem?
Some professional magicians spend considerable time deciding where
they should be applying their skills when creating new “effects.” They
are constantly asking themselves, “What’s the real problem that I’m
trying to solve? How do I even think about this particular problem?”
Magicians essentially source innovation in two ways: from the top
down and bottom up. Top down begins with a fresh idea or question:
“Wouldn’t it be amazing if… we could saw a tiger in half, make Dave
Letterman’s coffee cup move across his desk all by itself, or pour any
cocktail named from an empty glass?” Bottom up begins with an
existing routine, method, or gimmick that is drawn upon, utilised, or
improved. If a sleight-of-hand “deck switch” is necessary for a card rou-
tine, and it can’t be accomplished using existing cover, the magician
must invent an alternate “no switch” method, provide adequate cover
1. Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future. Henry Holt & Co; Rev Sub edition,
March 1984. Casual references to the word “magic” or “magical” are extensive in
business practice. However, few, if any, businesses have studied the field of magic
to extract some of its most important insights.
2. For a much more detailed description of the concepts discussed in this article,
see Stefan Thomke and Jason Randal, “Innovation Magic.” Harvard Business
School Note 612-099.
that seems reasonable, or utilise some clever misdirection.
The best innovators in business always allow for sufficient time for
defining an innovation problem before proceeding with any project.
When Walt Disney was planning Disney- land in the late 1940s, for in-
stance, he didn’t rush into solving the specific problems of just another
amusement park – how many rides to have, what was the minimum
number of parking spaces, what kinds of food to offer in the concession
stands, and so on. Instead, he concentrated on solving a much larger,
general problem “top down”: how can Disney provide visitors with a
magical customer experience?
Unfortunately, problem definition is often the most under- rated part
of the innovation process, and many companies give it short shrift.
Managers and engineers can’t wait to do the “real work” of developing
solutions. They don’t realise that defining a problem is perhaps the
most important part of the innovation process. Savvier companies have
learned to spend the proper attention to problem definition way up-
stream in the innovation process. They carefully observe customers,
learn from lead users, and tap into other sources of information
that help them frame the problem correctly. Moreover, from the
start they are also very aware that part of the “magic” of a
successful product occurs when it goes beyond just meet-
ing needs or when it solves problems in unexpected
ways to enhance the total customer experience.
Consider Apple3.The consumer electronics leader is
29
known for many things – innovative products, stylish
designs, and savvy marketing, among them – but perhaps
the company’s greatest strength is its ability to get to the
heart of a problem. As CEO Steve Jobs once explained, “When
you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple…, you
don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. And your
solutions are way too oversimplified. Then you get into the problem,
and you see it’s really complicated. And you come up with all these
convoluted solutions… That’s where most people stop.” But not Apple.
The company keeps on plugging away. “The really great person will
keep on going and find…the key, underlying principle of the problem
and come up with a beautiful elegant solution that works,” explains
Jobs.4.
Doing, Hiding, and Selling
Innovative magicians have learned to break a project down into three
fundamental components: how to do it, how to hide it, and how to sell
it. In business, most managers associate just the first item – how to do
it – with product development. But, as we shall see, the other two tasks
can also make or break the success of any innovation.
How to Do It
Innovative magicians are skilled at using two top-down and bottom-up
methods of innovating and switch between them whenever a project
is stuck. Similarly, the company IDEO, for example, has amassed a “Tech
Box” of hundreds of unrelated parts – everything from special fabrics
to oddball toys to electrical gizmos – that designers will rummage
3. Stefan Thomke and Barbara Feinberg, “Design Thinking and Innovation at
Apple.” Harvard Business School Case 609-066.
4. Steve Levy, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and
Coolness. New York: Simon & Shuster Paperbacks, 2007.
When you start looking at a problem
and it seems really simple…, you don’t
really understand the complexity of the
problem.”
- Steve Jobs
through for bottom-up inspiration. Each
item is documented and logged into a
knowledge management system so that
information about the collection can
be made available over the company’s
intranet.5 When IDEO designers are having
trouble solving a difficult problem, for
instance, they’ll often look through the
“Tech Box” in hopes that one of the items
will trigger an idea that will ultimately lead
to a solution. Indeed, perhaps one of the
most magical moments of the innovation
process is when the top-down (big picture)
and bottom-up (procedural) approaches
meet to produce a Eureka breakthrough.

The solution to a problem can sometimes

come from the most unlikely sources, and
it’s often the intersection of different fields
that results in major innovations.6 That’s
why companies like IDEO assemble teams
in which anthropologists, designers, engi-
neers, and other specialists work side by
side. Each of those individuals might look
31
at the same problem in very different ways
because of the lens of their experience,
education, training, and so on. And so it is
that leading magicians train them- selves
in multiple disciplines (and draw upon
these during the creation and execution of
their acts). Even magic that appears simple
combines applied psychology and findings
from neuroscience, principles of mechan-
ics, and often specialised knowledge such
as scuba, locksmithing, or pyrotechnics.7
Innovative magicians, by necessity, must
often build their own props or devices,
possess a variety of fabrication and repair
skills, and become adept with materials,
methods, and tools.

5. Stefan Thomke and Ashok Nimgade. “IDEO

Product Development.” Harvard Business School
Case 600-143; Tom Kelly, The Art of Innovation,
Crown Business, 2001.
6. Lars Bo Jeppesen and Karim Lakhani, “Mar-
ginality and Problem Solving Effectiveness in
Broadcast Search”, Organization Science, Volume
21, Issue 4, September 2010.
7. Stephen L. Macknik, Susana Martinez Conde,
and Sandra Blakesless, Sleights of Mind: What the
Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday
Deceptions, Henry Holt and Co., 2010.
 https://youtu.be/bJq697FfRQI
How to Hide It (and How to Decide What to Show)
There are said to be two types of magicians. The first is a “mag-
cian’s magician,” who develops, performs, and markets tricks
that employ novel methods, are technically difficult, and are
designed primarily to impress fellow magicians. The second
is an “audience’s magician” who performs tricks that
may or may not be technically difficult, but nonethe-
32 less have a huge impact on the general observer.
The second type of magician tends to have wider
appeal because nobody (besides another magician)
necessarily cares or appreciates how difficult a trick is.
People mainly just want to be “wowed” and entertained.
Great magicians will strike the delicate and changing balance
between the seen and unseen, which can become an innovation
in itself – sometimes as a result of failures or challenges from an
audience. For example, Houdini, who conceived the famous straight
jacket escape, hid his method by performing behind a small curtain
while the orchestra played. Houdini’s brother Theo (who billed himself
as Hardeen), when accused of using a hidden assistant to escape from
his straight jacket, responded by working in full view of the audience.
The response was so strong that the effect has largely been performed
that way ever since.8
The temptation to “show everything” often crops up among engi-
neers, for instance, who want to display everything they’ve come up
with: the technically brilliant solutions that so amaze their engineer-
ing peers. But sometimes the best solution for presentation is not
necessarily making visible the complex underpinnings that go into a
product design or service delivery. From the customer’s point of view,
often times the best solution for their purposes is relatively simple.
And that’s one of the things that Bang & Olufsen does well. The Danish
manufactuer of exclusive electronics products understands that
consumers don’t necessarily want to fiddle with the equaliser, balance,
and other controls in order to find the optimum combination of set-
tings to watch a movie or listen to music. As such, its high-end speaker
system, for example, automatically makes the necessary adjustments
to reproduce a recording with as much fidelity to the original as
possible so that all that’s left for users to enjoy themselves is to select
just one thing: the volume. The lesson here is that products that have
8. Bert Randolph Sugar, Houdini: His Life and Art. Grosset & Dunlap, 1976.
true magic to them are those that hide exactly what should remain
concealed – nothing more, and nothing less.
How to Sell It
Many magicians, while skilled at the art and craft of illusion,
aren’t necessarily successful performers. At a young age, they
might have been fascinated and highly motivated to learn
the various techniques and secrets of the magic profes-
sion, but were never particularly interested in learning
how to sell what they do. Here, we’re not talking about
the actual selling of a product that a sales force does. What
we’re referring to is the selling of the customer experience. Top
professional magicians recognise that they are, above all, entertain-
ers, and their goal is to connect with the emotions of the audience.
Teller, of the famous duo Penn & Teller, performs an exquisite illusion
called “Shadows,” in which he, using real scissors, apparently cuts only
the shadow of a flower standing in a vase. As he moves the scissors,
the petals of the real flower fall. It’s a trick that is almost poetic in its
simplicity and so perfectly performed that it often brings tears to the
eyes of many in the audience.
In other words, savvy innovators know that they have to sell the entire
customer experience. They know that an auto- mobile will appear to
be well built (and customers might experience it that way) if its doors
close with a solid “thunk” sound. They recognise that an electronic
book is not just about the readability of its display and the charge life
of its battery but also about how closely it can mimic the experience
of page turning. And they’ll pay attention to even seemingly mundane
things, like a product’s packaging. High-end vodka distillers like Grey
Goose, Chopin, and Belvedere, for example, have learned to enhance
the customer’s experience by packaging their products in tall, slender,
sleekly designed bottles with long necks that evoke an air of sophis-
tication and elegance. At the same time, the experience has to feel
“real”– not just a trick. Magicians usually ask, “Since I can’t really do it,
how can I appear to do it? What is the least evidence the audience will
expect me to produce? How much evidence is too much?” The Statue
of Liberty vanish, for example, was proven by powerful lights search-
ing the area where the statue should have been.
Innovation Tricks
Figuring out how to do something, how to hide it, and how to sell it are
much easier said than done. Even the best professional magicians will
often struggle for months (or years) experimenting as they pursue one
dead end after another before arriving at a solution that works. But the
important thing is that they don’t passively wait for some sort of divine
inspiration or Eureka moment. Instead, they actively think, experiment,
and constantly iterate. The following tips and practices can help consid-
erably in that process.
Intend to Innovate
Many people have a romantic notion of innovation. They think it arrives
serendipitously – Sir Isaac Newton sitting under a tree when an apple
falls. Although serendipity often does play a role, the truth is that inno-
vations simply don’t come out of nowhere. You have to intend to inno-
vate. That is, you can’t just desire to solve a problem; you have to intend
to solve it by going beyond any obvious, cookie-cutter approaches. And
you have to practice to get good at that. But exactly how are people
supposed to accomplish that, especially when they have little practice
in doing so? Consider that most employees go to work in the morning
knowing perfectly well what they have to do in their daily jobs, and that
knowledge makes them feel comfortable. But now if the organisation
suddenly adds “innovator” to everyone’s job descriptions, employees are
likely to become anxious because they’re no longer sure exactly what’s
expected of them. So to encourage people to leave their comfort zones,
companies have to be sure to amply reward the desired behavior, some-
times even when it results in the failure of a project. Remember that, at
its very essence, innovation is all about successes and failures – experi-
menting with different approaches to find the one that’s most effective.
Prototype, Test, and Revise
Magic is strongly linked with the concept of practice and suc-
cessful magicians are those who have learned the value of
that old saying, “practice makes perfect.” From an early age,
they recognise the need to rehearse regularly. They’ll repeat-
edly perform a sleight-of-hand maneuver for countless hours in
front of a mirror until they’re satisfied that they’ve worked out all
the kinks. And while they’re practicing, they’ll also experiment with
different ways of doing something in order to find the optimal tech-
nique. This process reveals what is visible to an audience from different
angles and what will need “hiding” during a performance. As much as
creativity underlies the invention of new tricks, it is the discipline of
experimentation that drives this innovation process9. Specifically, when
developing a new trick, the best professional magicians will always build
prototypes, which they’ll test, revise accordingly, test again, further
revise, and so on. The secret to that iterative process is to experiment
both frequently and early in a project. Likewise, businesses that excel in
innvation tend to run myriad tests as far upstream as possible in order to
avoid expending considerable resources pursuing a potential solution
that will ultimately lead nowhere.
Prime for Progress
The left hemisphere of our brains (popularly known as the sequential,
logical side) perceives and processes the world in terms of its parts
and their descriptions. In contrast, the right hemisphere (known as
the emotional, holistic side) sees the world in terms of shapes, images,
feelings, and impressions. The problem is when the left part is allowed
to dominate the right part, it can be detrimental for innovation. To avoid
that, we can engage in specific activities that purposely “prime” the right
brain before attempting to solve anything that is particularly difficult.
Techniques range from copying an upside down drawing, or writing
with the non-dominant hand, to assembling a puzzle minus the “inter-
9. Stefan Thomke, Experimentation Matters, Harvard Business School Publishing,
2003.
nal talking” or without directions. With both hemispheres contributing,
the brain has its best chance to be more creative.
In addition, one should always allow for difficult problems to “mari-
nate” before trying to solve them. In the development of new magic,
progress doesn’t always come in an upward linear fashion. It arrives
more like a step function: for long periods of time you won’t appear
to be making any progress but then, seemingly out of nowhere, you’ll
make a leap forward. You might, for instance, have an “aha” moment
after struggling with a problem for months. This process is very diffi-
cult to predict and stands in contrast to traditional engineering, which
might have some uncertainty but is much more predictable: you’ll
typically have some ups and downs but you’ll tend to make steady
progress. Even in emergencies, pilots are trained to “wind their watch”
so they don’t rush into solving the wrong problem. The gain in effec-
tiveness from contemplating a situation usually outweighs the loss of
a few moments of action.
Practice the Art of Toggling
There are two very important roles in innovation: creator (to brain-
storm new ideas) and critic (to decide which of those ideas are worth
pursuing). The problem is that most people are in the habit of critical
thinking – when they hear a new idea, they immediately think of its
flaws, inconsistencies, and problems. But this can then squelch the
creative process before it even has the chance to get fully started. To
avoid that, the trick is to toggle between creator and critic. Other-
wise, if you try to perform both roles at the same time, the critic
will usually silence the creator. In addition, innovators also
need to toggle between the top-down and bottom-up
approaches to innovation. In a typical project, people
know what they want to accomplish and they know
the specifics of their profession (the tools, tech-
niques, and so on), but they’re frequently unsure
how to use the latter to arrive at the former. So they
33
need to toggle between the two and allow sufficient
time for that process to converge. They should also toggle
between the “big picture” perspective (what problem am I
really trying to solve?) and the procedural view (how to do, hide,
and sell it), particularly when they’re stuck on a project because
that process will force them to re-examine and check all their basic
assumptions.
The Question Is the Answer
It’s amusing to consider that the starting point for innovation is
often similar to the starting point for comedy- “dissatisfaction”. As
such, innovators shouldn’t necessarily ask what new product will get
customers to open their wallets. Instead, they can ask what customers
don’t like about a current product. By identifying such “pain points,”
they can then start to figure out how best to improve something and
design a solution that customers will eagerly adopt. More- over, it’s
not only crucial to ask the right initial question, it’s also important to
follow that up with the proper exploratory queries. We call that the
power of “else”: What else? When else? Where else? What else? Why
else? How else? Who else? One of the secrets to innovation is to ask
the right questions. Great magicians always ask themselves: “What
else can I add to an existing trick to make it an exceptional audience
experience?” For example, “The Trick That Fooled Einstein” is a well-es-
tablished mathematical effect usually performed with a bowl of
coins. Ignoring the coins, the magician might ask, “Utilising the same
principle, can I perform a better effect with, say, postcards, marbles,
or cookies?” In our opinion, the one difference that separates great
innovators from others is the ability to ask much better questions.
Stay in the Room STEFAN THOMKE
According to Woody Allen, “80% of success is showing up.” We’d go
a little further than that and say, “In order to succeed you have to do
more than just show up. You have to stay in the room long enough.”
Persistence is the key to success in virtually all aspects of life, and that’s
especially true in innovation. Take, for example, the early manufactur-
ers of MP3 players. They helped develop impressive technology but
they didn’t take it far enough. They exited the room much too soon or
stopped trying to ask the next round of innovation questions, leaving
Apple to reap the benefits from recognising that the crucial thing
wasn’t just the device itself but the magical way in which the entire
music industry could be transformed with the electronic delivery
of digital content. And thus was born the wildly successful iTunes
platform.

Many people assume that persistence is an inborn trait, more nature

than nurture. But the truth is that persistence can be practiced and Stefan Thomke, an authority on the management of innovation, is
learned. The trick is to increase your attention span by constantly the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at
pushing yourself past your comfort zone until failure. Some of Houd- Harvard Business School. He is a widely published author and has
ini’s feats combined with, say, bridge jumping or negotiating a river taught and chaired numerous MBA and executive courses on inno-
in winter, required not only advanced escape skills, but the real ability vation management, R&D strategy, product & service development,
to withstand extreme levels of physical and mental discomfort. Such and operations, both at HBS and in individual company programs
levels that can only be reached through persistent practice, which in around the world.
Houdini’s case included agonising periods of breath holding, muscle
contractions, and sitting in bathtubs filled with ice.
JASON RANDAL
Bringing Magic to Innovation
Being a world-class professional magician requires much more than
just dexterous hands and an entertaining personality; it also
necessitates a variety of skills for innovating. In fact, much of
the job of a top professional magician is creative problem
solving – something that managers in business must
do on a daily basis. Yet although magic books might
34 teach aspiring magicians the techniques of their
craft – how, for example, to palm a card or coin –
they don’t provide very much guidance in how to
be more innovative. Similarly, business school courses
might teach students the fundamentals of finance, mar-
keting, strategy, and so on, but they have traditionally given
the topic of innovation short shrift. Fortunately, the principles
of innovation are universal; we have seen that managers can learn Jason Randal’s magic and mentalism has proven to be a favorite
much from the field of magic. And perhaps that, in a nutshell, is one of among his core clientele of senior level executives. Randal holds a
the most fundamental lessons of innovation: Sometimes you need to PhD in social psychology and is a member of MENSA. With over a
search way outside the normal sources of knowledge to discover true hundred television appearances, he has been a regular on David
magic – an unexpected but invaluable new approach to framing, un- Letterman, Ellen DeGeneres, and Craig Ferguson shows. On stage,
derstanding, and solving a problem that previously seemed hopelessly Randal has opened for comedians Jerry Seinfeld, Don Rickles, and
intractable. ■ Dennis Miller, and has per- formed before twelve heads of state.
Among his many talents, he is a master flight instructor and spent
ten years as a Hollywood stuntman. Thomke and Randal have been
working together for five years.

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Magic is the sole science not accepted
by scientists because they can’t
understand it.”
- Harry Houdini
 a l
o n
36
t i
c
ri e ip ic
i d sh ag
e B n M
h t i o n e
T la ee nc S
e
R tw ci PRE e V O to
r

e S
u p
isr

B d PE T
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E R Re
alit

n
|
ar
ol

a D E
R
ng
.
in
ee
r|
S ch
5

T
he magician introduces three cups and
some little balls. She waves her magic
wand and commands the balls to ma-
terialise from her hands and rematerialise
under the cups. The props seem possessed
by supernatural powers as they appear,
disappear and penetrate solid matter at the
mere whima of the magician. This unearth-
ly choreography ends with pieces of fruit
appearing under the cups where the balls
once were. The spectators applaud after wit-
nessing this ancient miracle. Yet, although
they are both fooled and entertained, a
nagging thought lingers in their minds: How
did she do it?
Among the spectators is a group of univer-
sity colleagues who reflect on what they
just experienced. They enjoyed the show
as much as everyone else, but they asked
questions beyond how she performed the
trick. The psychologist wonders how the per-
former so easily deceived his mind. How can
our minds see something that contradicts our
common-sense view of the world? The profes-
sor in humanities also enjoyed the show. She
ponders the cultural significance of magic
and why it has remained popular for millen-
nia across different cultures. Her husband is
an occupational therapist at the local hospital
and an amateur magician. He admires the
complex hand-eye coordination needed to
perform this trick and contemplates how
magic tricks can help his patients.
This anecdote illustrates how magic per-
formances can have different meanings,
depending on the viewer’s perspective. These
paragraphs also show that the question of
how magicians accomplish a magic trick
37
is only one of the wide variety of possible
questions. This article explores some of these
questions and looks at the complex rela-
tionship between magic and science.
The Magic of Science
Performing magic is essentially an anti-scien-
tific endeavour. A magician is a performer
who creates illusions that break the known
laws of nature. Even though the central pre-
mise of magic as a performance is to flaunt
with our scientific understanding of the wor-
ld, magicians nevertheless use the principles
of science to create the illusion of magic. The
magician in the introduction is fully aware of
the psychological aspects of her performance
by managing the audience’s attention. Other
magicians extensively use mathematics, en-
gineering, information technology, linguistics,
 CUMULATIVE NUMBER OF SCHOLARLY
Theatrical Magic Bibliography
Cumulative number of PUBLICATIONS
scholarly and professional publicationsMAGIC
400
300
200
100
0
1890 1900 1910 1920
explain abstract concepts of management.
Finding this paper was a welcome distraction
from my primary research. I subsequently
started a fascinating exploration into the
world of science and magic by developing a
bibliography.
The bibliography of the science of
magic currently includes more
than four hundred entries. The
scientific research into magic
38 is often undertaken out of
an interest in magic itself,
but also uses magic perfor-
mances as a research method to
learn about the world in general. For
magicians, this research is valuable and
exciting. These scientific findings enriches
their art and perhaps helps them fine-tune
their techniques to improve the deceptive-
ness and entertainment value of their tricks.
For scientists, magic is an exciting field of
study and experimental modality that helps
us to understand the world.
For the full academic magic bibliography,
see: https://horizonofreason.com/magic/ma-
gic-bibliography/.
Formal Sciences
The formal sciences form the foundations of
all the other sciences. Subjects such as logic
and mathematics provide the building blocks
of science. Magicians often rely on mathema-
tics as a method to entertain their audiences.
Even the greats of magic, such as David Cop-
perfield, use self-working mathematical tricks.
Mathematical magic tricks broadly fall into
three categories. Most such magic entails
self-working routines that use number theory.
INVOLVING
(1887−2021)
1930 1940 1950 1960 1970
sociology or performance studies to present
a world where the impossible becomes
seemingly possible. The relationship between
science and magic is thus bi-directional.
Magicians use science to create the illusion
of supernatural magic, while scientists study
magicians and their craft to learn more about
the world around us.
The diagram above visualises this bidirec-
tional relationship. The outer circle shows
the types of sciences involved with magic:
formal, physical, social, and applied sciences.
The formal sciences, such as mathematics,
form the foundations of science. The physical
sciences, such as physics and chemistry, des-
cribe the material world. The social sciences
study the behaviour of human beings, either
as individuals or in groups. The social sciences
also study the artefacts of human cultures,
one of which is theatrical magic. The second
ring lists the individual sciences where scho-
lars and professionals have published about
theatrical magic. Each of these sciences has
a different relationship with theatrical magic.
Magicians use science as layers of deception
(the methods ring), while scholars develop
scientific perspectives of magic (the research
ring). Some sciences, such as psychology and
performance studies, are both a method of
magic and a field of study.
The Bibliography of Magic
and Science
The circle diagram provides a taxonomy of
the magic of science and the science of magic
that emerged from extensive bibliographical
research into magic. I discovered the first
scientific paper on magic when writing my
dissertation about business studies. This
paper showed how magic tricks can help to
1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
horizonofreason.com
These are the well-known tricks that use
patterns and properties of numbers to
create seemingly impossible outcomes.
Less common are magic tricks that use
geometry, with the missing square puzzle
as the most popular implementation. The
third category of mathematical magic
tricks uses topology. Classics, such as
the linking rings, have a topolo-
gical theme. Linking two rings
without cutting them is only
possible in a world with more than
three spatial dimensions. Some magic
tricks, such as the legendary Afghan
Bands or rubber band magic, use topology
as a method.
Natural Sciences
The science of nature seeks to develop
models to explain and predict the physical
and biological world. Magicians liberally use
the principles of physics and chemistry to
create their illusions. Magical engineering
uses optics, hydraulics and electronics and
anything else that can help create a magical
effect. The scientific literature in this genre
does not research magic itself but mainly
describes how teachers can use magic tricks
to help students understand the principles
of nature.
Social Sciences
The social sciences are a broad group of
scientific interests that study all aspects
of human individuals and collectives. This
area of research is so wide that the space
available in this article can barely skim the
surface.
Psychology is the mother of all sciences
of magic. The scientific study of magic is
almost as old as psychology, with the first
papers published in the 19th century. More
recently, the number of articles on this topic
has seen exponential growth. Gustav Kuhn is
one of the drivers of this research through the
Magic Lab at Goldsmiths University. The broad
question of interest in most of these studies is
how magicians deceive people. This research
is interesting for magicians who like to per-
fect their techniques. More importantly, this
research also generalises broader questions
about how humans perceive the world.
Sociology and anthropology have a
long-standing interest in magic. Initially,
anthropologists directed their attention
toward magicians and shamans in traditional
societies, some of which use sleight-of-hand
as part of their rituals. Since decolonisation,
anthropologists have focused more on wes-
tern societies, including theatrical magicians.
The main question of interest for sociolo-
gists and anthropologists is how magicians
organise themselves, transmit their secret
knowledge, and the meaning of magic within
contemporary society.
The field of performance studies is a signifi-
cant aspect of the social sciences researching
magic. The underlying question in this field of
study is the place of magic within the per-
formance arts. Traditionally, literature
The Huddersfield University publi-
shes the Journal of Performance
Magic, dedicated to publishing
articles on theatrical magic that
provide a wide perspective of the
art of magic.
Also linguists have directed their attention
to magic by looking at how the words used
in performances enhance the deceptive
quality of a magic trick. Linguistic interest in
magic is not only theoretical. Magicians have
enhanced the English dictionary with words
and phrases such as “gimmick” and “smoke
and mirrors”.
Performing magic seems to be a male-do-
minated activity, with only a fraction of
magicians being female performers. Several
scholars in gender studies have tried to find
an answer to this imbalance. Fortunately,
the number of female magicians is gradually
increasing, enhancing our craft’s diversity.
Film studies analyses cinema from the past
and present and is as such an offshoot of per-
formance studies. French magician Georges
Méliès is the father of all special effects. He
invented a lot of new techniques in the early
days of cinema. Cinema and magic still have a
lot in common in the 21st century. They both
present the viewer with a world where the
seemingly impossible becomes possible.
The historiography of magic (the science of
writing the history of magic) has evolved
much in the past decades. Early magic history
books focus on the magician as the story’s
hero. Contemporary history books focus less
on individuals and place magicians and their
art within the context of the society in which
they live.
Lastly, scholars in legal studies have inves-
tigated issues with intellectual property in
magic. The magical literature is littered with
disputes about originality and claims of
plagiarism, which makes it a fertile field for
experts in this area.
Applied Sciences
The applied sciences, such as teaching,
engineering and health care, use the formal,
natural and social sciences as mechanisms to
improve reality. For example, teachers trans-
mit knowledge, engineers create the physical
world we live in, and medical professionals
help us live long healthy lives. The magic lite-
rature in the applied sciences describes how
magic tricks and the methods of magicians
can help these professionals quest to improve
the world.
The most common applications of magic are
in education and health care. For example,
mathematics and science teachers use magic
tricks to explain otherwise abstract concepts
and enhance the learning experience. Many
magic tricks that use physics, chemistry or
mathematics are ideal vehicles to engage
students in the subject.
Nurses, dentists and doctors use magic
tricks to reduce anxiety in children before
treatment. Magic in health care is not only a
passive form of entertainment to engender
positive emotions in patients. Performing
magic tricks by the patients themselves can
increase their self-esteem. Patients of occu-
pational therapists can use magic to improve
their manual dexterity. Programs, such as
Kevin Spencer’s Healing of Magic, trains thera-
pists to use magic in their practice.
Also computer scientists have started expe-
rimenting with magic tricks. Both magicians
and software designers create virtual realities.
The computer screen is the theatre of the
software developer, and deception is also
an integral part of Artificial Intelligence and
robotics. For example, you might think that
you are chatting to a person while in actual
fact, you are responding to a string of words
generated by an algorithm. The computer
has no idea what these words mean, and we
are deceived into believing we converse with
a person. Software developers don’t neces-
sarily use the same techniques as magicians,
but perhaps they should embrace them to
improve the deceptiveness of their software.
New Avenues of Inspiration
This article barely touches the surface of the
amount of available literature about science
and magic. We can conclude from this safari
into the bibliography of the magical sciences
that there is no such thing as the science of
magic. Eugene Burger used to say that the
house of magic has many rooms. This analogy
does not only apply to magicians but can ea-
sily be extended to the sciences. Likewise, the
house of science also has many rooms and
thus provides multiple perspectives on magic.
Reading scientific literature about magic
is not only beneficial for experts in their
respective fields. Magicians can learn from
the science of magic as it can enhance their
methods, provide inspiration for their scripts,
and generally increase appreciation of the art.
For scientists and professionals, studying ma-
gic is a rewarding activity that can inspire and
revitalise the mind and open new avenues of
inspiration.
if you like to learn more about the rela-
tionship between magic and science, then vi-
sit the magicperspectives.net website, which
lists the complete bibliography and links to
the various papers. ■
39 39
DR. PETER PREVOS
With over three decades of experience as
a water engineer and manager, and a PhD
in business, Peter has worked on multiple
continents including Europe, Africa, Asia,
and Australia. He aspires to become the Willy
Wonka of the water industry by developing
new ways to solve old problems. Currently,
Peter is responsible for developing and
implementing the data science strategy at a
water utility company in regional Australia.
The objective of his strategy is to create
value from data through useful, sound, and
aesthetic data science.
 Th Ma rs at
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40
I
have been a university math professor for over twenty-five years, and I love
it. I get to work with students from all across the spectrum of mathematical
comfort. I teach students who love math and take lots of advanced classes,
and I teach students who have not had good experiences at all and, quite
honestly, fear the subject. Each student is different, of course, and I am so glad
for opportunities to work with them all.

As different as student experiences can be, there is one thing that unites
them all – Monday mornings are hard! In Monday morning classes, there is
a palpable sense of exhaustion (dread, even) regarding the upcoming week
of assignments and exams. There is a common sense of regret that the prior
weekend was not as productive as had been originally planned (we teachers
feel this too!). This makes Monday classes particularly challenging.
Several years ago, I decided to start a Monday morning class with a magic trick
– one that was math related. This perked up the group a bit, and a student
suggested that I should do something similar every Monday. With that, “Magic
Mondays” were born.

Since that day, I have started every Monday morning class (from introductory to
advanced) with a magic effect that is related in some way to math. Sometimes
the math part is clear (effects of the form “Pick a number, now multiply it by 5,
now add 3, etc.”). Other times, though, the mathematical part is in the working
and is less obvious.

What started as a way to ease students into Monday mornings has become a
staple of my teaching career. Students who are taking their first class with me
will ask me about it when the semester starts. Clearly, they have heard about
Magic Mondays from others, and that lets me know that the lessons (or at least
the experiences) are making it out the classroom door.

I have discovered over the years that the impact of magic in a math classroom is
more than just a fun extracurricular diversion. This magic is also making better
math students, and this article describes a few ways in which this is the case. 41
I want to be clear that when I say “better” math students, I’m not just talking
about students getting better grades. Good grades are nice, of course, but
I’m referring to improvements that, to me, are much more meaningful. I have
organized my comments based on six Cs: comfort, coolness, concepts, curiosity,
creativity, and communication.
 Comfort
If I had a nickel for every time someone said to me, “I’m not a math
person” – then I could fill hundreds of miser’s dream buckets with
coins. I have come to understand that the statement really means
“math makes me uncomfortable.” This is often the result of negative
experiences in classes (or with teachers), and unfortunately it is all too
common.

One of my goals as a teacher is to help change this perspective, for this

surely makes better math students. I like for the magic (and the mathe-
matics) that I do in class to be inviting, welcoming – and comfortable
• Modular Arithmetic: I tell my class that I have a very strange hobby –
– to the students. I do my best to avoid “gotcha”-type effects, especial-
I memorize Universal Product Codes (UPCs) that appear on retail items.
ly in introductory classes of hesitant students. If I can make students
They can test me by calling out the codes on items in their possession
comfortable by enjoying some magic, then I am one step closer to
and omitting one of the digits (and instead saying “blank” at that po-
having them feel more comfortable with the math behind it. Comfor-
sition). After a series of questions meant only for show (and a little bit
table math students are better math students.
of basic mental calculation), I am able to announce the missing digit.
I’m not sure I fool anyone with my “strange hobby” claim, but this is a
Coolness fun introduction to the area of modular arithmetic, which is the thing
When a student tells me that math is not their thing, I like to add the upon which the patterns of UPCs are based.
word “yet” to their statement. I suggest that perhaps they have not yet
encountered a part of mathematics that has caught their attention,
and then I like to try and find something that will do just that. If I can
Curiosity
A curious mind is one of the best things a math student can possess.
help students find something “cool” about math, then they are less
Genuine curiosity involves not only a desire to know more about
likely to have the “not a math person” perspective – and that makes
something, but also a willingness to persevere on the journey toward
them better math students.
that knowledge. Sometimes (many times?) in math classes, impa-
tience wins out over curiosity. Understandably, it may be difficult for a
• Take any number that is not evenly divisible by 7, get a calculator,
student to generate genuine curiosity about a word problem involving
and then divide that number by 7. If the calculator window is
two trains approaching one another on parallel tracks. Nurturing cu-
large enough, you’ll see lots of numbers to the right of the de-
riosity takes practice, though. If I can encourage curiosity in other
cimal (they actually go on forever, but no calculator window
settings, maybe that skill and the associated perseverance can
is that large!). Find the sum of the first six digits to the
be more fully developed.
right of the decimal. You’ll always get 27. Cool math
42 area: cyclic numbers.
An example I have used in class in this setting is an
• Start with a three-digit number, perform a parti-
effect similar to David Copperfield’s Orient Express trick
cular set of easy operations, and always end up with
(not the one where an actual train disappears, but the
the number 1089. (The operations are readily available
one involving a grid of cards similar to the one here. A card
via an internet search of the number 1089.) Cool math
is randomly chosen, and, after several steps/moves, Copperfield
area: basic algebra is used to show why this works.
identifies the current location).
• Fold a piece of paper a certain way, make a single, straight scissor
cut. Unfold the paper to reveal a swan, a butterfly, a star, or many
other things. Cool math area: the Fold and Cut Theorem.

• Start with a standard deck of 52 playing cards, do eight successive

faro shuffles to really mix them up (wink-wink). The cards are now
in their original positions! Cool math area: several great (advanced)
mathematical topics related to card shuffling.

Coolness is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and so I try to use an

assortment of different ideas to help students see a new side of math.

Concepts
Magic Mondays can work nicely as introductions to class topics. When
students have relatable examples in mind, new concepts are less abs-
tract for them from the beginning.

• Angles, Area, Slope: The pieces in the puzzle on the left can be
rearranged into the positions on the right – and there is something
missing! These “geometric vanishes” have appeared in various forms
over the years, but the reason for their weirdness is all based on angles,
areas, and slopes of lines. This effect is a nice introduction to some of
these topics.
This is nice because it can be repeated at students’ desks with their
own cards, and the effect/method is in the sweet spot between being
too easy and too complex. I have found that this puts their curiosity
level at just the right place, and they enjoy working toward unders-
tanding the reasoning (which, by the way, is based on the relationship
between even and odd numbers).
Creativity
It may be surprising for some to read that creativity is fundamental in

When a student tells

mathematics. Often thought of as the subject “where there is always
and only one right answer,” there is a common perception that math is

me that math is not their

a straight-down-the-middle, solve-it-or-you-don’t endeavor. With the
possible exception of a claimed ability to bend spoons with your mind,

thing, I like to add the word

nothing could be further from the truth. Mathematicians are problem
solvers, and while some of the problems have standard solution me-

“yet” to their statement.”

thods, others require a great deal of creativity and outside-of-the-box
thinking. (Here you can picture the scene in the classic film Apollo 13
where the mathematicians and engineers are challenged to create a
survival plan using only items that were in the stranded capsule.) In
my classes, I love to try and find opportunities for students to practice
this sort of creativity. Not only does it help them in my class, but it also
helps them to become better thinkers and problem solvers in general.

I often use Magic Monday opportunities to do this. After I demons-

trate an effect, I give students time to brainstorm a bit to come up with
as many ways as they can as to how the trick worked. The goal is not Magic and Mathematics in the
for them to find the way I did it, but rather to identify ways that I might
have done it. A great example of this is Fitch Cheney’s Five Card Trick. Classroom at Princeton and
This is the effect in which the magician, seeing four of five randomly Harvard
selected cards is able to identify the fifth. The effect requires an assis-
tant who is in-the-know, and it uses a mathematical system to use four “The Mathematics of Magic Tricks and
cards to encode the identity of the fifth. I enjoy hearing the possible Games,” a class taught at Princeton and
methods that the students suggest. Harvard, explores the mathematical
principles behind games and magic
Another way to tap into the students’ creativity is to ask them to tricks. Students then use those prin-
modify my effects to create new ones. For the five-card trick, they ciples to create and master their own
ask themselves if they could do the same trick with fewer (or more) tricks and games.
cards. They like the idea of encoding the identity of things using
other things, and they think of lots of different ways to use
these codes.

Communication
43
As students progress through math courses and math
majors, they begin to understand the importance of precise
communication. In mathematical writing, symbols and terms have
precise meanings, and any sort of sloppiness in their use can turn a
true statement into a false (or nonsensical) one. I use Magic Mondays
to give students a chance to practice this precision, and I do this by
having them write clear, detailed instructions regarding how an effect
looks in performance and how the working is accomplished.

One example that I use a lot in this setting is the classic 21 card trick.
The effect is fairly simple to do, but it can be a challenging exercise to
write the instructions for someone who has never seen or heard of it.
As students prepare drafts, we have other students try to read and fol-
low the instructions as literally as possible. Errors and lack of precision
get revealed very quickly this way, and this is both instructive and fun.

Magic, math, and teaching are three of my favorite things. I feel very
fortunate to be able to combine all of these things with my Magic
Mondays. From hesitant to eager students and from introductory to
advanced levels, magic can enrich perceptions, foster creativity, and
deepen understanding of the beautiful subject of mathematics. ■

JOHN HARRIS
John Harris is a Professor of Mathematics at Furman University. His
research spans sports analytics, recreational mathematics, and graph
theory. Recent projects include analyses of board games and card
games, work on baseball and soccer analytics, and studies of mathe-
matical magic tricks.
 7
44 Magic: Art of
the Impossible
JASON LEDDINGTON
Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bucknell
University

https://youtu.be/hk6EAfo2eyQ
https://youtu.be/4aVmlv2YVZ0
Michael [watching Rita walk on water]:
“Is that your trick, G.O.B.?”
G.O.B.: “No, Michael, that’s not my trick.
It’s my ILLUSION!”
- Arrested Development, Season 3, Episode 61
In his book on Indian street magic, Net of Magic,
magician and religious studies professor Lee
Siegel relates the following conversation:
“I’m writing a book on magic,” I explain, and
I’m asked, “Real magic?” By real magic people
mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and
supernatural powers. “No,” I answer: “Conjuring
tricks, not real magic.” Real magic, in other
words, refers to the magic that is not real, while
that magic that is real, that can actually be
done, is not real magic. (Siegel, 1991: 425)
This article is not about “real magic,” but theatri-
cal magic—magic “that can actually be done.”
(So, think Copperfield or Blaine, not Prospero
or Potter.) Theatrical magic (henceforth simply
‘magic’) is one of the most popular forms of live
entertainment of the last 200 years. Neverthe-
less, philosophers, art critics, and art histo-
rians have paid it scant attention. This is
unfortunate, because magic is a rich and
fascinating artform that deserves—
and rewards—critical reflection.
I. What Magic Isn’t 45
I begin with two common mis-
conceptions.
First, many people think that the goal of
a magic performance is to fool the audience
(after all, magicians do magic tricks!). But this is
only half right. There’s no question that many
magicians—mainly amateurs—derive pleasure
from fooling people; and a magic trick that
doesn’t fool you isn’t magical at all. But the
point of magic is not trickery. As magician and
magic theorist Darwin Ortiz writes: “Magic is not
simply about deceiving. It’s about creating an
illusion, the illusion of impossibility” (2006: 15).2
In this respect, then, trickery is just a means to
an end.
Second, there is a widely shared impression
that magicians would like to convince us that
they have supernatural abilities. Again, this
is only half right. Some performers—usually,
would-be psychics such as Uri Geller—fit this
description; and inasmuch as they profit by
using “magic” to con their audiences, they
deserve our scorn. But that a charlatan such as
Geller knowledgeably deploys the magician’s
tools does not make him a magician. A magi-
1) See https://apps.npr.org/arrested-development/joke-
41.html.
2) Note that I think Ortiz really should have said:
“Magic is not at all about deceiving.” And that magic’s
not about deceiving is compatible with James Randi’s
reminder that it shows that even the smartest among us
can (easily) be fooled.
cian may claim, as part of a performance, that
he has the ability to read minds or to make
coins vanish; however, he actually doesn’t
expect, or want, his audience to believe this.
In fact, it’s essential to his aesthetic aims that
the audience not believe that such feats are
possible. That’s because, as discussed below,
active disbelief is integral to the experience
of magic.3

These misconceptions are troubling because

they prevent us from taking magic seriously.
After all, why invest in watching or thinking
about mere trickery—especially if it wants
you to “believe in the impossible?” As magi-
cian and essayist Jamy Ian Swiss notes, mere
fooling is worse than dull, it’s aggravating
(2002b: 4–5); and using trickery to promote
belief in supernatural phenomena such as
psychokinesis or ESP not only intellectually
insults the audience, it’s also ethically loathe-
some (Swiss, 2002a). So, it’s very important to
distinguish magic from both charlatanry and
simple deception. Fine, but the question still
remains: what is magic?
II. What Magic Is
The basic condition for a successful
magic performance is that an
impossible event appears to
happen. David Blaine closes
his hand around the coin
46 and—per impossibile!—
it vanishes. So, we might
say that magic is a form of
theater that appears to present
impossible events.4 But this can’t
be quite right. As mentioned above,
to experience a performance as magical,
you must also believe that what you are ap-
parently witnessing is impossible. Otherwise,
it will seem, at best, like a demonstration
of an unusual ability. When true believers
watch Geller (pretend to) bend spoons, they
don’t experience it as magical; instead, they
marvel at his powers. And Geller doesn’t say
he’s doing the impossible; he says, “I’m really
doing it; so, it’s possible.” By contrast, the ma-
gician says, “This is impossible,” and then—as
far as the audience can tell—appears to do
it anyway. For this reason, we should think
of the impossibility of the event depicted by
a magic performance as part of the content
of the performance itself.5 So, then, what is
3) I think these misconceptions persist in part be-
cause many magicians are themselves not fully clear
about them. The unfortunate result is that their per-
formances can be quite aesthetically confused—and
confusing—just further fodder for those who would
dismiss magic as childish, intellectually insulting, or
both.
4) This deliberately echoes, but is importantly
different from, Teller’s proposed definition: “Magic
is a form of theater that depicts impossible events
as though they were really happening” (Stromberg,
n.d.). For discussion, see Leddington (2016: 255).
5) For further discussion of this point and the
semantic views underlying it, see Leddington (2016:
Ricki Jay - sleight-of-hand master
magic? Magic is a form of theater that appa- don’t appear to present the impossible. Magic
rently presents impossible events as impos- is not about pushing the limits of what can be
sible. Here is how one of magic’s most brilliant done, but about apparently going beyond
performers, Teller of Penn & Teller, describes it: them altogether.
[Y]ou experience magic as real and unreal Moreover, if magic is experienced,
at the same time. It’s a very, very odd form,
compelling, uneasy, and rich in irony…. A
in part, as real, then magic is not
fiction. Fiction asks us to imagine
romantic novel can make you cry. A horror or make-believe that something is
movie can make you shiver. A symphony can happening. In watching magic, you
carry you away on an emotional storm; it can shouldn’t have to imagine the impossible,
go straight to the heart or the feet. But magic because you should already (apparently)
goes straight to the brain; its essence is intel- be presented with it!6 In other words, magic
lectual. (Stromberg, n.d.) is not fiction, but illusion. Compare the fol-
lowing figures.
Inasmuch as magic apparently presents
impossible events, we experience it as as Figure 1
real—and so, as possible; but inasmuch as it
apparently presents impossible events, we
experience it as unreal. So, if, like much of Gel-
ler’s audience, you experience a performance
as merely real, then you don’t experience it as
magic. But still: how is it possible to expe-
rience something as “real and unreal at the
same time?” This is the key to understanding Figure 2
the experience of magic—more on it below.
First, a few comments.
If magic performances are experienced, in
part, as unreal, then they must also be distin-
guished from overt feats of skill, endurance
stunts, and so on. When sleight-of-hand mas-
ter Ricky Jay announces and then performs
an invisible bottom-deal as part of demons-
tration of card-cheating—this is not magic.
When David Blaine stands on top of a 22-inch
In Figure 1, the lines look, and are, the same
wide, 100-foot tall pillar for 35 hours—also length. Nevertheless, you can imagine them
not magic. These performances are impres- being different lengths. But, in Figure 2, you
sive, but they are not magical, because they
6) See the discussion of suspension of disbelief in the
255–6). next section.
don’t need to imagine this, because the lines already look as though
they are different lengths (yet they are not; this is the Müller-Lyer
illusion). Similarly, in watching a performance of Peter Pan, seeing
the wires holding the actor aloft doesn’t prevent you from enjoying
the play: you can still make believe that he is flying. On the other
hand, the whole point of David Copperfield’s flying illusion is that
you should, in some sense, experience it as real. If it’s successful, you
should not need to make believe that he is flying, for it should already
appear as though he is (which is why you’d better not see any wires!).7
Finally, if the point of magic is to give us an experience as of so-
mething both possible and impossible, real and unreal, then it follows
that magic aims to make us uncomfortable. After all, if you believe
that vanishing a coin is impossible, yet—as far as you can tell—it just
happened anyway, the result is a kind of cognitive dissonance. This
yields two pressing questions. First, exactly what kind of cognitive
dissonance is involved here? What exactly is going on in the mind
of someone apparently presented with something they know to be
impossible? Second, if magic performance aims to produce cognitive
dissonance, why do people seek it out? How is it possible to enjoy ma-
gic at all? The rest of this article focuses on the first of these questions.
I’ll conclude with a few thoughts about the second.
rience. However, I doubt it is psychologically possible; and, even if it is,
it cannot be the point of the performance. Copperfield’s flying illusion
is one of the greatest illusions in magic, but it’s altogether implausible
to think that mature audience members come to believe (even tem-
porarily) that he is actually flying. Again, magic isn’t about inducing
“belief in the impossible” any more than horror is about inducing
belief in monsters8. Thus, it seems that a correct characterization of
the experience of magic requires an account of cognitive dissonance
where active disbelief comes into conflict with a mental state that is
not a belief at all.
On this very point, here is Ortiz, from his book on magic performance,
Strong Magic:
[F]orget about creating willing suspension of disbelief. Get your
audience to actually believe in magic…. [But how] can you make
a sophisticated, modern audience believe in magic? You can’t, if
you’re talking about intellectual belief. I’m talking about emotional
belief. An anecdote from the 19th century perfectly captures the
difference between intellectual and emotional belief. Madam De
Duffand was asked whether she believed in ghosts. She responded,
“No. But I am afraid of them.” (2011: 25–6)

Even adults that don’t believe in ghosts, either consciously or

III. Cognitive Conflict in the Experience of Magic
What happens in the mind of someone taken in by a successful magic
performance? What is it like, cognitively, to experience the apparent
presentation of an event that you know to be impossible?
An idea widely endorsed by magicians is that the experience of
magic essentially involves suspension of disbelief. But as Ortiz
notes, this is a mistake (2011: 25). Suspension of disbelief
is what allows you to enjoy a performance of Peter Pan
even though you see the wires, or to imagine that you are
witnessing a swordfight in feudal Denmark rather than actors
wielding painted wood in present-day New York. In other words,
suspension of disbelief is what allows us to imaginatively engage
with possibilities that we don’t experience as real. So, while suspension
of disbelief is appropriate for fiction, it’s wholly irrelevant to magic.
unconsciously, still in various situations respond in various ways as
though ghosts exist. Having recently seen Poltergeist, you might
feel a rising fear and a sudden tension in your body as you enter a
darkened room—but not because you now believe in ghosts!
Arguably, it’s the same with magic. When Copperfield floats off
the stage, or the mentalist Banachek appears to read your
mind, you don’t come to believe in magic, but you do to
some degree respond, emotionally and somatically,
as though something you know to be impossible
is happening. So, how should we characterize this
sort of response?
47
8) Compare the view that our responses to fiction are explained by
a (temporary) belief in the reality of the depicted events. But the idea
that the frightened audience of The Exorcist really believes that Regan is
possessed by the demon Pazuzu is deeply implausible. For discussion, see
Carroll (1990: 63-8).

Another way to put the problem with the idea

that suspension of disbelief is essential to the
experience of magic is that suspending disbelief
in the impossible generally does not result in
cognitive dissonance. That’s because there’s no
conflict between imagining that Copperfield is
flying and firmly believing that it’s impossible. So,
if cognitive dissonance is integral to the expe-
rience of magic, then we need to look elsewhere,
and the most obvious candidate is conflict of be-
lief. On this account, while Copperfield’s audience
very firmly believes (in fact, knows) that unaided
human flight is impossible, a successful perfor-
mance will induce in them (at least temporarily)
The levitation of Daniel
the conflicting belief that he is actually flying.
Dunglas Home at Ward
This would be to experience the performance as
Cheney’s house interpreted in
thoroughly real and thoroughly unreal at the same
a lithograph from Louis Figuier,
time. Presumably this would be a powerful expe-
Les Mystères de la science 1887
7) For more on the contrast between fiction and illusion,
see Walton (1990: 54–57). The example comparing Cop-
perfield to Peter Pan is drawn from Ortiz (2011: 25). Note
that the Müller-Lyer illusion is not (by itself) magical be-
cause it is not an illusion as of something impossible. That
said, there is a long history—dating at least to the 19th
century—of using optical illusions such as the Müller-Ly-
er to create magical illusions.
4848
The seated woman longs for her dead twin. She may “feel” her sister is trying to reach out to her, physically or mentally. But her brain is likely just misreading some sensory cues such as soft
air currents in the environment around her. VALENTINRUSSANOV/E+/GETTY IMAGES
Motivated by cases such as these (and by
work in the dual-processing tradition in psy-
chology), Tamar Szabó Gendler has recently
developed a theoretical concept she calls
alief. 9 She explains:
A paradigmatic alief is a mental state with
associatively linked content that is represen-
tational, affective and behavioral, and that is
activated—consciously or nonconsciously—
by features of the subject’s internal or am-
bient environment (Gendler, 2008: 642)
Moreover, alief contrasts in important ways
with both belief and imagination. First, belief
involves endorsement of a representational
content. By contrast, in alief, a representa-
tional content is present in the subject’s co-
gnitive system, but it is not endorsed. Still, it
is associatively linked to affective and beha-
vioral contents, so it is not idle: it makes you
feel, and inclines you to act, in certain ways.
Second, alief is distinct from imagination.
While “we can (for the most part) imagine at
9) See Gendler (2008; n.d.; 2006).
will, we do not seem to have the same sort of
freedom in alief” (Gendler, 2008: 651). Further-
more, there is no cognitive conflict involved
in imagining that not-p while believing that
p; or, as Szabó Gendler puts it, in doing this, “I
am violating no norms.” By contrast,
…if I believe that P and alieve that not-P,
something is amiss. Learning that not-P may
well not cause me to cease alieving that
P—but if it does not, then…I am violating
certain norms of cognitive-behavioral
coherence. No such criticism is possible in
the analogous case of imagining. (Gendler,
2008: 651)
Here, then, we have a type of cognitive
conflict that is passively-incurred, has affec-
tive and behavioral consequences, and is not
a matter of conflicting belief. My suggestion,
then, is that we should treat the experience
of magic as essentially involving, neither
suspension of disbelief nor conflict of belief,
but the alief that x is happening, where x is
impossible and known to be so.
Suppose this is correct. Even so, the point of a
magic performance is not simply to generate
cognitive dissonance by inducing an alief that
an impossible event is happening; rather, as I
argue in the next section, the magician must,
in a very specific way, maximize this disso-
nance. Only then does the spectator have a
properly “magical” experience.
IV. The Experience of Magic
The best way to understand the experience of
magic is to consider what undermines it. Take
Copperfield’s flying illusion. If you see the
wires, you cannot have an experience of ma-
gic. But concealing the wires is not enough,
either, for if you so much as suspect that there
are wires, you cannot have an experience of
magic (no matter how good the illusion). In
general, suspecting that you know how a ma-
gic performance is accomplished is enough
to ruin it. And since, when witnessing the
apparent presentation of an impossibility, you
typically will have some ideas about possible
methods, the magician has to do more than
conceal the actual method—namely, “cancel”
 all the methods that might reasonably occur
to you (Minch, 1980: 11). Only then are you
likely to have the sort of experience the magi-
cian wants you to have. As Ortiz writes:
Magic can only be established by a process
of elimination. There is no way that you can
directly apprehend that you’re witnessing
magic. You conclude that it’s magic because
there is no alternative. Therefore, the prima-
ry task in giving someone the experience of
witnessing magic is to eliminate every other
possible cause. (Ortiz, 2006: 37; cf. Tamariz,
2014: 3–19)
It is very helpful to consider a concrete exa-
mple. Imagine this. With my right hand, I take
a silver coin from my pocket. I drop it into my
left. I squeeze the coin tightly and, a moment
later, I open my hand to show that silver coin
has apparently been transformed into a green
poker chip. Executed well, this performance
should immediately occasion cognitive
dissonance in a spectator by producing a
belief-discordant alief that the coin was ma-
gically transformed. The automatic response
is to try to mitigate the discord by devising
a plausible explanation for the appearance
of impossibility: “Perhaps he used his sleeves
or his pockets? Perhaps he switched the
coin when I wasn’t looking? Perhaps it was
a trick coin?” This is the natural, immediate
response to an effective magical illusion: the
spectator struggles to minimize cognitive
dissonance by explaining away appearances.
The job of the magician—and the point of the
strategy of canceling methods—is precisely
to thwart this attempt, and so, to maximize
the cognitive dissonance that spectators
experience by depriving them of any means
to mitigate it. And note that methods can
be canceled before, during, and even after a
performance. So, to begin, I might roll up my
sleeves and ask you to inspect the coin; then,
while performing, I might keep my hands in
front of and away from my body, move slowly,
Juan Tamariz
and be sure not to prevent you from watching
closely; finally, afterward, I might slowly and
carefully show my hands otherwise empty as I
hand you the poker chip for examination.10
What’s the resulting experience like? It’s not
just that you don’t know how the trick was
done. It’s much worse (or better!) than this.
Magician Simon Aronson captures the point
nicely:
“There is a world of difference between a
spectator’s not knowing how something’s
done versus his knowing that it can’t be done”
(1990: 171; cf. Ortiz, 2006: 32–33).
More precisely, the idea is that, while you
know it’s a trick, you don’t see how it could
be. So, in a very important sense, you can’t
make sense of what you’ve witnessed. This
isn’t just puzzlement—it’s total bafflement,
and it’s the experience of magic. Whit Haydn,
another very thoughtful magician, writes:
The job of the magician is to trap the spec-
tator in this logical conundrum. The result
of this is a peculiar mental excitation—a
burr under the saddle of the mind. If the
operation is performed correctly, the
patient will not be able to ignore the
problem, but will keep coming back
to it again and again. (Haydn,
2009: 6)
Indeed, as any performing
magician knows, a good 49
magic trick can stay with
someone—like a “burr under
the saddle of the mind”—for a
very long time (decades, even).
10) For a very clear example of canceling methods
during a performance, see Copperfield’s flying
illusion. At the time of this writing, video of the per-
formance is available at https://youtu.be/mYR-OyOP-
AZw and on my website at www.jasonleddington.
net/. I analyze the performance in some detail in
Leddington (2016).
Tamar Szabó Gendler
V. Concluding Questions
I hope that this article provokes more ques-
tions than it answers.
First, if I’m right that the experience of magic
consists in a total bafflement of the intellect,
why do people seek it out? How do we ex-
plain magic’s persisting popularity? Moreover,
isn’t it surprising that such a popular artform
could be one whose “essence is intellectual,”
as Teller puts it?
Second, in thinking about this, it’s worth re-
flecting on similar experiences, aesthetic and
otherwise. In Leddington (2016), I compare
the bafflement constitutive of the expe-
rience of magic both to the experience of a
philosophically-inclined interlocutor at the
end of a Socratic (aporetic) dialogue and to
the experience of the Kantian mathematically
sublime. More generally, we should study the
experience of magic alongside the puzzle of
negative emotion in art (see, e.g., Levinson,
2014). How does the experience of magic
relate to other “negative” aesthetic expe-
riences, such as experiences of tragedy or
horror?
50
MAGIC IS THE LINK BETWEEN SCIENCE
AND ART- INFINITE POSSIBILITIES - SHARED
THROUGH NEW TECHOLOGOY AND GRAND
STORYTELLING.”
Third, even if strong magic is disturbing, we
should keep in mind that the experience of
magic is emotionally complex. For example,
laughter is one of the main responses to good
magic. Why? What do magic and comedy
have in common? How do they differ?11
Fourth, does magic matter? What value does
it have? Magicians often talk of magic in
relation to big ideas such as mystery, astoni-
shment, and wonder. Is this overblown? How
can a card trick speak to such stuff? Or is there
a sense in which magic reveals, and speaks to,
something deep, whether within (or without)
us?
Finally, I hope this article has piqued your
interest in magic and given you some appre-
ciation for how difficult it is to perform well.
It’s one thing to fool an audience; it’s another
thing to baffle it completely. But that, and no
less, is magic’s goal. ■
A version of this article originally appeared in
Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics (2022).
11) For one possible approach to the problem of
negative emotion in the experience of magic, see
Leddington (2017).
- DAVID COPPERFIELD
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHQIdFZzQwM
Jason Leddington
JASON LEDDINGTON
Jason Leddington is Associate Professor of Philosophy at​
Bucknell University. He does research mainly in two over-
lapping areas: (1) aesthetics & philosophy of art and (2)
the philosophy of perception. He also does card tricks.
WORKS CITED
Aronson, S. (1990). The Aronson Approach. Savaco, Ltd.
Carroll, N. (1990). The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New
York: Routledge.
Gendler, T. S. (2008). Alief and Belief. The Journal of Philosophy, 105(10), 634–663.
Gendler, T. S. (n.d.). Alief in Action (and Reaction). Mind and Language, 23(5),
552–585.
Gendler, T. S., & Kovakovich, K. (2006). Genuine Rational Fictional Emotions. In
M. Kieran (Ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (pp.
241–253). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Haydn, W. (2009). The Chicago Surprise. Self-published.
Leddington, J. (2016). The Experience of Magic. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 74(3), 253–264 . 2017. “The Enjoyment of Negative Emotions in the
Experience of Magic.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40: 34–35. 2020. “Comic
Impossibilities.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78 (4): 547–58.
https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12762.
Levinson, J. (Ed.). (2014). Suffering Art Gladly. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Minch, S. (1980). Secrets of a “Puerto Rican Gambler.”
Morreall, J. (2009). Comic Relief. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Ortiz, D. (2006). Designing Miracles. Ortiz Publications.
Ortiz, D. (2011). Strong Magic. Ortiz Publications.
Siegel, L. (1991). Net of Magic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stromberg, J. (n.d.). Teller Speaks on the Enduring Appeal of Magic. Retrieved
April 13, 2012, from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Teller-
Speaks-on-the-Enduring-Appeal-of-Magic.html
Swiss, J. I. (2002a). Mentalism Grows Up. In Shattering Illusions (pp. 13–27). Seattle:
Hermetic Press.
Swiss, J. I. (2002b). Why Magic Sucks. In Shattering Illusions (pp. 3–12). Seattle, WA:
Hermetic Press.
Tamariz, J. (2014). The Method of False Solutions and the Magic Way. (G. Navarro, Ed.,
R. Benatar, Trans.) (2nd ed.). Seattle, WA: Hermetic Press.
Walton, K. L. (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the
Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
 The Science
of Magic as a
52
8 Sandbox for
STEAM
Education
ANTHONY BARNHART
Ph.D. in Cognitive Science
 “Magic Sam” performs for students in the Cognitive Science of Magic course during their visit to the Chicago Magic Lounge.
I’m a psychologist. Not the kind of psycho-
logist who helps people. I do experiments.
Specifically, I am a cognitive psychologist:
an experimental psychologist who studies
the building blocks of thought with a goal
of better understanding the relationships
between thought and behavior. Before I
was a psychologist, I was a magician. Like
many magicians, I was drawn to psychology
through my firsthand experience with the
fallibility of memory and perception. Howe-
ver, as an undergraduate studying psycholo-
gy, I had no idea that magic would continue
to be central to my career.
Indeed, as a doctoral student at Arizona
State University, I had no plan for magic to
be anything more than a hobby I pursued
on the side while formally studying the
psychology of language. That changed when
I began to see scientists taking an interest
in the methods of magicians to inspire new
hypotheses and laboratory techniques in the
study of attention and perception. Thanks to
the help of a supportive mentor, I was able
to add a new focus to my doctoral work,
studying the means by which magicians
manipulate their audience’s attention. My
doctoral dissertation, an empirical study of
the magician’s “off beat,” was likely among the
first dissertations in the new science of magic
discipline.1
As a midcareer faculty member in the
Department of Psychological Science at Car-
thage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, magic
pervades nearly everything I do as a tea-
cher-scholar. Part of scientists’ enthusiasm for
this new topic of study comes from its ability
to bridge between artificial, contrived labora-
tory experiments and real, lived experience in
the world. Magic is applied cognitive science,
and as such, it can be a useful educational
tool to exemplify abstract concepts from
psychology. I became aware of this powerful
application of magic when teaching my first
course as a graduate student, a basic Intro-
ductory Psychology course. When I taught
the section on sensation and perception, I
used a magic trick to demonstrate some of
the assumptions that our visual system makes
1) The first dissertation on the psychology of magic
was undertaken by Norman Triplett in 1900, who
is also credited with carrying out the first experi-
ment in social psychology. I published some of the
findings from my dissertation in the scientific journal
Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics (Barnhart et
al., 2018).
53
when presented with ambiguous informa-
tion.2 Not only did the inclusion of a magic
performance capture the students’ curiosity,
but it offered a salient reminder of how
automatic and unconscious these perceptual
assumptions can be and provided a strong
memory hook that allowed students to return
to the example readily.
This early experience using magic in the
classroom only hinted at the broader role
that magic can play in an educational setting.
After 15 years teaching in higher education,
I have come to realize that inspiring curiosity
and wonder in students is the most basic role
that magic can play. On the opposite end of
the continuum, I believe that the science of
magic is an ideal sandbox for student engage-
ment with STEAM education.
STEAM is a current buzzword in education.
It is an acronym for Science, Technology, En-
gineering, Arts, and Mathematics. Proponents
of STEAM argue that the world’s problems will
be solved most efficiently through the col-
2) This became the topic of my first scientific publica-
tion on magic in the pages of the journal Perception
(Barnhart, 2010).
laboration of diverse disciplines and that students should be encou-
raged to see how each of the STEAM disciplines approaches problems
through a different lens. Broad training in STEAM could allow stu-
dents to approach problems flexibly and dynamically. Of course, this
approach is not new. This perspective has been championed by the
liberal arts for centuries. As a faculty member at a liberal arts college,
I know that the liberal arts were engaged in interdisciplinary thought
before it was cool.
At Carthage College, I regularly teach a course on The Cognitive Science
of Magic that attempts to realize the full educational potential of the
scientific study of magic. I have now taught the course eight times, at
three different institutions.3 The course has evolved to fully embrace
interdisciplinarity and highlight the complexity of interactions
between the arts and sciences. Indeed, it is now labeled as a “Diverse
Perspectives” course within the Carthage curriculum by because of its
focus on interdisciplinary thought.
3) A video compilation from the first version of the course is available at https://
bit.ly/ASU-PsychOfMagic.
54
The most fundamental learning objective in the course is for stu-
dents to practice distilling testable hypotheses from the writings of
magic scholars (the Science component of STEAM). This is no small
feat, as magic theorists do not have to operationalize their ideas in
the same way that scientists do. Most magicians care about how
their magic works, not why their magic works. Students read theore-
tical pieces by Arturo de Ascanio, Tom Stone, and others, identify tes-
table hypotheses, and practice designing experimental techniques
to test those hypotheses. Meanwhile, I expose students to historical
approaches to interaction between science and magic and modern
empirical works exploring the cognitive basis of performance magic.
I try to pepper in some examples of computational modeling in co-
gnitive science so that students see how mathematics shapes theory
development (the Mathematics component of STEAM).4
Students also gain experience building and performing pieces of
magic (often for the first time) and understanding how the perfor-
mance of magic can be informed by findings from psychological
4) See Grassi and Bartels (2021) for a Bayesian model of magical wonder.
science (the Technology & Engineering components of STEAM).
All of this is enveloped in elements of magic appreciation, and most
students leave the class with very strong attitudes about what makes
for good and bad magic (the Art aspect of STEAM). It turns out that
when students are exposed to the full breadth of magic, they find
themselves drawn to magic that is narrative- or character-driven.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the course is that it is immersive.
I often teach it during our January Term, when students
take a single course that meets three hours
every day for the month of January, and I
include multiple excursions that allow
students to experience magic
“in the wild.” Further, nearly
every class period includes
a guest speaker from
the world of science
or magic. Students
are learning about
the content from the people who are on the front lines. Magicians
who have visited my class over the years include James Randi5,
Mac King, Christopher Carter, Steve Bedwell, Kenton Knepper,
Simon Aronson, Danny Orleans & Jan Rose, David Parr, and Joe
Diamond (among others). Scientist visitors to the class have in-
cluded much of the leadership of the Science of Magic Association
and some researchers whose work may speak to magic without
explicitly invoking it, including Gustav Kuhn, Steve Macknik,
Susana Martinez-Conde, Amory Danek, Jay Olson, Matt
Tompkins, and Larry Rosenblum.
I have had great success with
the course. It has inspired
students to begin
learning magic, to
5) Video from Ran-
di’s visit is available
at https://bit.ly/
Randi-ASU.
55
Christopher Carter demonstrates muscle reading.
 WHERE SCIENCE COMES TO THE
INCOMPREHENSIBLE,
MAGIC BEGINS.
- SAM H SHARPE
become magic aficionados, and to pursue
scientific inquiry in magic. I also firmly
believe that the course makes students
more effective critical thinkers. It enhances
awareness of how readily our senses can
be deceived and provides students
with a toolbox that allows them
to see through bunkum. Part
of the course’s effectiveness
stems from the fact that

56 it is deceptive in and of
itself. Students enter the
course thinking they will
be immersing themselves in
a world of fantasy and wonder
(which they are), but they are fooled
into learning about STEAM along the
way. ■
References
Barnhart, A. S. (2010). The exploitation of
Gestalt principles by magicians. Perception,
39, 1286-1289. https://doi.org/10.1068/
p6766
Barnhart, A. S., Ehlert, M. J., Goldinger,
S. D., & Mackey, A. D. (2018). Cross-mo-
dal attentional entrainment: Insights
from magicians. Attention, Perception, &
Psychophysics, 80, 1240-1249. https://doi.
org/10.3758/s13414-018-1497-8
Grassi, P. R., & Bartels, A. (2021). Magic,
Bayes and wows: A Bayesian account of
magic tricks. Neuroscience & Biobeha-
vioral Reviews, 126, 515-527. https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.04.001
Triplett, N. (1900). The psychology of
conjuring deceptions. The American Jour-
nal of Psychology, 11(4), 439-510. https://
doi.org/10.2307/1412365
PROFESSOR ANTHONY BARNHART
Professor Anthony Barnhart received his Ph.D. in
cognitive science from Arizona State University, where
he began his graduate career with the intention
of being a language researcher. To this end, he has
published research examining the processes underlying
handwritten word perception, a domain that has been
largely ignored by psychologists until now.
Prof. Barnhart is also a part-time professional magician
with more than 30 years of performing experience.
His research trajectory changed in 2010 with the
publication of the book Sleights of Mind: What the
Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about our Everyday
Deceptions, in which he was featured by the authors as
a consultant and teacher on the science of stage magic.
The scientific interest that the book garnered motivated
Prof. Barnhart to shift his focus toward the interface of
science and magic.
His research program in the science of magic explores
the intuitions of magicians and attempts to marry this
folk psychology with formal scientific models in the
domains of attention and perception. This work has
been featured in Science News For Kids as well as in
national and international television appearances and
documentaries, most recently appearing on the long-
running CBC science program, The Nature of Things.
If your aim in life is pursuing truth, one
of the things you might want to study is
why deception is so common in life.”
- Eugene Burger
 d
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p
ity : gic h tive?
tiv ng ma rea
ea uri ing re c
Cr nj earn e mo EMAN he
Co es l e b WIS
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58
I
n my experience, there are two main reasons why magicians tend to be
highly creative. First, coming up with ideas for magical happenings involves
imagining a world that isn’t constrained by reality. For instance, producing
something from an apparently empty box confounds our thoughts about
object permanence and making a person seem to levitate defies our beliefs
about the effects of gravity.

Second, magicians need to figure out a way of making these impossible

dreams appear to happen. Audiences tend to be both observant and smart,
so magicians methods frequently involve a significant amount of lateral and
creative thinking.

A few years ago, Professor Caroline Watt (from Edinburgh University) and I
wondered whether learning more about magic might help to get people’s
creative juices flowing. A student of mine named Amy Wiles was teaching in a
local school and suggested that we conduct a study with some of her pupils.
The resulting experiment was simple and involved three key stages.

We asked a group of around 60 schoolchildren to complete a standard measure

of creativity known as the Alternative Uses Test. Created in the late 1960s by
psychologist Joy Guildford, this test involves presenting someone with an
everyday object, such as a mug or pencil, and asking them to think of as many
uses for it as possible. To score the test, researchers then carefully count the
number of uses that the person comes up with (known as the Fluency score)
and rate how novel these uses are (known as the Originality score).

Then we randomly split the pupils into two different groups and had one group
take part in a magic lesson and the other participate in an art lesson. The magic
lesson was based around a trick called Colour Vision. Invented by magician
Martin Sunshine, this illusion involves giving the spectator a cube with different
coloured faces, having them place the cube into an opaque box, and the
magician mysteriously divining the top colour of the cube.
59
During the lesson, the children watched the trick, tried to figure out how it was
achieved, were shown the solution, and then performed it on one another. It
was important that the art lesson shared many of the features associated with
the magic activity, and so we needed to create something that was illusion-
based, interesting, fun, surprising and involved a sense of mastery. After much
thought, we decided to show the children a perspective illusion, explain how to
make it and then have them create their own drawings.

https://youtu.be/xMmK-azpUds
 https://youtu.be/yKxnnKLn9Hc
60
In the final stage of the study,
we had the children complete
the Alternative Uses Test a second
time.
Amy did a great job of carrying out the
study and we soon set about carefully
scoring the creativity tests that had been
completed before and after the two lessons.
Before the activities began, both groups
obtained roughly the same Fluency and
Originality scores. However, after the
activities, the children in the magic group had
much higher Fluency and Originality scores
than those in the art groups.
In short, our hunch was right, the magic
lesson had boosted the children’s creativity.
Three weeks later we returned to the
school and had the children complete the
Alternative Uses Test one last time. This time,
there was no difference between the groups,
suggesting that the boost to creativity was
relatively short-lived.
We were delighted with the findings but, as
is often the case in science, our experiment
produced more questions than answers. Why
did the magic lesson enhance creativity?
Was it due to the children watching the trick,
learning how it was achieved, or a mixture of
both? Did all of the children benefit from the
lesson or was magic especially effective for a
certain type of person? What would happen
if the children had been taught different
illusions every week rather than just taking
part in a single lesson? And finally, what could
be done to prevent the effect fading away
after a few weeks? Right now, we are planning
various studies to examine these issues and
many more.
Our study was published in an academic
journal called PeerJ and quickly attracted
the attention of the media. In addition,
several educational websites and magazines
produced lesson plans that encouraged
teachers to incorporate magic into the
classroom. The idea of incorporating magic
into schools isn’t new. Over the years, many
educational practitioners have described
using magic tricks to enhance attention, RICHARD WISEMAN
understanding, curiosity and recall. However,
our study is the first to show that magic Richard Wiseman is a Professor of
really can have a positive effect on children’s Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire
creativity, and we are excited to see how in the UK. He has written over 100 academic
this idea develops in the future. Who knows, articles, several best-selling books, and his
maybe one day magic will form part of the illusion-based Youtube video have attracted
standard school curriculum along with other over half a billion views. The full details of this
performing arts, such as dance, drama, and study, entitled ‘Conjuring up creativity: the
music. In doing so, it might help to broaden effect of performing magic tricks on divergent
minds, spark creative ideas, and create a more thinking’, can be seen at: https://peerj.com/
magical future. ■ articles/11289
 Window of

10
Opportunity:
How Magic Can
62
62
Help Teach Today’s
Device-Obsessed
Kids Curiosity and
Creativity
MICHAEL AMMAR
T
he skill set that best empowers
future scientists must surely begin
development at an early age. Are
there ways to ensure these skills
take root?

There are times during every child’s life

when he or she has an amazing opportunity
to learn skills and process information in
an almost magical way. However, when
that window of opportunity closes, the
same information, the same skills, must
be learned the hard way, if at all, through
repetition and memorization. One such well
known window is for learning language.
Before the age of 6 or 7, a child can learn
several languages effortlessly with enough
exposure, while a teenager struggles to
learn any second language.

When I developed Discover Magic – a

curriculum for children 8 to 12 years old that
is being taught in over 100 cities across the
US, Canada, England, Australia and China
– the goal was to help kids develop critical
skill sets when it’s still easy for them to learn
and integrate into their adult character. The
Discover Magic program focuses on basic
life skills including creativity, curiosity,
listening, communicating, giving
feedback, etc.

Magic requires children to
interact and communicate
effectively with others, it requires
kids to imagine what others might be
thinking, and it challenges them with how
to think conceptually about magic trick
methods and effects. At a time when society
is reconstructing itself around devices that
connect our children digitally with others,
we have a greater need than ever to help
them connect on a personal, human level
that requires more eye contact, empathy,
and personal interaction than swipes right
or left.
Parents today instinctively understand
the need to break their kids away from
their near-obsessive focus on phones,
tablets and gaming consoles and
expose them to more human-to-human
interactions and activities that teach skills
for success as an adult, and perhaps as a
scientist.
63
As a result, for what may be the first time
ever, today’s younger generation seems to
desperately need many of the very skill sets
that are developed through the study and
performance of magic, including curiosity,
creativity, inquisitiveness, an openness to
possibilities, a love for learning new things
and “secrets,” interacting and communicating
effectively in small group environments, etc.

“ There are even more subtle skills developed by magic

that probably do more for a potential young scientist
than you would imagine.“
Children, when exposed to these concepts at the right age, embrace
them as acts of unthreatening discovery. But what about children who
are not exposed to these things? We all know adults who are terrified
to speak in public, because they never had a reason to speak in front of
a group as children.
It’s easy to see the interpersonal and creative skills developed from
a kid learning and practicing magic – and then performing in front
of audiences – and how these skills can also help many scientists be
more successful. While we like to in the end judge today’s scientists
by their scientific breakthroughs, at the start of their careers many
scientists are at a teaching university or college, and they need to be
comfortable and effective in front of an audience. Many very brilliant
young scientists are challenged connecting with today’s students,
being comfortable and effective in presenting information, getting
messages across, and teaching hard science skills and fact. Studying
and practicing magic teaches many of the core communication and
presentation skills that any exceptional teacher needs.
There are even more subtle skills developed by magic that probably
do more for a potential young scientist than you would imagine.
Three components in the study and performance of magic must
surely serve the budding scientist well. The first is the realization that
there are many different methods for creating the same effect; next
is realizing the same methods can create many different effects; and
finally, learning that one can work backwards from any desired effect
to create a potentially new and unique method for creating that effect.
Magic turns this dynamic interplay between methods and outcomes
into a fun and fascinating exercise that can be transferred to almost
any other curiosity – or scientific pursuit – an active mind might be
exposed to.
In my opinion – and considering the topic, I wish I could back this
up with double blind studies – the same sort of correlation could be
made between adult scientists and children who pursued magic as
a hobby: That the roots of their key scientific skills were sewn during
their joy-filled early days of discovering and performing magic. ■

We know many people who loved magic as they were growing up,
and because of their childhood performances, as adults they are
comfortable, confident and poised in front of any group. The skills
developed during those childhood windows of opportunity became
resources they could count on throughout their lives.

64

https://youtu.be/zZ51ata8lxk

MICHAEL AMMAR
Michael Ammar is recognized worldwide as one of the greatest living
magicians. In 1983, Ammar entered the FISM magic competition
and was awarded the Gold Medal for Close-Up Magic. In doing so, he
became the second American in the history of the competition to do
so. After winning at FISM, Ammar travelled west and became friends
with the great Dai Vernon who became Ammar’s mentor throughout
the following years.

He has produced over forty video titles, also books and magazines.
In 1999 The Magic Magazine named him one of 100 most influential
magicians of the century.
Nearly every man who develops
an idea works it up to the point
where it looks impossible,
and then he gets discouraged.
That’s not the place to become
discouraged.”
- Thomas Edison
 n g p
y i e l
u d H i d
66 t
S Can Avo d f
ow c s a n o
i
H ag ti ots ide s t
M ie S un p t s
c
S ind k O I
l
B hin ox TEDU ” C AT

T
“ e RK S B E T
11

th MA
 “ There are so many
subtle ways humans
interact and
communicate with the
world around us that
the study of magic
makes us aware of.”

67

PHOTO LEFT: Wilhelm von Osten

and Clever Hans.
ABOVE: Mark Setteducati

W
ilhelm von Osten was a mathemati-
cian and schoolteacher living in Ger-
many in the early 1900’s. He was also
an amateur horse trainer. At that time, people
were becoming interested in how intelligent
animals were. Von Osten experimented to
see if he could teach his horse math. To his
amazement and excitement, he was able to
teach his horse how to do calculations, read
and spell, and even understand German.
He would ask his horse a question such as
“What is two plus two?”, and the horse would
tap its foot four times. Von Osten named
his horse “Clever Hans” and traveled around
Germany presenting Hans to the public. This
caught the attention of skeptical scientists,
and in 1907 a formal investigation was orga-
nized and led by psychologist Oskar Pfungst.
Clever Hans almost always gave the right
answer when he could see Von Osten, but
also gave the right answer if someone else
asked a question, which proved Von Osten
was not intentionally secretly signaling Clever
Hans or trying to trick his audience. Von Osten
genuinely believed Clever Hans’ abilities.
Investigator Pfungst was truly baffled by the
demonstrations, and even more so when
the first few controlled experiments failed to
stump Clever Hans.
Neither Von Osten nor Pfungst were magi-
cians, but had they been they might have
discovered Hans’s secret much faster –
Clever Hans was responding to very subtle
non-verbal cues which the questioners were
unknowingly signaling Hans. Eventually
Pfungst figured out how to signal the horse.
By slightly raising his eyebrows, he could get
Hans to give any response he wanted.
There are so many subtle ways humans
interact and communicate with the world
around us that the study of magic makes us
aware of. Magicians learn to intentionally and
gently guide their spectators to select a card
 https://youtu.be/hAJlAuEo7Ac
68
or object without their spectator’s knowledge
that they are being influenced. On the other
hand, there are unintentional signals magi-
cians sometimes telegraph to their audience.
A magician’s technique of secretly palming
a card can be perfect and even invisible to a
camera. But should the magician feel even a
little doubt or guilt and think the spectator
saw what they did, the spectator can sense
something happened and the magic will be
diminished.
Studying and performing magic is one of
the best ways to understand these human
influences and subtle interactions and can
benefit scientists. Are you effectively commu-
nicating your thoughts and ideas? Are you
listening to others and picking up on their
reactions? Are you deceiving yourself?
Who is easier to fool: a ten-year old or a
scientist?
Here is a fun question to ask a kid. If you write
down all the numbers from 1 to 100, how
many times does the number 9 appear? For
example, 9, 19, 29, etc. This is an easy ques-
tion to answer, and you can easily use your
fingers to count, so quickly do this now and
come to a total before you read on.
Every magician knows that it is much harder
to fool a ten-year old kid than an adult. In
fact, the “smarter” or more “knowledgeable”
a person is, the easier it is to fool them. But
why? Magic is based on hidden assumptions
and conclusions that our minds automati-
cally make. These assumptions are based on
knowledge and experiences. For example,
sitting down at a dinner table you automati-
cally and without thinking assume the white
dish is the same white color on the underside,
that it is not attached to the table, that it is
ceramic and not painted lead, etc.
Magicians take advantage of these assump-
tions and strive to make things appear “ordi-
nary” when in fact they are gimmicked. The
older and “smarter” a person becomes, the
more knowledge and life experiences they
have and the quicker their minds automa-
tically make assumptions. It is very difficult
for anybody, including magicians, to look
past these automatic assumptions as we are all human and
assumptions are programmed into our brains, probably for
survival or other reasons. The question is how to bypass this
mechanism and train yourself to look at everything and see
things in a different way.
When you ask the question, how many times the number 9
appears from 1 to 100, most people will answer 11, which
is the wrong answer. The correct answer is 20. Most people
quickly get 9, 19, 29, 39, 49, 59, 69, 79, 89, and 99, but for
some reason miss 91, 92, 93, etc. Can you learn to not miss
something so seemingly obvious and invisible, these “blind
spots”? The more you know and think about magic, the more
you become trained to be more watchful and cautious in
your observations and answers.
Magic teaches us that things are not always what they
appear to be, and by performing magic it allows us to watch
first-hand how people’s minds work and the assumptions
they make when they are fooled. Because the magician
knows exactly how the tricks they perform work, it is often
amazing for them to hear the spectators’ explanations
or theories of how they were done. Each trick performed
is a kind of controlled experiment by the magician of a
spectator’s thinking process. Also, after performing a trick,
magicians usually analyze their performance based on their
“Thinking Outside of the Box”
Creativity is about looking at the world in a different way; and studying
and performing magic makes one more creative. Magicians don’t want
their spectators to figure out their tricks, so they are constantly trying to
intentionally create “blind spots” for their spectators. These mental blocks
are like writer’s block or creative blocks.
An exercise sometimes practiced when creativity is attempted to be
taught is to write down as many things you can do with a paper clip
except clip papers. The average person will come to only a few answers,
whereas the more “creative” person will think of many more ideas.
A question that is often asked is, can creativity be taught, or can any
person learn to “Think Outside the Box”? One of the things I have done to
try and teach myself to be more creative is to collect novelty pens. Not
just ordinary pens, but ones that are novel, such as the way they fold, an
innovative mechanism, an unusual theme or styling. To me, it’s not a col-
lection of pens, but it is a collection of ideas. How do you take a simple
object such as a pen and make it interesting, inventive, and/or unusual?
Different solutions to the same problem – design of a pen.
There are two kinds of ideas, or solutions, to problems. The first are
ideas that you could have thought of had you been given the problem,
for example, design a pen. The second are ideas you never would have
thought of. Even if you had worked on the problem of designing a pen
and thought about it for many years, some ideas would have never

EVERY MAGICIAN KNOWS THAT 69 69

IT IS MUCH HARDER TO FOOL A
TEN-YEAR OLD KID THAN AN ADULT.”

audience’s reactions to see what worked and what didn’t,

and then they try to tweak the performance of the trick to
make it stronger.

All magicians are sometimes fooled by a trick or performance

by a fellow magician. This allows the magician to analyze
their own mind and thinking process. They will walk away
completely fooled and will think to themselves, what fooled
me and where were my blind spots? Often magicians are
fooled by tricks or methods they know and have even used
themselves, but because something was slightly changed,
they didn’t see it.

One can be fooled by physical gimmicks such as a trick

cards or a hidden thread, or you can be fooled by subtle
interactions such as misdirection or being psychologically
manipulated, or a combination of both. Magic is one of the
best ways to exercise our brains and expand our creativity
because we see and learn so many tricks and principles.
come to you. These are the “AHA” ideas, breakthroughs that require
“thinking outside of the box.” They are the most valuable because they
open new doors in your mind and get stored in your subconscious for
MARK SETTEDUCATI
later use. I believe the more ideas and “outside the box” solutions to
Mark Setteducati is a magician and inventor of magic, games,
problems you are exposed to, the more creative you will become.
and puzzles. He has been issued 19 US Patents and over 50 of
his creations have been marketed by companies worldwide. He
Magic is full of “AHA” ideas and principles. Studying magic supplies
is the author of “The Magic Show,” an interactive book that per-
your subconscious with much food for thought and later use, and
forms magic. In 2014, the Academy of Magical Arts awarded him a
performing magic allows you to put these “AHA” ideas to use.
Creative Fellowship and lifetime membership to the Magic Castle,
Hollywood, California.
“Blind Spots”
This true story has a big blind spot like the question previously asked
about how many 9’s appear in the numbers from 1 to 100. During
World War II, the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University was
the most extraordinary group of mathematicians and statisticians ever
organized at that time. They worked closely with the military to solve
problems. For example, the loading order of ammunition on planes
was worked out by the group. Because many planes were being shot
down, the military wanted to find a way to reinforce the planes. When
bombers returned from missions, many would be covered with bullet
holes. The bullet holes were not evenly distributed around the plane,
but were concentrated on the fuselage and wings, almost twice as
much as places like the engines.

The group came to the obvious conclusion that they needed to

reinforce the fuselage and wings with armor because these areas were
taking the most fire. Exactly how much more armor should be added
to those parts of the plane? You need to be precise as to not add
too much additional weight that might affect the balance of
the flight or other factors that need to be considered.

Hungarian born Abraham Wald worked with the

group and was asked to figure out the calcula-
70 tions. Wald told the group they were completely
wrong in their observations about the bullet
holes being mainly on the fuselage and wings, and
that the bullet holes were in fact evenly distributed all
over the planes, including the engines, fuselages, wings,
and the entire aircraft. How could Wald defy the obvious evi-
dence that all these smart mathematicians observed? What blind
spot did he see that the other geniuses missed?

Although Wald was not a magician, he was thinking like a one. Wald
was looking at the invisible. The armor, said Wald, doesn’t go where
the bullet holes are. It goes where the bullet holes are not – which is
on the engines. But why?

Bullets holes were not found on areas like the engines because those
planes were shot down and did not return home! The planes that had
many bullet holes on the fuselage and wings proved that these were
not the weak areas because they made it home without being shot
down.

Wow! This is a real “AHA” idea! Imagine how useful it is to have hun-
dreds of these “outside the box” ideas stored in your subconscious.
Whether you are a scientist, magician, or just an ordinary person, it will
make you more creative. I know it has for me. ■
Magic and all that is ascribed to
it is a deep presentiment of the
powers of science.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
72
72

THE MAGIC
OF SEEKING
12 ANSWERS
AN INTERVIEW WITH JASON LATIMER

Anthony Elio
From Innovation and Tech Today

S
cience and magic are gene- would happen. I’ve never been interested in I decided to leave my stage shows
rally seen as opposite sides of doing magic tricks that other people do. So, in the casino world and start
the coin. In popular culture, I wanted to build new 21st century magic. working with science centers
and museums around
7373
the scientific process of a hero When I went to build bending light and
like Iron Man is seen as a stark bending lasers, that sounded like physics, the country. I started a
contrast to the mystic powers of so I studied physics. When I wanted to study program in San Diego to
Doctor Strange. However, illusionist shaping water, that sounded like chemistry, inspire kids to want to ask
Jason Latimer has effectively combined so I started studying chemistry. Soon, I started questions by using magic to
the two, creating encapsulating stage shows building different illusions with different get the conversation started. Let’s
that meld the entertainment of magic with fields of science. Then it eventually grew into say invisibility, we learned the hard
the educational aspects of STEM. Founder the Impossible Science Program. But I think science about how light works and how
of the Impossible Science Program, Latimer the real “ah ha!” moment was when I was the biology of the eye works. It literally
spreads his interest in science and magic looking in science to try to figure out that comes down to the idea that we must inspire
through festivals, interactive experiments, maybe there’s something in the science world wonder. To find that new cure, to find that
and his work on shows such as Wizard Wars that hasn’t been applied in the magic world new technology, we must get the kids excited
and SciJinks. In this exclusive interview, before. about asking new questions. That’s the
Latimer details how the Impossible Science essence of it. It started with a TEDx Wall Street
Program originated and discusses the power l&T Today: How did the Impossible Science talk that changed my life.
of asking questions. Program begin?
I&T Today: What do you want those involved
Innovation & Tech Today: When did you rea- JL: It originated with my TEDx Wall Street with the program to walk away with?
lize that the worlds of magic and education talk called, “’Seeing Beyond the Illusion of
can intersect? Knowledge.” It was pointing out this need to JL: I want to empower people. I want to
remind people that we need wonder and we inspire and empower people with the ability
Jason Latimer: When I was kid, I was just fasci- need it more now than we’ve ever needed it. to ask a question. And to think critically and
nated by magic. However, I was finding myself Because people are searching for questions logically. That’s what science is, a progres-
staring at a magic book wondering what is and moving on as if they have a crystal ball of sion of logical questions. And that’s it. I want
possible. Then I soon found myself staring at knowledge in their hands with the internet. people to realize that wonder changes the
a science book wondering the same question. People have forgotten we gave the internet world, and they could be wondering about a
Like, how do you know what can and can’t its answers. It’s only as good as we are. The question no one else has thought of before.
happen? Basically, go to the next page and reason I point that out is if the internet were So basically, we’re empowering people with
you keep reading and you keep learning. But around when we collectively thought the the ability to do something they were born
as I grew up, I started studying science in earth was flat, you would never be able to with. Which is kind of funny, but at the same
order to build better magic tricks. search the true shape of earth on any search time, people tend to forget that our educa-
engine because everyone would’ve uploaded tion system today, for the most part, stomps
I wasn’t really interested in telling what the wrong information. out creativity and thinking outside the box.
 https://youtu.be/5uZ0rj0-ro8
7474
https://youtu.be/dKLhJGeSOrg
“The right
question changes
everything”
Because it’s too busy shoveling answers.
The easiest way to explain why we’re doing what we’re
doing with the museums is, if we know that the right
question changes everything, and we know that that’s how
we’re going to find our next advancement is getting new
questions, then you must ask yourself,
“Why isn’t there an academic platform designed to inspire
wonder? Why haven’t we done that? Why haven’t we taught
kids how to ask better questions?”
That’s really where this all started - we need wonder in the
age of information, and we know wonder changes the
world. So, the real question is, why are we not teaching it?
We get so wrapped up in what we know that we forget that
there’s never been a rule book. It’s just what we’ve learned
so far. It’s embarrassing for a teacher to come to that term
to realize we really don’t know everything. But the reality
is the day before Einstein discovered E = mc2, it had to be
available. It had to be available the day before he knew
about it. That means there’s probably a lot of other stuff out
there that we don’t know about.
l&T Today: You’ve been talking about the power of asking
questions. What exactly do you mean by that?
JL: The concept of flight was impossible until someone as-
ked the question about lift. A cure to a disease is impossible
until somebody asks the right question that no one thought
of before. So, it’s this ability to believe in an answer that
doesn’t exist yet. We may not know everything. To come to
terms with that and to realize that no one actually knows
what’s ultimately possible.
Even if you track that all the way back, you’re eventually
going to realize that there had to be somebody that didn’t
have a rule book. There had to be somebody that realized we
don’t know the answer. We get so wrapped up in trying to
learn all these facts and answers that we forget where those
came from. Now it’s happening on a much larger scale and
a much faster speed. Where people are uploading things,
a computer that doesn’t know how to wonder or doubt
is regurgitating those answers back to the next user. The
scariest part about it is even if you’re an individual that can
spot the website you clicked on is wrong, it’s too late. You’ve
already clicked on it. So, you already made it that much more
popular.

l&T Today: Through your different projects, what message do

you most want to send to the next generation of innovators?

I’m speaking in Berlin for Education First to talk about the

influence of technology on society. We’re globally going
to start talking about the internet. Where it can actually
undermine your ability to be creative. Because you assume
it knows more than you do. Rightfully so, you can say that it
has more information than you do. But it can’t ask a question.
It’s more important that we know the computer can’t ask a
question, that it’s only as good as we are. It’s important for a
kid to realize that they were born as a question generating
machine.

It’s very important for me to try to promote wonder on a

massive scale and the importance of that thought process
to everyone. Science is a way of thinking. So, you don’t really
have to be in a lab coat to think logically. But at the same
time, you do have to know that you are capable of asking a
question that no one’s ever thought of before. My biggest
concern right now is getting kids to see beyond the answers
in the age of information. But in that process, I’m trying to
remind people that it’s wonder that changes the world. And
you were born with that ability. ■
7575
JASON LATIMER
Jason Latimer is a World Champion magician and distingui-
shed scientist known for his work on Houdini (2014), The Ma-
gicians (2011), Wizard Wars (2014-2015) and SciJinks (2018).

As a magician, Jason is the series champion of the BBC One’s

The Magicians, the recipient of Siegfried & Roy’s Masters
of the Impossible Award, and was bestowed with magic’s
highest honor, Grand Prix ‘Best Overall’ World Champion
of Magic. As a scientist, Jason is the creator of Impossible
Science, the academic platform uniting magic and science
to inspire wonder in education. Latimer is the Curator of
Impossible Science of the iconic Fleet Science Center in San
Diego, CA but his STEM program has expanded to science
centers throughout Southern California. Recently, Enginee-
ring and Latimer launched the Impossible Science Student
Challenge, a competition of thousands of participating schools
across the US and Canada to find the classroom doing the most
to inspire curiosity within Science, Technology, Engineering,
and Mathematics.
 Magic,
Surprise,

76
13 and Machine
Learning
JEANETTE ANDREWS
Can a machine take us by surprise? This is the central argument of Alan
Turing’s 1950’s seminal work, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Can a
human take another human by surprise? This is one of the central ‘arguments’
at the center of the performance of magic. What can an investigation on the
structure of machine learning teach us about the form of magic and about the
experience of surprise?
On Machines
Let’s begin at the beginning, of sorts. In the 1840’s,
Ada Lovelace came to prominence as a mathemati-
cian and is thought of as the first computer program-
mer after creating a series of operatioans for Charles
Babbage’s “Computing Engine,” which is typically
thought of as the first automatic digital computer.
Lovelace posited that due to humans building and
programming such computing machines, it was not
possible for them to take us by surprise.
Nearly a century later, famed mathematician Alan
Turing argued the opposite. He states that: “Machines
take me by surprise with great frequency. This is
largely because I do not do sufficient calculation to
decide what to expect them to do, or rather be-
cause, although I do a calculation, I do it in a hurried,
slipshod fashion, taking risks. Perhaps I say to myself,
‘I suppose the voltage here ought to be the same as
there: anyway, let’s assume it is. Naturally I am often
wrong, and the result is a surprise for me, for by the
time the experiment is done these assumptions have
been forgotten. These admissions lay me open to
lectures on the subject of my vicious ways, but do not
throw any doubt on my credibility when I testify to
the surprises I experience.”
If a machine can take a human by surprise, how does
this influence our definitions of surprise? More on this
later.
Turing created one of the most famous thought expe-
riments of our age as a way to tease out ideas about
if machines could possess ‘intelligence’ and, if so, how
to distinguish human intelligence from that exhibited
by a machine: The Turing Test.
He expanded this to propose that: “Suppose that we
have a person, a machine, and an interrogator. The
interrogator is in a room separated from the other
MAGIC AND SCIENCE
INTERBLEND, AND ONE LEADS TO
THE FRINGE OF THE OTHER.”
- SAM H. SHARPE
person and the machine. The object of the game is
for the interrogator to determine which of the other
two is the person, and which is the machine. [This is
done via the interrogator asking a series of questions
to each anonymous entity.] The object of the ma-
chine is to try to cause the interrogator to mistakenly
conclude that the machine is the person; the object
of the person is to try to help the interrogator to
correctly identify the machine.”
Turing’s test was inspired by a Victorian-era parlor
game, the Imitation Game, which possessed a similar
framework, but was instead composed of a man,
woman, and interrogator. Here, it was the job of
the interrogator to distinguish the man from the
woman based on asking a series of questions to
decipher gender as defined by the stereotypes
of the time.
On Magic
As a lifelong magician, I have often
wondered as to why certain 77
pieces of magic are more surprising
to audiences than others. Why do
some effects, such as a cut and restored
rope, seem to provide, in lieu of a surprise, a
feeling of a rational completion, whereas others
provide a borderline level of shock, such as the
transformation of a ball into a dove?
I began deeply thinking about the experience of
surprise in 2019 after finding Thomas Griffith’s 2014
paper “Revealing ontological commitments by
magic.” Here, he poses that “Considering the appeal
of different magical transformations exposes some
systematic asymmetries. For example, it is more
interesting to transform a vase into a rose than a rose
into a vase. An experiment in which people judged
how interesting they found different magic tricks
showed that these asymmetries reflect the direction
7878

a transformation moves in an ontological hierarchy: transformations in the

direction of animacy and intelligence are favored over the opposite.”
This, while on face value seems an obvious observation, actually
leads to a nuanced line of thought as to the depth of the ontological
commitments that we do hold about each object and both how rigid and
flexible they are simultaneously.

Take, for example, one of the items in his list of objects, a blackbird. Black-
birds possess a litany of properties, such as the ability to fly, the sheen of
their feathers, the ability to make a distinctive sound, etc. They may also
hold a set of shifting personal and cultural connotations for observers, such
as summoning thoughts of superstition, ancestral respect, or spirituality
based upon regional and historical culture. Hence, a deep investigation of
the fixed and fluctuating nature of an object or animal’s properties and the
ontological commitments that an audience may hold about them seems
worthy of reflection in magic.

Reading Griffiths’ study seemed to address much of my line of inquiry,

though the paper mainly addresses ‘interestingness’ while not necessarily
focused on the experience of surprise itself. (I highly recommend that
anyone with an interest in this topic read the full paper.)

Jeanette Andrews
On Surprise
After having spent the past year researching
surprise through the lenses of science,
philosophy, sociology, and innumerable
conversations, I feel little closer to a grasp of
this slippery experience. To summarize a few
quick thoughts:
From a scientific standpoint, in the study
“Intuitions about magic track the develop-
ment of intuitive physics” by the team of
Casey Lewry, Kaley Curtis, Nadya Vasilyeva,
Fei Xu, and Thomas L. Griffiths, they note that:
“However, there is some debate surrounding
the extent to which looking time is an accu-
rate measure of surprise. Wang et al. (2004)
note that when they refer to violation-of-ex-
pectation paradigms as measuring infants’
surprise, ‘surprise’ is shorthand for a state
of attention or interest. While there is wide
Dowell” by Elizabeth F. Cooke, she notes: “Our
experience of surprise from a first-person
point of view tells us that we often do make
incorrect judgments about the world and
feel compelled to rescind them. And for error
recognition to occur, some things must be
in place: an inquirer with concepts and a set
of beliefs, as well as a nonego acting on the
inquirer. The subject’s experience is partly of
the self as an object in relation to the world.
[...] Surprise is felt as causal and conceptual
within experience and provides conceptual
friction with the world. It serves as an empi-
rical self-corrective insofar as it is forced by a
nonego, yet still conceptual.
English cultural theorist Mark Fisher explores
the haziness of surprise’s adjacent expe-
riences such as the weird and the eerie, and
how weirdness notes a feeling ‘this does not
belong,’ and the intertwining of the historical
ideas of the weird and of fate itself.”
Finally, in many conversations with lay
people across a broad spectrum of indus-
tries, ages, etc., there seems to be no shor-
tage of interest and opinions on this topic.
I have encountered sentiments along a full
spectrum that surprise is nothing more
than a biological being startled, to the
feeling that all experience is emotion
driven and thus surprise is a
personal and cultural fleeting
experience.
79
Magic, Machine Learning,
and Surprise
My thoughts on these topics
converged in spring of 2021. I was
fortunate enough to be named as
an Affiliate of metaLAB (at) Harvard, the
greatest honor of my life to date. One of the
original Principals of the lab, the ever-inspi-
ring Matthew Battles, posed the question
to me whether the original Victorian parlor
“Imitation Game” was similar to the parlor
consensus that a difference in looking time
magic of the era and further: A) if this style
indicates detection of a difference between
of magic was in my wheelhouse and B) if
the two events, some have argued that this
using parlor magic might be an interesting
attention or interest could be caused by
way to explore these ideas of surprise and
familiarity with the event or prediction of an
computational intelligence.
event, rather than by surprise at a violation of
an expectation, thus providing no evidence
I was taken aback by this beautiful line of
for an understanding of the physical principle
thought and began an immediate deep
in question (e.g., Bogartz, Shinskey, & Speaker,
dive into the relationships between magic,
1997; Jackson & Sirois, 2009). However, as
surprise, and machine learning. Could I
Hamlin (2014) explains, the evidence for
design an algorithm to generate descrip-
infants’ surprise at an event is distinct from
tions of novel magic effects with varying
evidence for infants’ prediction of an event,
levels of surprise factors? This is what I
and well-designed research can distinguish
set out to do. After reaching out to some
between these two interpretations.”
brilliant computer scientists and coders,
my initial thought was to join with them
Research on the phenomenology of surprise
to create algorithms: inspired by some
holds ideas based on the richness of the lived,
of Griffiths’ thoughts on interestingness,
embodied experience. In “Phenomenology of
and to also weave in my own ideas on the
Error and Surprise: Peirce, Davidson, and Mc-
properties of objects noted in his studies

80
that seemed to contribute to my ongoing
ideas of what may constitute a surprising
transformation.
I anticipated being blown away by truly
surprising results that were more novel and
exciting than our own historical effects. At the
time of writing (spring 2022) the algorithm is
still in progress, yet at every turn, I find myself
diving deeper and deeper into the historic
magic texts that I utilized in initial design
research to train the algorithms. (I wanted to
only use historic magic catalogs, as I planned
to have public conversation around this
process and thus wanted to have text that did
not include methods.)
So far, although some outputs have been
intriguing, funny, and perhaps surprising,
they all seem to lack the deep psychological
nuance that the original magic effects in the
catalogs reference. I have been continually
inspired by the delicate psychology that was
built and honed over hundreds of years by
those in the field of magic.
https://youtu.be/4_WB0_2TK_I
Perhaps, as the algorithm I am working with
my collaborators on gets trained further, it
will prove me wrong. Time will tell.
Modern machine learning is a dance between
the human and the non, the trained and the
untrained, and the level of human interven-
tion that allows for the rendering of new
and certainly unexpected forms. Perhaps an
unpopular opinion, but maybe machine lear-
ning is only a tool to help us get to the root of
understanding our own humanity. By seeing
where machine learning does and does not
meet or confound our expectations, we can
explore why we hold the beliefs that we do
and if they are worth rethinking or leaning
further into.
When I am met with a new algorithmically ge-
nerated output of a magic effect, it prompts
me to think deeply about why I find it less
surprising, and if I were to perform it, what
would make it more surprising. So perhaps,
for now, machine learning is just that, a tool
to help us investigate the beautiful history
of our field and the subtle psychological
underpinnings that we are lucky enough to
play within.
A Note
I will be further investigating these ideas in
my new performance and installation work,
“Taken by Artificial Surprise,” which I will be
debuting with CultureLAB in New York City
in July of 2022 as part of an ongoing series
of work exploring this topic. I also must note
that this project was inspired by my time as
an Affiliate at metaLAB at Harvard. During
this time, I encountered a diversity of ideas
and research, and discourse with metaLAB
members also greatly assisted the ideation
process. ■
Sources
Ada Lovelace.” Ada Lovelace | Babbage Engine |
Computer History Museum, www.computerhis-
tory.org/babbage/adalovelace/.
“Ada Lovelace.” Encyclopædia Britannica, En-
cyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.
com/biography/Ada-Lovelace.
A. M. TURING, I.—COMPUTING MACHINERY
AND INTELLIGENCE, Mind, Volume LIX, Issue
236, October 1950, Pages 433–460, https://
doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433
Cooke, Elizabeth F. “Phenomenology of Error
and Surprise: Peirce, Davidson, and Mc-
Dowell.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society, vol. 47, no. 1, 2011, pp. 62–86, https://
doi.org/10.2979/trancharpeirsoc.47.1.62.
Accessed 19 Apr. 2022.
Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. , 2016.
Print.
Griffiths, Thomas. Revealing Ontological Com-
mitments by Magic - Cocosci.princeton.edu.
cocosci.princeton.edu/tom/papers/magic.pdf.
Lewry C, Curtis K, Vasilyeva N, Xu F, Griffiths
TL. Intuitions about magic track the deve-
lopment of intuitive physics. Cognition.
2021 Sep;214:104762. doi:
10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104762. Epub
2021 May 26. PMID: 34051423.
Oppy, Graham, and David Dowe. “The
Turing Test.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Phi-
losophy, Stanford University, 4 Oct. 2021,
plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/.
JEANETTE ANDREWS
Jeanette Andrews is a magician, artist, and
independent researcher based in New York
City. Andrews presented her first magic
performance at age four, was paid to do her
first magic show at age six, began running her
business that day, and has never had another
job since. She has staged sold-out and stan-
ding-room-only performances for Fortune
500 companies, theaters, and universities and
has presented commissioned and site-specific
works for The Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt,
the International Museum of Surgical Science,
and the Museum of Contemporary Art
Chicago. Andrews is an Affiliate of Harvard’s
metaLAB and current artist in residence for
Culture Lab LIC in New York city and prior
artist-in-residence for High Concept Labs and
The Institute for Art and Olfaction. Illusion is
Ms. Andrews’ life’s work and her performances
have been praised by the Chicago Tribune,
PBS, and the New York Times.
81
Photo by Michael George
82
Spooky Science:
How Scientists

14 Were Fooled by
19th Century
Spiritualism
JAMY IAN SWISS
C
onsider this list of ten rightly celebrated men of science, all stan-
douts of the mid- and late-nineteenth century; they include astro-
nomers, physicists, chemists, geologists, biologists, physiologists,
and mathematicians. All made breakthrough discoveries that changed
the world of science and that have lasting impact today. These ten men
also shared one more remarkable trait. Don’t look ahead. Care to take a
guess?

Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer,

anthropologist, and biologist, best known for independently conceiving
the theory of evolution through natural selection.

John William Strutt was a physicist who, with William Ramsay, discove-
red the element argon, an achievement for which he earned the Nobel
John William Strutt
Prize for Physics in 1904.

Robert Hare was an early American chemist who developed the

“galvanic deflagrator,” a type of voltaic battery for producing rapid and
powerful combustion, and developed, with Edward Daniel Clarke, the
oxy-hydrogen blowpipe.

Augustus De Morgan was a British mathematician and logician who

formulated De Morgan’s laws and introduced the term “mathematical
induction,” making its idea rigorous.

Robert Chambers was a Scottish geologist, evolutionary thinker, publi-

sher, author and journal editor who was highly influential in mid-19th
century scientific and political circles.

Pierre Curie was a French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magne-

tism, piezoelectricity and radioactivity. In 1903 he received the Nobel August De Morgan
Prize in Physics with his wife, Marie, and Henri Becquerel.

Charles Robert Richet was a French physiologist known for

his pioneering work in immunology. In 1913, he won the
Nobel Prize “in recognition of his work on anaphylaxis.”
83
Nicolas Camille Flammarion was a French astronomer and prolific
author of more than fifty titles, and in 1897 he received the Prix Jules
Janssen, the highest award of the French astronomical society.

Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge was a British physicist and writer who identified
electromagnetic radiation independent of Hertz’ proof, and demons-
trated an early radio wave detector. In 1898 he was awarded the “synto-
nic” (or tuning) patent by the United States Patent Office.

Sir William Crookes was an English chemist and physicist who worked
on spectroscopy and was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, inventing the
Crookes tube, and the Crookes radiometer, still sold today as a science
novelty. He was a professor at the University of London, editor of the Pierre Curie
Quarterly Journal of Science, and president of the British Chemical
Society.

Care to guess what else, besides their brilliant discoveries, these men of
science shared?

Ready?

They all believed … in ghosts. Not just in ghosts, but most of them, in
one way or another, believed that they had seen, and indeed, personally
communicated with ghosts and spirits. Each and every one of these wor-
ld-class scientists supported, or believed some aspects of, Spiritualism,
which claimed that it was possible to communicate with the spirit realm,
and that the existence of an afterlife could be proven by scientific inves-
tigation. One of them—Charles Robert Richet, a Nobel Prizewinner—is
responsible for coining the term ectoplasm. Unfortunately, the evi-
dence these men accepted, and in many cases passionately embraced,

Sir William Crookes

consisted entirely of magic tricks performed
by professional con artists.
Consider William Crookes. A brief list of
Crookes’ research would include meteorolo-
gy, chemistry, economics, spectrometry, ra-
diation, and cathode rays. But between 1871
and 1874, Crookes also undertook scientific
examination and testing of several professio-
nal séance mediums—Kate Fox (yes, of the
Fox sisters), Florence Cook, Daniel Dunglas
Home, and Anna Eva Fay—investigations
mostly conducted in his self-constructed
home laboratory. For example, he tested Fay
in February 1875, having her hold two elec-
trodes in an electrical circuit connected to a
galvanometer in the next room. Somehow
Fay managed to cause objects in the room to
move, and to produce sound from a musical
instrument, and Crookes became convinced
of her psychic abilities.
Although he was sure that the electrical
control had not been broken, skeptical
researchers maintained that Fay could have
freed her hands to produce the phenomena
while using other parts of her body or a
resistance coil to keep the electric circuit
intact.
Thirty-eight years later, Fay ex-
plained to Society of Psychi-
cal Research investigator
Eric Dingwall how she
84 had fooled Crookes
and other researchers,
using a repertoire of magic
tricks. A decade after that, in
retirement, she also shared her
secrets with Harry Houdini; the two
developed a late-in-life friendship of
sorts based on a kind of mutual respect as
professional performers and deceivers. Fay
told Houdini that in the Crookes galvanome-
ter test she had gripped one handle of the
battery beneath her knee joint, keeping the
circuit unbroken, leaving one hand free to
manipulate objects in the dark séance room.
D. D. Home, who tended to avoid scientists
and any sort of challenge testing, also fooled
Crookes. Home’s most notorious claim to
fame was that he had floated out the window
of a third story séance chamber and floated
back in through the window of an adjacent
room—all without any skeptics or scien-
tists present, and, of course, in pitch-black
darkness. The key witness to Home’s levita-
tion is believed to have been Home’s lover,
but Crookes somehow overlooked that
compromising fact. And when Crookes was
investigating the beautiful young medium
Florence Cook, who happened to be living
in the Crookes’s home—the writer Trevor
Hall speculated that Crookes was having an
affair with her (while his wife, pregnant with
their tenth child, remained bedridden)—that
cozy situation didn’t dent his belief that he
was impartial. To be sure, it was not unusual
for mediums to receive embraces and other
amorous favors from the spirits; many, in the
darkness of the séance room, engaged in
complete sexual encounters with apparitions
from the beyond. I suppose you never know
what can happen if a spirit is willing . . . and
the flesh isn’t weak.
Florence Cook routinely manifested the spirit
known as Katie King. While Cook was sup-
posedly tied to a chair in a spirit cabinet or
behind a curtain, King would walk among the
séance sitters, sometimes touching them, and
Crookes Experiment
occasionally even disrobing before them (in
order to prove herself human, donchaknow).
Many witnesses observed that the spirit of
Katie King looked remarkably similar to the
medium Florence Cook, and that they were
never clearly seen together at the same
time, one or the other being obscured or
invisible. In one séance, a skeptic grabbed
the hand of the spirit of Katie, and a violent
wrestling match ensued, leaving the skeptic
bleeding. The spirit escaped, and when the
lights came on the medium was found once
again tied to her chair, albeit disheveled and
with her clothing in disarray.
When all is said and done, one must agree
with the conclusions of the science historian
Sherrie Lynne Lyons, who determined that
Cook had easily tricked Crookes; after all, she
had been repeatedly exposed as a fraud and
had been “trained in the arts of the séance.”
The alleged spirit “Katie King” was on most
occasions Cook herself, and at other times
was an accomplice. Lyons wrote, “Here was
a man with a flawless scientific reputation,
who discovered a new element, but could
not detect a real live maiden who was mas-
querading as a ghost.”
And then there was the Italian medium,
Eusapia Paladino, widely hailed by spi-
ritualists, who boldly and frequently
permitted herself to be examined
by scientists in France, Germany,
Italy, England, and the United
States. (When she arrived in the
United States in 1909 she garnered
widespread press coverage from the
New York Times to Cosmopolitan.) She
was exposed as a charlatan in every one of
those countries, but that mere problem did
not dent her colorful career. Paladino would
at times admit to fraud when she was caught
in the act, but supporters claimed that while
the pressures to produce consistent results
from inconsistent spirits sometimes led her
and other mediums into fakery, that didn’t
necessarily mean they cheated all the time.
Yet if ever there was a call for Occam’s Razor
to be applied to an explanation, it should
be to the claim that just because someone
cheats sometimes, it doesn’t mean they cheat
all the time. When you weigh the options
between (1) mediums always cheat, versus (2)
we should upend everything we know about
the physical universe since the birth of the
scientific method, call me crazy, but . . . I’m
going with cheating.
Here’s how she did it. First, she dictated the
lighting and “controls” that were to be used
in her séances. Second, she used a common
trick of the spirit medium, the “medium’s
grip,” wherein when all the sitters around the
séance table would clasp hands, or touch
hands together, the fingertips of her right
hand resting upon the back of the hand of
one of the “controller” sitters adjacent to her.
A second controller seated on her other side
grasped her left hand. Her feet rested under-
neath or on top of the feet of her controllers.
Thus it appeared that she could not use her
hands or feet to create spirit phenomena
in the dark. But even “controlled” in
that way, she could pull a foot out
from her shoe prepared for the
purpose, and after tipping the
table back on one leg, she could
wedge her foot under the lifted
leg nearest her, and then briefly raise
the entire table, making it appear to be
floating in the air. As with any professional
con artist, the keys to the skill set of a psychic
or medium are flexibility—the ability to take
advantage of any situation spontaneously—
and, above all, boldness. Eusapia Paladino
had both in abundance.
Paladino had been invited to England in 1895
by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR),
the first organization of its kind, formed in
1882 with the stated intention being “to
approach these varied problems without
prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in
the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned
enquiry which has enabled science to solve
so many problems, once not less obscure
nor less hotly debated.” William Crookes
was a member, along with the previously
mentioned physicist Oliver Lodge and Nobel
laureate Charles Richet. The organization,
which still exists, professed to hold no a priori
position on Spiritualism and psychic pheno-
mena, and in its earliest days exposed many
fraudulent mediums.
For example, in 1884 the SPR sent its Secre-
tary, Richard Hodgson, to India to investigate
Madame Blavatsky, a renowned medium and
the founder of Theosophy, which attracted
numerous eminent adherents (including Wil-
liam Butler Yeats), and still does. Among the
phenomena that Hodgson investigated was
the miraculous “Theosophical letters from
the Mahatmas,” Blavatsky’s claimed mystical
teachers and so-called “adepts” with whom
she claimed personal connection. The letters
were said to magically appear over a four-year
period in a cabinet in the Shrine Room at the
Theosophical headquarters in Madras. Hodg-
son concluded that the letters were fakes and
that Blavatsky had not only written them her-
self, but had then planted them in the cabinet
via a secret opening in her bedroom located
behind the Shrine room.
After that auspicious start, the SPR unfortuna-
tely broke into contentious factions, creating
frequent and heated debate within the ranks. Photo by Michael Bulbenko
After the exposure of William Hope and other
fraudulent mediums, Arthur Conan Doyle
led a mass resignation of 84 members of the JAMY IAN SWISS
Society—not because of the revelation of so
much trickery by mediums, but because they According to the post-modern magic duo,
believed the Society was opposed to Spiritua- Penn & Teller, Jamy Ian Swiss is “James Bond
lism. Science historian William Hodson Brock with a deck of cards for a pistol!” An interna-
observed that by the 1900s most of the spiri- tionally acclaimed sleight-of-hand artist, wri-
tualists, unhappy about the skeptical stance ter and speaker, Swiss has appeared interna-
of most of the group’s investigations, had tionally for presenters ranging from Fortune
resigned from the SPR and joined a London 500 companies to the Smithsonian Insti-
Spiritualist Alliance that had been founded tution. His U.S. television appearances
about the same time. include CBS 48 Hours; PBS Nova; re-
peat appearances on The Today
Show and on The Late, Late
For their part, skeptical members also began
resigning from the SPR, disillusioned with its Show; and he has been seen 85
credulous approach to investigations. Eric on screens nationwide in two
Dingwall resigned and wrote, “After sixty feature-length documentaries:
years’ experience and personal acquaintance “An Honest Liar” and “Merchants of
with most of the leading parapsychologists Doubt.” The author of six books, he has
of that period, I do not think I could name lectured to magicians in 13 countries; to
half a dozen whom I could call objective academics and scientists about skepticism
students who honestly wished to discover and critical thinking; to law enforcement
the truth. The great majority wanted to prove professionals on con games; and consulted
something or other: They wanted the pheno- on casino game security. A lengthy profile in
mena into which they were inquiring to serve the New Yorker declared that, “Swiss is widely
some purpose in supporting preconceived thought to have one of the most masterly
theories of their own.” sleight-of-hand techniques in the world to-
day.”
And thus, in its later years—like so many
parapsychology groups ever since—the SPR
became a hotbed of believers attempting
to find supportive evidence of their beliefs,
rather than pursuing open-minded investiga-
tions without foregone conclusion. ■
Chapter excerpted from The Conjurer’s Conun-
drum: My Life in Magic and Skepticism
Copyright (c) 2020
by Jamy Ian Swiss & Vanishing Inc. Magic
The book is available at:
jamyianswiss.com/conjurers-conundrum
 15
i r™
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dO
ar rd
&
A
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Bo a O O
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, It
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De

86
 Abstract. The MOOCs, and online material design in general, stimulate the search for appropriate technologies. We can see
this happening in the special glass board “Lightboard” of the Department of Mathematics, built and implemented follow-
ing an initial open source project by Prof. M. Peshkin of Northwestern University, with the intervention of Frank Cadillac, a
famous Italian builder of great and small illusions.

Keywords: Lightboard, MOOC, post-production

“I guess your lightboard is going to revolutionize the elearning business!”

- Beate Brede, Head of Talent Recruiting Management, Fraunhofer IFAM, Bremen, Germany.

87
Excerpts from videos by the authors made with the Lightboard BoardOnAir™

1. Looking for an effective video writing the only option available is to write to press the button of the digital recorder and
on a tablet PC and video-record the desktop. start the recording.
system However, the absence of a real person (or
simply their icon from the webcam) apparent- It took us two years to figure out how to
Since 2015 the so called MOOCs (Massive
ly is not very effective and, according to some transport / transfer the project we had seen
Open Online Courses) have become excep-
studies on MOOCs, can even be counterpro- on the internet - an open source patent – not
tional tools for the dissemination of mathe-
ductive. to mention the difficulty of building a struc-
matics. The MOOCs are free online courses,
ture with very particular characteristics made
consisting of sequences of short videos, texts
2. From Lightboard to BoardOnAir™ of glass and steel navigating through Italian
and quizzes. However, whoever is in charge
In 2015 we became aware of a Lightboard bureaucracy which, for example, obliges the
of their realization, is aware of the difficulty of
produced by physicist M. Peshkin of North- public administration to only purchase prod-
producing an effective video.
western University (USA). This tool allowed to ucts from one specific catalogue: how can
make videos in which one is able to see the one do this if the product still does not exist?
Mathematics is typically explained on a
board. Instead, the procedure to produce a presenter frontally, while he writes and draws
MOOC video involves a presentation in Power images to which he can add comments live
in a vacuum, using phosphorescent markers, The Lightboard needs a massive structure,
Point by the presenter who explains with the
and without any need for post-production able to safely hold a glass measuring 2.40 m
aid of his gestures and is shot by a camera in a
work. X 1.20 m, surrounded by LEDs and various
multimedia centre equipped with Chromakey
other apparatuses: a camera, a device able
(green background). Afterwards, a technician
This board is a special glass blackboard, to flip the right-left image, a television mixer,
needs to edit the video so that the presenta-
illuminated from the inside and accompa- and a digital recorder. The video image is then
tion will appear behind the presenter. Various
nied by auxiliary instruments that allow both mixed with the Power Point presentation or
other steps, by the authors themselves to the
to reverse the image in order to make the computer pdf.
technicians, will produce an optimal synchro-
presenter’s writings appear in the correct ori- We were lucky enough to meet Frank Cadillac,
nization between images and speech.
entation, and to assemble the signal coming President of the Ring Club 314 of the Interna-
from the Power Point presentation of a PC to tional Brotherood of Magicians and builder
In order to maintain the naturalness of hand-
the camera image. The presenter just needs - the only one in Northern Italy - of great
 BoardOnAir™ at the Club Ring IBM 314 in Padua (left) and the final steps of the installation by Frank Cadillac (right)
88
illusions, who appreciated and understood the “magical” effect we
wanted to create. After meeting him and discussing with him several
times, the structure we wanted gradually emerged.
For the complex settings of the various devices we were assisted by
the Office of Digital Learning and Multimedia, of the University of
Padua, which passionately carried out the task. We can still remember
the exciting moment when for the first time at their headquarters we
finally managed to obtain the video signal we wanted through all the
steps from the equipment at play.
Finally, Niccolò Mariconda fine-tuned the photographic settings in
order to create the desired tones and colours.
After building the prototype, funded by the Department of Mathe-
matics of the University of Padua, we trademarked the system Boar-
dOnAir™ and assigned the rights for the marketing to the University
of Padua spinoff Audioinnova . Specimens of BoardOnAir” are now
present in various Departments of the University.
3. How to use BoardOnAir™
The advantage of BoardOnAir™ is that it immediately creates a com-
plete, highly effective, high quality video.
If what the teacher can write onto the blackboard is not enough, he
can prepare a presentation in Power Point on a black background,
imagining being present inside from the bust up, he then can insert
an SD card into the recorder and start recording.
The video obtained is ready for immediate use without any post-pro-
duction work. When the presenter is immersed inside graphs, tables
and diagrams, the whole thing becomes alive and attractive, and can
effectively and enthusiastically communicate the passion of those
who have dedicated their lives to the magic world of numbers.
In addition to numerous video lessons and educational seminars
in Engineering, Mathematics and Statistics, BoardOnAir™ has been
used to create several MOOCs, including our Precalculus , Advanced
Precalculus and Combinatorics , all accessible free of charge from all
over the world on the prestigious platform FutureLearn.
BoardOnAir™ has also been used in various projects such as Raidmap
(by Prof. Bonollo) involving colleagues who came specifically from
Spain and Germany to use it.
During the first lockdown, BoardOnAir™ was the only working tool of
the University of Padua as it made it possible to work in solitude and
total autonomy, without any risk of infection. ■
Bibliography
Birdwell, J. A., & Peshkin, M. (2015). Capturing technical lectures on
lightboard. age, 26(1).
Dourmashkin, P., Tomasik, M., & Rayyan, S. (2020). The TEAL Physics
Project at MIT. In Active Learning in College Science (pp. 499-520).
Springer, Cham.
Lubrick, M., Zhou, G., & Zhang, J. (2019). Is the Future Bright? The
Potential of Lightboard Videos for Student Achievement and En-
gagement in Learning. EURASIA Journal of Mathematics, Science and
Technology Education, 15(8), em 1735.
McCorkle, S., & Whitener, P. (2020). The Lightboard: Expectations and
Experiences. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 11(1), 75-
84.
McGray, R., Contant, N., Davis, M., Fisher, L., Kopczinski, J., Scott R. M., ... https://youtu.be/UMjfFt1uszM
& Stevens, J. (2019). Democratizing Online Learning in Postsecondary
Education: Instructional Design Plans.
Rogers, P. D., & Botnaru, D. T. (2019). Shedding Light on Student Learn-
ing through the Use of Lightboard Videos. International Journal for the
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 13(3), 6.
West, P. (2017). Let’s talk pedagogy: The lightboard creating more
flexible learning. Education Technology Solutions, (79), 46.
Ye, W. (2016). Lightboard and Chinese language instruction. Journal of
Technology and Chinese Language Teaching, 7(2), 97.

89
 Experience

90
16 The Impossible
DR. GUSTAV KUHN
Reader in Psychology, Goldsmiths
 91

C
outsiders. Ignoring this fascinating form of entertainment is a
onjuring is one of the oldest and
lost opportunity. The past decade has seen huge advances in
most enduring forms of entertain-
our understanding of magic, yet there is still much catching
ment, and magic has played an
up to be done.
important role in many aspects of our
lives. Even though the Enlightenment
Magic is shrouded in clouds of secrecy and deception, which
brought scientific explanations for most
often prevent outsiders from studying it. Some magicians are
of the ancient mysteries, advances in
reluctant to reveal their secrets for fear of destroying their
science and technology have done little
illusions. Magicians also often mislead outsiders about how
to squash magic’s appeal. To the con-
their effects are achieved. Throughout history, magicians
trary, magic has rarely been as popular
have presented their tricks a scientific demonstration, and
as it is today.
today, they often use pseudoscientific neuro-jargon to create
intriguing illusions. For example, some magicians use tricks
Magicians amaze and enchant, but
to demonstrate psychological skills, such as priming or body
there is more to magic than simple
language reading, and people often take this explanation at
entertainment. Magic deals with some
face value. However, as we have seen throughout this book,
of the most fundamental philosophical
there is often more to magic than meets the eye.
and psychological questions (e.g., con-
sciousness, deception, beliefs, free will),
Magic relies on deception and secrecy, but this should not
yet it has received far less academic
prevent us from studying it more systematically. Most magi-
attention than other art forms, such as
cians are pretty open about their deceptive techniques, and
music, film, literature, and the fine arts.
the idea that they guard their secrets with their lives is an
Even though thousands of magic books
illusion. I have tried my best to avoid revealing secret meth-
have been written for magicians (by
ods unless necessary, but it is impossible to please all. For the
magicians), very few are intended for
nonmagician eager to know how the tricks are done, I simply
say: the secrets to most magic tricks can be
unlocked with a few clicks on the internet.
But be warned. Once you know the secret,
you will never again experience the wonder
and mystery.
Magicians are often concerned with expo-
sure, and theoretically, I could be expelled
from the Magic Circle for revealing how
magic tricks are done in public. However,
magicians are allowed to sell their secrets,
and inasmuch as you have all paid to buy
this book, there is little danger of this. In
the digital age, it is virtually impossible to
keep anything secret, and thus social media
platforms and YouTube pose a big challenge
to magic.1 These open platforms, howev-
er, also provide new opportunities for the
magic endeavor. I learned magic from books
that I found in our local library, while today’s
generation is learning from watching You-
Tube tutorials performed by masters. Young
magicians today learn new and better tech-
niques, and I am often amazed—and put
to shame—by their skills. Magicians should
embrace the challenge of openness because
it will ultimately encourage them to develop
better tricks.
I believe that a more open approach
to magic, one that allows outsiders
to study and contribute, will
enrich the endeavor. For any
magicians concerned about
92 exposure, rest assured
that most people don’t
actively seek out the secret;
they enjoy and cherish the
wonder too much to do so. I hope
to have offered some insights into
this wonderful form of entertainment
without destroying the wonder that it elic-
its. I hope this will help enhance the magic
endeavor and help people appreciate this
often-neglected art form. Most importantly,
though, magic offers many important bene-
fits beyond simple entertainment.
Magic provides compelling illustrations of
our mind’s limitations, and it highlights the
subjective nature of our conscious experi-
ence. The science of magic offers a new per-
spective on cognition, and it provides com-
pelling illustrations of the surprising tricks
our brain uses to deal with the challenge of
survival. We rarely reflect on these challeng-
es, and our cognitive processes are often
impenetrable to conscious introspection.
Most importantly, magic creates a conflict
between the things that we believe to be
possible and the things that we experience,
and it does so by exploiting our delusional
beliefs about our own cognitive abilities.
Understanding and appreciating these
errors in meta-awareness has far-reaching
implications for how we judge ourselves
and others. Moreover, been fooled by magic
https://youtu.be/SniOvy5GYcc
is a compelling reminder of how much we
misjudge our own capability.
These errors and illusions provide scientists
with new insights into the brain, but they
also help us make more informed decisions.
Technological advances are changing the
demands our brains face, and our safety
relies on realizing our own limitations. For
example, the ease with which magicians
can create blind spots by manipulating
your attention explains why it’s a bad idea
to talk on the phone while driving. Simi-
larly, many of the perceptual and memory
illusions challenge our thoughts about the
way we perceive the present and remember
the past. The ease with which magicians
influence your decisions shows that the
compelling sense of free will we typically
experience may be an illusion. Throughout
modern history, people have tried to per-
suade others and influence public opinion;
advertisers try to convince us to buy their
products, and politicians try to manipu-
late public attitudes. Democracy relies on
informed and free choices, yet in our digital
age, the distinction between “real” and “fake”
news is becoming more blurred, and it has
become much easier to covertly manipulate
opinion. As with the magician’s force, we
feel like our choice is free, and yet this may
simply be an illusion.
The science of magic provides valuable
lessons. It is difficult, if not impossible, to
enhance our cognitive resources, and these
forms of covert persuasion are often hard, if
not impossible, to resist. However, aware-
ness of these limitations and biases has the
potential to help us make more informed
decisions and to reduce the chances of us
being unknowingly manipulated. Although
magic highlights many of our limitations,
we should also embrace the positive
experiences that magic elicits wonder,
creativity, captivation. A deeper
understanding of the nature of
magic will help translate these
principles from the stage to
our daily lives. So much more
can be learned from magic and the
psychological mechanisms underpin-
ning these experiences, and we hope to
see significant advances in this area in the
years to come. ■
Excerpted with permission from
“Experiencing The Impossible”
GUSTAV KUHN
Gustav is a Reader in Psychology, Gold-
smiths, where he directs the MAGIC-lab.
He is also president of the Science of Magic
Association (SOMA) and a member of the
Experimental Psychology Society (EPS) and
the Magic Circle (M.M.C).
He has contributed to several diverse
research areas, including social cognition,
consciousness, attention, illusory experienc-
es, magical thinking, free will, misdirection
and a range of areas related to the scientific
study of magic. The breadth of his work is
not only seen in scientific contributions, but
also in his engagement to bring science to
the public and bridging the gap between
magic and science. Visit https://www.
magicresearchlab.com for more information
about the research lab.
RESOURCES

Examples of Magic Inspiring Science

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN  
Magic and the Brain: How Magicians “Trick” the Mind
“Neuroscientists are scrutinizing magic tricks to learn how they can be put to work in experimental studies that probe aspects of consciousness not necessarily grounded
in current sensory reality.”

NATURE REVIEWS NEUROSCIENCE

Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic: Turning Tricks Into Research
“By studying magicians and their techniques, neuroscientists can learn powerful methods to manipulate attention and awareness in the laboratory.

PEERJ NEUROSCIENCE
Perceptual Elements in Penn & Teller’s “Cups And Balls” Magic Trick
“Magic illusions provide the perceptual and cognitive scientist with a toolbox of experimental manipulations and testable hypotheses about the building blocks of con-
scious experience.”

FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
The Psychology of Magic and the Magic of Psychology
“Magicians have dazzled audiences for many centuries; however, few researchers have studied how, let alone why, most tricks work. The psychology of magic is a nascent
field of research that examines the underlying mechanisms that conjurers use to achieve enchanting phenomena, including sensory illusions and misdirection of atten-
tion.”

A Framework for Using Magic to Study the Mind

“Over the centuries, magicians have developed extensive knowledge about the manipulation of the human mind—knowledge that has been largely ignored by psychol-
ogy.”

CURRENT BIOLOGY
There’s More to Magic Than Meets the Eye
“Our perception of an event is often modulated by our past experience and expectations. Here we used a magic trick to demonstrate how magicians can distort our sub-
jective perception and we investigate the mechanisms behind this deception.”

Magic and Cognitive Neuroscience

“Neuroscientists have shown an increasing interest in magic. One reason for this is the parallels that can be drawn between concepts that have long been discussed in
magic theory, particularly misdirection, and those that are routinely studied in cognitive neuroscience, such as attention and, as argued in this essay, different forms of
memory.

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

From The Stage To The Laboratory: Magicians, Psychologists, and The Science Of Illusion
“In 1894, French psychologist Alfred Binet published an article on the psychology of conjuring. By observing five magicians perform in his laboratory, he was hoping to
gain a better understanding of the psychological processes responsible for inducing illusions in an audience.”

BOSTON CONSULTING GROUP

Ideas, Emotions, and Innovation: Riding the Amazement Cycle
“The theme of TED’s 2018 conference, “The Age of Amazement,” reflects the momentous innovation and change going on around us. Taking this cue, we examine the dy-
namic interplay of logic and emotion that unfolds when we encounter something new, and attempt to extract some hints for how leaders can understand and harness it.”

SCIENCEDIRECT
Imaging the impossible: An fMRI study of impossible causal relationships in magic tricks
This study uses magic-trick perception as a means of investigating violations of relationships that are long-established, deterministic, and that form part of an
established belief system.

WIRED / SCIENCE
Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion
Teller joined a coterie of illusionists and tricksters recruited by Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in
Phoenix, Arizona, to look at the neuroscience of magic.

PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY
Where is the ball? Behavioral and neural responses elicited by a magic trick
“Altogether, our results show how new insights into sensory and cognitive processing can be obtained using adapted magic tricks.”

FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
Magic and Misdirection: The Influence of Social Cues on the Allocation of Visual Attention While Watching a Cups-and-Balls Routine
“In recent years, a body of research that regards the scientific study of magic performances as a promising method of investigating psychological phenomena in an
ecologically valid setting has emerged.”

The Phantom Vanish Magic Trick: Investigating the Disappearance of a Non-existent Object in a Dynamic Scene
“Drawing inspiration from sleight-of-hand magic tricks, we developed an experimental paradigm to investigate whether magicians’ misdirection techniques could be
used to induce the misperception of ‘phantom’ objects.”

WIRED
The Science of Magic: How Tricks Are Changing Real-Life Research

NEW YORK TIMES

Sleights of Mind (Teller)
by GREG WILSON

Greg Wilson