Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: do you remember the Math Magician from Breaking the Magician's Code,
Speaker 1: Magic's biggest secrets finally revealed? Oh yeah, you don't, well,
Speaker 1: this was this was on TV all the time back
Speaker 1: in the day. Um particularly, this was like especially and
Speaker 1: probably you know reruns thereafter, but it was this this
Speaker 1: magician and he wore this mask because he was he
Speaker 1: was like a rogue illusionist that was that on the
Speaker 1: on this this particular show, he was gonna come on,
Speaker 1: he was gonna do uh, sort of a staple magic
Speaker 1: trick and then he was going to expose how it
Speaker 1: was done. And he was having to hide his identity
Speaker 1: so that the Magician's Guild wouldn't you know, fire him
Speaker 1: and destroy him, lock him in a cast, getting sinking
Speaker 1: into the ocean kind of a deal. But but I
Speaker 1: remember and then thinking this guy was kind of a jerk,
Speaker 1: and you know, because he's coming along and he's like like, oh,
Speaker 1: you think it is magic, I'm going to kill the
Speaker 1: magic for you. And I could easily imagine him showing
Speaker 1: up in his mask at other events to to destroy
Speaker 1: the magic of other things, like you know, he could
Speaker 1: do you know, a whole series of specials where it's
Speaker 1: like breaking the puppeteers code, puppet tearings, biggest secrets finally revealed,
Speaker 1: you know, and just going down through through the list,
Speaker 1: they sit on tiny stools. They're wearing all black. But
Speaker 1: but no, that that was the first thing that came
Speaker 1: to mind when we were talking about doing an episode
Speaker 1: on magic, on the science of believing, well, that there
Speaker 1: are people who say, let's not reveal the magic. And
Speaker 1: in fact, Um, one the reasons why we're talking about
Speaker 1: this is because there was a great article that came
Speaker 1: out talking about Teller of pen and Teller and Um
Speaker 1: and his pen is the quiet one. That's what I mean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Tell was the quiet one, the loud one, and and
Speaker 1: he has been lately, Um, he has been talking about
Speaker 1: these secrets Um that they employed. But the thing here
Speaker 1: is that I think of it as meta magic. I mean,
Speaker 1: they have always been pretty forthright with their audience, like
Speaker 1: we are telling you the secrets kind what we're doing,
Speaker 1: and yet we are still going to fool you we
Speaker 1: are still going to pull this magic trick off and
Speaker 1: you're not going to really now. Yeah, I do like
Speaker 1: the way that Penn and Teller tend to handle it, because,
Speaker 1: first of all, it's not a oh, I'm gonna totally
Speaker 1: expose the magic here, some secrets about to be revealed,
Speaker 1: prepared to have your your dreams crushed. Like it's not
Speaker 1: it's not about that, like they're they're really bringing And
Speaker 1: it's also not a sense of in the case of
Speaker 1: the mass magician. You don't get the sense that it's
Speaker 1: like a magician that had some bills to pay and
Speaker 1: was like, all right, this is the gimmick. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do like Penn and tell her all about really explaining
Speaker 1: how magic works, because they love magic, because there is
Speaker 1: there's some really amazing stuff going on beneath the surface
Speaker 1: of the illusion. Not only is the illusion amazing, but
Speaker 1: the way the the the illusion toys with our perception
Speaker 1: reality that's amazing too, And they're all about sharing that.
Speaker 1: But then at the same time they're all about using
Speaker 1: this these secrets that they share as in midirection in
Speaker 1: a magic trick. So yeah, it gets really met up
Speaker 1: really fast. Yeah, because they're basically saying we're totally to
Speaker 1: flu and this is how we're going to fool you,
Speaker 1: and yet this is still going to happen. Um. And
Speaker 1: for people who are who don't know Penn and Teller,
Speaker 1: um me describe them. Pen As, you say, is the
Speaker 1: one who speaks, he's uh, kind of you know Audashas.
Speaker 1: He's six ft seven. He went to clowning school, by
Speaker 1: the way. Yeah, um, and he is usually the person
Speaker 1: who's talking about what sort of trick they're going to
Speaker 1: do and sort of ushering that in, while Teller usually
Speaker 1: executes the trick and is the quiet one. He never talked.
Speaker 1: He's just kind of a mining in that style. Yeah yeah, um,
Speaker 1: And I guess you can call it kind of highbrow
Speaker 1: magic in the way that they really are sort of
Speaker 1: asking you to um. They're they're trying to they're asking
Speaker 1: you to be critical, to be analytical, and yet they
Speaker 1: are obstucating your um critical thinking very much in the
Speaker 1: in the vein of the amazing Randy Um who, of course,
Speaker 1: in addition to being the madition, has the you know,
Speaker 1: the this whole organization is built up. They have the
Speaker 1: prize that the I think it's like a million dollars
Speaker 1: could be wrong on that, but a huge cash prize
Speaker 1: for people who can who can prove that they have
Speaker 1: psychic abilities. And uh in Randy to a large extent
Speaker 1: also falls on the footsteps of Fudini, who, in addition
Speaker 1: to being an accomplished illusionist, was also really into exposing
Speaker 1: uh frauds who were who were taking advantage of people
Speaker 1: who had lost loved ones. And we're using like seance
Speaker 1: environments and in various tricks to toy with people's emotions
Speaker 1: and loosen their purse strings. So so yeah, that's kind
Speaker 1: of the the mold of of these guys as well,
Speaker 1: because they have that long running show UH we Can't
Speaker 1: Bullplop uh to uhus, the censored version, where they would
Speaker 1: talk about various things, often controversial things. X. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: their skeptics, and they bring that that skeptic viewpoint into
Speaker 1: analyzing all these topics when they also bring a fun
Speaker 1: skepticism into their magic. Yeah, and so we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about how we can break down the magic here a
Speaker 1: little bit with science and how they actually do that
Speaker 1: as well, particularly Teller. Again, he wrote an article for
Speaker 1: Smithsonian Magazine telling people how he does it and we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about why magicians are like camouflage designers of
Speaker 1: the mind. We talked about camouflage and some of the
Speaker 1: same uh sub diffusions going on in camouflage patterns as
Speaker 1: as the magic acts. But first, let's uh let's talk
Speaker 1: about the New York Times article Science of Illusion by
Speaker 1: Alex Stone. He ushers in the article by talking about
Speaker 1: a coin trick, a really simple coin trick. So he says, Okay,
Speaker 1: pinch a coin at its edge between thumb and first
Speaker 1: fingers of your right hand and begin to place it
Speaker 1: in your left palm of letting go doing that now, Okay,
Speaker 1: begin to close the fingers at the left hand. Okay,
Speaker 1: the instant the coin is out of sight, extend the
Speaker 1: last three digits of your right hand and secretly retract
Speaker 1: the coin. Presumably that means like put it in a
Speaker 1: little into The last three are kind of they're they're
Speaker 1: kind of serving as a cover, like a shield, right right. Well, also,
Speaker 1: it's making it look like it's drap in your like
Speaker 1: your freeing your fingers from the coin at the same
Speaker 1: time you're depositing that coin, let's say, right inside your sleeve. Um.
Speaker 1: And then he says, um, secretly retract the coin, make
Speaker 1: a fist with your left hand as if holding the coin,
Speaker 1: as your right hand palms the coin and drops to
Speaker 1: the side. Okay, and then you're going to reproduce that
Speaker 1: coin later, all right. What they say in this article
Speaker 1: is that this is a great example of something called
Speaker 1: retention vanish. This is the illusion of a false transfer,
Speaker 1: and it happens when there's a lag in the brain's
Speaker 1: perception of motion called persistence of vision. So the audience
Speaker 1: will actually see this is the crazy thing. The audience
Speaker 1: will actually see the coin and left palm for a
Speaker 1: split second after the hands separate. And this is because
Speaker 1: your visual neurons don't stop firing once a given stimulus. Here,
Speaker 1: the coin is no longer present to your brain. Again,
Speaker 1: we talked about this. This this great pattern recognition machine
Speaker 1: makes that coin appear because you have the visual neurons
Speaker 1: still being stimulated. So what they're saying is that our
Speaker 1: perception of reality lags behind reality about one of a second.
Speaker 1: And this is what magicians are exploiting. Wow, it's it's
Speaker 1: really interesting, and that we u We also recorded an
Speaker 1: episode today on Camouflage, which either just came out before
Speaker 1: this one, or will come out next. And there's a
Speaker 1: lot of overlap between these two topics. And camouflage, you
Speaker 1: are toying with pattern recognition a lot of the time
Speaker 1: and using distraction and misdirection to ful like potential enemy.
Speaker 1: And in in magic we see a similar thing. Here
Speaker 1: we're exploiting pattern recognition where we're we're exploiting the lag
Speaker 1: in perception and reality. Yeah, and this is where the
Speaker 1: cognitive bias comes in, right, um. And we can say
Speaker 1: that cognitive cognitive bias can be traced to evolution to
Speaker 1: our ancestors because missing a pattern was much more dangerous
Speaker 1: than seeing a pattern that wasn't their right, So that's
Speaker 1: kind of why we're hardwired like that. Um. So if
Speaker 1: magician magicians can tweak the patterns enough, then you can
Speaker 1: lead the brain to cognitive bias. And that's where we're
Speaker 1: constructing this false logic for ourselves. And as you say,
Speaker 1: they're employing um, not just the um you know, a
Speaker 1: pattern sort of falling into the background in us accepting
Speaker 1: that the coin has been transferred, but also this idea
Speaker 1: of dazzle as well, and this idea of distraction. Okay,
Speaker 1: so um, absurdism, humor always comes into play with magicians
Speaker 1: for a really good reason. Yeah. I found this really
Speaker 1: fascinating because, I mean, on one hand, I mean it's
Speaker 1: it's pretty obvious. You're you're gonna use basic misdirection. You're
Speaker 1: you're not looking you're not looking at the coin. You're
Speaker 1: gonna look at the assistant skimpy outfit, or you're not
Speaker 1: looking at the allowed, you know, at at the thing
Speaker 1: that's about to disappear. You're looking at the elaborate prop.
Speaker 1: You're not looking at the handcuffs on the guy. You're
Speaker 1: looking at this enormous vat of water that they're being
Speaker 1: immersed to. So you end up focusing on the spectacle
Speaker 1: and not necessarily on the small detail upon which the
Speaker 1: entire trick hinges. And uh. And you know, so you're
Speaker 1: you're taking in this an environment, You're you're working it
Speaker 1: out in your head, what's about to happen. You're you
Speaker 1: have expectations of what's going to happen. Throw in some absurdity,
Speaker 1: throw in some humor. And they find that laughter disables
Speaker 1: your ability to think critically for at least a moment um.
Speaker 1: And I've I've been observing this recently. Um playing this uh,
Speaker 1: this card game called Cabo. Um, we'll pull us out
Speaker 1: with friends, and it's a very simple memory game. Um,
Speaker 1: you can look it up online. It's like like I
Speaker 1: think they used to sell it on Etsy. It's like
Speaker 1: it's got like one of the cards has a rainbow
Speaker 1: as a unicorn puking a rainbow. So it's that kind
Speaker 1: of fun little game. But you end up having several
Speaker 1: people set around and you're you don't know what your
Speaker 1: cards are. Necessarily you get peaks of them and you
Speaker 1: have to memorize it. Other people are memorizing their cards,
Speaker 1: trying to keep track of cards that are moving, and inevitably,
Speaker 1: if you have some fun people playing, somebody's gonna crack
Speaker 1: a joke, somebody's gonna say something amusing, or something's gonna happen,
Speaker 1: and then you totally don't remember where anything is right
Speaker 1: the distraction there, So throw that out on a magic trick.
Speaker 1: So it's like people think they're smart, Oh, I wonder
Speaker 1: where that coin is. Then they throw in a fart
Speaker 1: joke and you're good. You're good to go, like reset
Speaker 1: the entire memory well, and Teller says that they all
Speaker 1: immediately follow a trick with a joke every single time.
Speaker 1: And that's exactly because they're manipulating that part of your brain. Um.
Speaker 1: I want to go down real quick. His his seven
Speaker 1: things that he does um to to defraud an audience. UM.
Speaker 1: One which we already talked about. Exploit pattern recognition to
Speaker 1: make the secret a lot more troublesome than the trick
Speaker 1: seems worth. Complex trick, Yeah, Like for instance, he said that, uh,
Speaker 1: for an appearance on David Letterman, for two weeks, they
Speaker 1: trained themselves to work with these cockroaches two hundred of them,
Speaker 1: really slow moving so that they would not you know,
Speaker 1: skiter off um when they got their camera time. They
Speaker 1: created some styrofoam thing that um that works really well
Speaker 1: with roaches to crawl on, and then they inserted it
Speaker 1: into this hat. And I mean really seriously, and all
Speaker 1: we need said that, you know, they worked with an
Speaker 1: animal trainer or this entomologist you know, day after day
Speaker 1: so that they wouldn't scream like little girls when they
Speaker 1: had to handle the roaches his words, um, And so
Speaker 1: you know that is a lot of trouble for that trick, right, Okay. So,
Speaker 1: and the reason is because he says, you have to
Speaker 1: create some sort of simular Akham of reality that people
Speaker 1: can buy into. Uh. Number three, he says, which, by
Speaker 1: the way, that kind of ties into our discussions of
Speaker 1: action in reality, the idea of it. You have a
Speaker 1: scene where something fantastic is going to happen, say James
Speaker 1: Bond wrestles the squid, but earlier in the book he's
Speaker 1: making coffee or he's having a steak. Right, you're setting
Speaker 1: up the this this illusion of reality that and again
Speaker 1: the buying into thing, this, this idea, this narrative that
Speaker 1: we're buying into. Number three, you get hard to think
Speaker 1: critically if you're laughing. For keep the trickery outside the frame.
Speaker 1: So he's talking about, um, you know, if he's you
Speaker 1: pick a card out of a fifty two deck or
Speaker 1: a fifty two card deck. Um, if he's taking off
Speaker 1: his his jacket and throwing it outside the frame of
Speaker 1: what's going on, that's diverting your attention because he's doing something, right,
Speaker 1: then write some sort of flight of hand. Um. Five,
Speaker 1: to fool the mind, combine at least two tricks. We'll
Speaker 1: talk about that a little bit. And uh, he says,
Speaker 1: Number six, nothing fools you better than the lie you
Speaker 1: tell yourself. Um. And this is something that he means
Speaker 1: that you come to discover on your own. The magician
Speaker 1: lets you discover a truth on your own. Plants that
Speaker 1: really number seven. If you're given a choice, you believe
Speaker 1: you have acted freely. That I think it's fascinating. We'll
Speaker 1: talk about that too. Um, but that that's kind of
Speaker 1: how he goes about these tricks. And um, that's when
Speaker 1: we talk about cognitive bias happening. And that's because your
Speaker 1: brain is telling you all these things, it's making up
Speaker 1: a story, it's creating the pattern, and misdirection becomes a
Speaker 1: really key item for a magician. Yeah, Like I said,
Speaker 1: misdirection is all about diverting the viewers attention from the
Speaker 1: often trivial looking things that are the small detail upon
Speaker 1: which the entire uh trick or illusion rather is is hinging.
Speaker 1: So again, that's that's why you have I mean, I mean,
Speaker 1: part of it, of course is its performance, and performance
Speaker 1: needs to be visually amusing. But you have all these
Speaker 1: elements in a magic trick that that are distracting. You
Speaker 1: have a beautiful assistant that's skimply addressed. You have magnificent props,
Speaker 1: you have uh explosions and fire and uh and slashing
Speaker 1: swords and musical accompaniment and lighting effects. Um. It reminds
Speaker 1: me a lot too of how of how a really
Speaker 1: um well done haunted houses put together, because even that
Speaker 1: is about the scares there are about misdirection if they're
Speaker 1: done right, It's about let's get you looking over here
Speaker 1: and then something will come from this direction. Let's have
Speaker 1: you thinking about what the place sounds like, and then
Speaker 1: we'll shock you with what the place feels like. That
Speaker 1: kind of thing. I have a good real life example
Speaker 1: of this. It was I guess inadvertent magic trick, and
Speaker 1: it was how do you hide a half naked woman
Speaker 1: in plain view? Okay, so will science Festival. I'm walking
Speaker 1: down to a whole years. Yeah, I'm going to one
Speaker 1: of the venues, and I'm passing in front of this
Speaker 1: church or I'm approaching church on my left. Wedding party
Speaker 1: is on the stairs of the church. On the right
Speaker 1: of the sidewalk, the bride is about to get out
Speaker 1: of the car. Coming forward is a woman in jean
Speaker 1: shorts and no shirt or brawn, just just walking down
Speaker 1: the street. Because it's in New York. Can people do that? Right?
Speaker 1: And what I found amazing and made me feel completely insane,
Speaker 1: like I was the only person I think actually who
Speaker 1: noticed is that as she is crossing in front of
Speaker 1: the wedding party on the stairs, none of them look
Speaker 1: at her because they're all looking at the bride coming
Speaker 1: out of the car. And I'm thinking about this, did
Speaker 1: they not see this half naked woman passed right in
Speaker 1: front of them? And that is how this this is
Speaker 1: very similar to a magic trick, right that how could
Speaker 1: you hide this, you know, thing that should be really
Speaker 1: obvious and it's that misdirection. Huh. Anyway, well, it makes
Speaker 1: me that I feel like, um, there have been some
Speaker 1: some like bank heist movies where where they've used that
Speaker 1: where it's like, let's have a sexy lady over here
Speaker 1: and then the guy, you know, the guard doesn't notice
Speaker 1: and they slipped by them. And it also ties into
Speaker 1: my my longstanding theory that you could potentially rob a
Speaker 1: bank with a basket of kittens, like if you were
Speaker 1: just bring them in and like place them on the
Speaker 1: table and people are gonna be transfixed by the kittens
Speaker 1: and then be like, oh my goodness, and then they'll
Speaker 1: touch the kittens like they're so soft, I can feel
Speaker 1: their heart and then you just slip by and the heart,
Speaker 1: you know, how do you do? You feel them? They're
Speaker 1: so warm, they're like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: but no, you can you could totally rob a banquet
Speaker 1: that's mine. I just did something horrible happening to the kittens.
Speaker 1: I have to say in that scenario, No, you can't
Speaker 1: bring a basketful of kittens into a robbery scenario. You
Speaker 1: do not expect one of them to be splatter. The
Speaker 1: only downside I see is that eventually that basket of
Speaker 1: kittens will have to testify in court, so they'll be like,
Speaker 1: up on this witness stand will be a basket of
Speaker 1: kittens and uh, you know, really abusive lawyers coming in
Speaker 1: and really trying to grill them on the stand, and
Speaker 1: they're just they're kitten, so they're they're just completely out
Speaker 1: of it. And there's your next Pixar film, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: Bandit kittens. All right. So, Um, one of the things
Speaker 1: that Teller was talking about is to fool the mind
Speaker 1: combined at least two tricks. I wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: that because he says that, Um, every night, Las Vegas,
Speaker 1: I make a children's ball come to life like a
Speaker 1: trained dog. My method. The thing that fools your eyes
Speaker 1: is to puppeteer the ball with a thread too fine
Speaker 1: to be seen from the audience. But during the routine
Speaker 1: the ball jumped through a wooden hoop several times, and
Speaker 1: that seems to rule out the possibility of a thread.
Speaker 1: The hoop is what magicians call misdirection. A second trick
Speaker 1: that proves the first. The hoop is genuine. But the
Speaker 1: deceptive choreography I took um or I used, took eighteen
Speaker 1: months to develop. Again see number two, more trouble than
Speaker 1: it's worth it. Also, I can't help but think of
Speaker 1: a fiction in this case to take one idea that
Speaker 1: truly cool, take another idea that's really cool, combine them,
Speaker 1: and if you do it in the right way, no
Speaker 1: one will necessarily notice that all you did was say,
Speaker 1: take the pacing for you know, this classic novel, and
Speaker 1: simply infuse it with whatever this trend happens to be. Right,
Speaker 1: That the idea is not to see the underpinnings bursting underneath, right. Um.
Speaker 1: Teller is also talking about independent verification, so he says
Speaker 1: when he cuts the cards, he doesn't magic trick with cards.
Speaker 1: Um I think he says, like the worst uncle magic trick.
Speaker 1: You can imagine, Um, he says, I let you glimpse
Speaker 1: a few faces, and then you conclude the deck contains
Speaker 1: fifty two different cards again pattern recognition. But who's gonna
Speaker 1: who's actually gonna sit there and look at them? Right?
Speaker 1: I mean, well you go through. All you need is
Speaker 1: a couple, right, you say, okay, but when in fact
Speaker 1: he's actually taken those three cards and replicated a full
Speaker 1: deck by taking eighteen different decks of cards and taking
Speaker 1: out those three cards, or so he's always going to
Speaker 1: get one of those three cards. Yeah. Also cases where
Speaker 1: the magician you know, is allowing individuals who are participating
Speaker 1: the trick to handle objects that are involved, to touch
Speaker 1: the cards, to touch the hoop, to touch the wand
Speaker 1: whatever is being used to verify that it is not gimmicked. Right.
Speaker 1: And you think too, that you've made a choice, right,
Speaker 1: You've made a choice. You took that card and this
Speaker 1: this was of your you know, this fifty two different cards, um,
Speaker 1: and this this was the decision that you made. And
Speaker 1: uh so then you feel like you have some skin
Speaker 1: in the game, right, And what Teller says is that
Speaker 1: if you're given a choice, you believe you have active freely.
Speaker 1: This is one of the darkest of all psychological secrets.
Speaker 1: And he actually does a little political action and points
Speaker 1: back to our political system and says that this idea
Speaker 1: of having a two party system is much like having uh,
Speaker 1: fifty two cards of the same three cards in them.
Speaker 1: Sort of interesting, um, you know it. Also, I'm reminded
Speaker 1: to of pickpockets here. Uh. And there's certain there's a
Speaker 1: certain overlap here because you do see plenty of magicians,
Speaker 1: especially slight of hand magicians that are also a skill
Speaker 1: that at least performance pickpocketing pickpocketing, if not actual pickpocketing.
Speaker 1: And uh and like some simple pickpocketing techniques are as
Speaker 1: simple as, oh, I bump into you while I actually
Speaker 1: take your wallet, because you're your distract acted by the
Speaker 1: bump to your shoulder. You don't feel the slight um
Speaker 1: you know, fabric movement of your wallet disappearing that kind
Speaker 1: of thing, or or also you know, distracting by visuals.
Speaker 1: You know, you're handed a baby, or or here's a
Speaker 1: you know, an attractive lady, that kind of thing. You know.
Speaker 1: What's uh interesting about that is that their pickpocketing. Um,
Speaker 1: I guess you could say rules are predicated on the
Speaker 1: way that you actually approached the wallet. And this was
Speaker 1: from an article by Jonah Laire and Wired. It's called
Speaker 1: magic in the brain. And apparently your eye tracks really
Speaker 1: well when you when you's on a sort of flat plans.
Speaker 1: If you're if your hand is just reaching across in
Speaker 1: a horizontal line, then you're gonna be able to track
Speaker 1: it really easily. But if you do an arc like this,
Speaker 1: your your machinery is pretty flawed in that sense, and
Speaker 1: that our our brains, our eyes aren't able to really
Speaker 1: read that motion. Isn't that interesting? And it also that
Speaker 1: that ties into a lot of the flourishes that you
Speaker 1: see in in in magic in these performance illutions, because
Speaker 1: people aren't just I'm grabbing this orange and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: grab that one. No, there's a lot of flourishing and
Speaker 1: movements of the arm. It becomes difficult to track exactly
Speaker 1: what's going on. We are gesticulating wildly right now, as
Speaker 1: we talked by the way in here. Yeah, but you're right,
Speaker 1: there's there's no linear movements. It's all sort of circular.
Speaker 1: All right, We're gonna take a break and when we
Speaker 1: get back, we're going to talk about this inherent blindness
Speaker 1: we have, whether or not we're looking at a face
Speaker 1: or we're making a choice on a particular let's say
Speaker 1: jam that we like. All right, we're back, so we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about jam. We're gonna talk about jam, preserves, jelly.
Speaker 1: I don't know what you call it, but jam in
Speaker 1: my house. And the reason I want to talk about
Speaker 1: it is because it was called out in this New
Speaker 1: York Times Science of Illusion article um in one study
Speaker 1: where shoppers in a blind taste test had two different
Speaker 1: kinds of jam to pick from it so they can't
Speaker 1: see it. They're just getting spoonfuls of it. They choose
Speaker 1: the one they like. They are then given a second
Speaker 1: taste from the jar they picked. Oh, they think they
Speaker 1: are getting a second taste of it, but with the
Speaker 1: researchers actually switched the jam flavor, so they get a
Speaker 1: second spoonful and it is not the one they like.
Speaker 1: But they fail to notice that they're tasting the wrong jam,
Speaker 1: even when the two flavors are like super dissimilar, like
Speaker 1: grapefruit and cinnamon apple, because their brain has already created
Speaker 1: the narrative that this is the one I like, and
Speaker 1: we're going with us. Yeah, there's been some really fascinating
Speaker 1: experiments along this line involving wine, where you bring people
Speaker 1: in and you really color someone's expectations of this wine
Speaker 1: by letting them know that, oh, this is a fine vintage,
Speaker 1: this is a more expensive wine, and then this one
Speaker 1: is cheaper and it's you know, and this is the
Speaker 1: I don't know, fill into blanks, what's the fancy wine.
Speaker 1: Uh something something was, Yeah, that one. So the people
Speaker 1: end up going to that experiment, their narrative is colored.
Speaker 1: Like you said, they're already writing the story of their
Speaker 1: their experience with that wine, and then they go in
Speaker 1: and then there they end up getting it wrong because
Speaker 1: it was swapped on them. I mean, this is the
Speaker 1: classic we secretly swapped this person's coffee with folders, instant thing, right,
Speaker 1: But it but it works. That's the thing. You. So
Speaker 1: much of our experience of something is colored by our
Speaker 1: anticipation of it, what other people seem to be expecting
Speaker 1: of it. And then if you switch things around the
Speaker 1: last minute, you can get a lot past the person. Well,
Speaker 1: and there's this another thing called change blindness, which I
Speaker 1: thought was fairly really cool. Um. It is a study
Speaker 1: that shows how minor distractions can impair our ability to
Speaker 1: remember remember faces. Um Psychologist Daniel Simon's had an experiment
Speaker 1: or stop random strangers on the street and ask for directions,
Speaker 1: and then midway through the conversation, a pair of confederates
Speaker 1: called confederates walked between them and block the stranger's view,
Speaker 1: and the experiment or switched places with one of the stooges,
Speaker 1: so the person that as directions was then replaced. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've seen the video of this. Yeah. Yeah, when we
Speaker 1: do a blog post to go with this podcast, I'll
Speaker 1: try and find that video and embed it for you
Speaker 1: so you can watch it right there. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: really is. It's great because you know it's just that
Speaker 1: split second um uh, you know we're distraction, uh, and
Speaker 1: then the stranger is talking to a completely different person
Speaker 1: and most of the time, just like the jam experiment,
Speaker 1: they really didn't notice, which I can see that. I
Speaker 1: think that probably would happen to me before because your
Speaker 1: brain is occupied with other stuff. But again, this is
Speaker 1: what magicians are exploiting, and in doing it in a
Speaker 1: way that you don't notice. I mean, that's that's the
Speaker 1: whole thing is to the seamless incorporation of distraction in
Speaker 1: this direction, so that the end of it you would
Speaker 1: have to really think back on the moments where you
Speaker 1: were you were tampered with. Well, it also makes you
Speaker 1: think too, like how how how much stimuli we really
Speaker 1: can't take in that that's entering the light entering into
Speaker 1: our eyes and our brain trying to make sense of everything,
Speaker 1: and how much of it is the brain is filling
Speaker 1: in the gaps, like, for instance, seeing the coin that
Speaker 1: isn't actually there, but it's just filling in the gaps
Speaker 1: because it can't actually assemble all of that information. No,
Speaker 1: we would melt down if we shot to right. It's
Speaker 1: almost like them when we were talking about camouflage and
Speaker 1: we're talking about Tom Harris's article and about this continuity
Speaker 1: in our brains, taking those you know, stack of blocks
Speaker 1: and saying, okay, that's one unit because they're all one color. Um, Okay,
Speaker 1: now there are two different colors, are two different units. Um,
Speaker 1: that's just the way our brains work, all right. So
Speaker 1: here's something really interesting again from the New York Times
Speaker 1: article is about transcranial magnetic stimulation and this this old
Speaker 1: TMS grambler has shown up before in our podcast uh,
Speaker 1: notably in as the God Machine used by Michael Persinger,
Speaker 1: so called because its ability to induce feelings of transcendence,
Speaker 1: but also has been the culprit behind some hallucinations people
Speaker 1: imagined ghosts. When pormal experience abductions, Yeah, when their brains
Speaker 1: are basically fussed with with this this super magnet that
Speaker 1: is placed over their head uh and and manipulates parts
Speaker 1: of their brains that that create these um these hallucinations
Speaker 1: for them. And this is what we talked about this
Speaker 1: before is a possible explanation again for abductions alien abductions.
Speaker 1: And it turns out that some people have this high
Speaker 1: libility and low libilities in their brain. In other words,
Speaker 1: there are a little bit more sensitive to this magnet
Speaker 1: than other people are. So our magicians using this magnet
Speaker 1: no scramble the brains of audiences where the yet um,
Speaker 1: but it has been used to look at our attentions fans.
Speaker 1: So in other words, they've used this TMS over our
Speaker 1: parietal cortex. This is a part of the brain that
Speaker 1: controls attention, and they noticed that when they fuss with it.
Speaker 1: Of course, people UM have a harder time identifying faces
Speaker 1: and recalling things um, which is, you know, not surprising.
Speaker 1: But again, here's here's something that magicians have known for
Speaker 1: thousands of years um and have been doing these magic tricks,
Speaker 1: and that neuroscientists are now just really excited to um
Speaker 1: investigate through magic. Interesting. And again, while that while magicians
Speaker 1: are not using magnets on people's brains, it is worth
Speaker 1: remembering that certainly if you go to a magic show
Speaker 1: in Vegas, there is a there's a very good possibility
Speaker 1: that the individuals observing that magic show have have had
Speaker 1: something to drink before it really gets going here. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you're having environments where, you know, where wine and
Speaker 1: beverages are served, so you're already sort of again, you're
Speaker 1: not pointing a magnetic ray gun at someone's head, but well,
Speaker 1: in a sense you are. It's just it comes in
Speaker 1: a glass with a fancy little umbrella on it. Well,
Speaker 1: your critical thinking abilities we probably teeny bit impaired. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I mean we talked about that lag in motion
Speaker 1: right with your eye and and seeing those coin tricks,
Speaker 1: so we already know that when you have too much
Speaker 1: to drink about your own um, yeah, that is a
Speaker 1: little bit impaired as well. So I mean one. One
Speaker 1: drink is enough to you don't see through the illusions
Speaker 1: of the world around you, much less what the guys
Speaker 1: is doing on the stage. Oh man, that's nice, actually
Speaker 1: done well. Wind does more than Milton can to justify
Speaker 1: God's ways to man. But you had a quote you
Speaker 1: want it ended up instead of me ending it with
Speaker 1: an unrelated quote. Oh no, I just thought general there
Speaker 1: in his article and wired um nail that you just
Speaker 1: have a magician must sell people a lie, even as
Speaker 1: they know they are being lied to. Unless the illusion
Speaker 1: feels more real than the truth. There is no magic,
Speaker 1: and we certainly want there to be magic all the time.
Speaker 1: So speaking of magic, let's haul the robot over here
Speaker 1: and have him deliver us some magic in the form
Speaker 1: of listener mail. All right, we heard from a listener
Speaker 1: by the name of Gene Genet wrote in about about
Speaker 1: the horror episode, but also a little bit about Prometheus
Speaker 1: and stuff. He says, Hey, guys, thanks for all the
Speaker 1: awesome podcasts. I worked third shift pretty much by myself,
Speaker 1: so it's great that there are so many to listen to.
Speaker 1: You are also always smart and funny. I love that
Speaker 1: I rarely write into anybody, but the Horror podcast was
Speaker 1: just too good not to. I've been a lifelong horror fan,
Speaker 1: so a lot of what you talked about hit home
Speaker 1: seeing horror movie covers at the video store as a
Speaker 1: kid Eat You in the bum Goolies, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: I did a blog post U right talked about ten
Speaker 1: different VHS covers that kind of mess with me as
Speaker 1: a kid, and what I thought they may have done
Speaker 1: to me. Inspired on inspired by Eating the Bumblies, yes,
Speaker 1: and and and inspired by our episode on horror. Anyway,
Speaker 1: he continues, um, Well, he says that he's on board
Speaker 1: with the idea that clowns are horrible because thing, he says,
Speaker 1: they don't scare me like they do my wife. My
Speaker 1: problem is with sad clowns and book clowns, which is
Speaker 1: interesting because those are the ones that I hold up
Speaker 1: is being that it's always my defense against anyone who's
Speaker 1: just great of clowns. I'm like, well, the hobo clowns
Speaker 1: are great. How can you not like those? But he
Speaker 1: says they are images of sad, broken people, and that's
Speaker 1: supposed to be funny. It just doesn't sit right with me.
Speaker 1: So it's an interesting perspective anyway. It continues for some reason.
Speaker 1: People on people horror bothers me in films. I'm sure
Speaker 1: there's a psychology paper on it somewhere out there. I
Speaker 1: prefer supernatural monster evil based harror um and I didn't
Speaker 1: agree with that. I mean, it's a different scenario. When
Speaker 1: you have a monster attacking somebody, that's as much an
Speaker 1: idea attacking somebody, or it's a at the very least
Speaker 1: something unreal. Well, there's that benign violation theory, right, so
Speaker 1: if you take if you make it non human, it
Speaker 1: becomes benign in a sense that it's probably not gonna
Speaker 1: happen to you in real life, where people doing horrible
Speaker 1: things to people, that's a lot more agreeable. It's weird.
Speaker 1: I used to be different on this. I used to
Speaker 1: My old response to this was, well, a person with
Speaker 1: a knife, I can run from a person with a knife,
Speaker 1: I can back against the person with a knife. But
Speaker 1: a ghost that kills people with its mind or something
Speaker 1: like that, if that were real, I wouldn't have as
Speaker 1: much of a defense about it. Um. Interestingly enough, a
Speaker 1: friend that I saw Prometheus with his wife didn't come
Speaker 1: because she is totally fine with like people on people
Speaker 1: violence in movies, but not supernatural or unbelievable like alien
Speaker 1: type things. Um So, anyway, Jane goes on too to
Speaker 1: share that he's also a fan of space sorry, mentions
Speaker 1: of a few things that he digs to the alien franchise,
Speaker 1: Event Horizon, which was fun back in in high school.
Speaker 1: Pandorum which uh, which which I really enjoyed. I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people did not like it, but I
Speaker 1: thought it had some really cool science fiction ideas in it. Um.
Speaker 1: And then and also Dennis Quaid, So you know, a
Speaker 1: sci fi film with Dennis Kaid, I'm always on board
Speaker 1: for uh and uh. And then he also said there
Speaker 1: was a Star Wars novel with zombies in it that
Speaker 1: he was into. So um and he also mentions the
Speaker 1: the Dead Space video game series, which which he holds
Speaker 1: up is really good space hard and and I've actually
Speaker 1: been toined with this game series recently, and it's I
Speaker 1: agree that it's it's really well done, really well done
Speaker 1: game with a lot of scars in it and some
Speaker 1: actually some interesting science in places. All right, Well, let's
Speaker 1: listen to one more listener mail here and then we
Speaker 1: will call it a podcast, all right, And here's one
Speaker 1: from Eleanor. Eleanor writes in on our Science of Promethea's episodes,
Speaker 1: is Hi, Rob and Julia, I just found your podcast
Speaker 1: and love it. I have a question about the recent
Speaker 1: episode The Science of from Prometheus. You brought up the
Speaker 1: subject of panties. You talked about in detail about Ripley's
Speaker 1: panties an alien, but you didn't discuss in detail Shaw's
Speaker 1: panties and Prometheus. I thought her quote unquote panties looked
Speaker 1: more like a gauzy loincloth, something like Jesus wore on
Speaker 1: the Cross. Uh. They weren't sexy at all, but her
Speaker 1: buff body was. What did you think of Shaw's panties? Um? Wow?
Speaker 1: What did I think of Shaw's panties? Well, okay, I
Speaker 1: agree that they weren't They did not sexualize her, and
Speaker 1: I think any more than she was wearing panties and
Speaker 1: she's running around. Yeah, I think I was so distracted
Speaker 1: by the blood on her from from the scene where
Speaker 1: she performs her own C section that Um, I didn't
Speaker 1: even think about it because my my main thing was, Hey,
Speaker 1: doesn't anybody notice she's covered in blood? But I know
Speaker 1: that they were all wrapped up and uh, in the
Speaker 1: old dude. Uh that scene, So that's probably why they didn't. Anyway,
Speaker 1: these are all willing suspension of disbelief issues. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I my thoughts are pretty much the same. I felt like, yes,
Speaker 1: she had underwear on, so you a woman in her
Speaker 1: underwear in a movie. You it's hard to say that
Speaker 1: it's not a sexually charged scene just because it's you know,
Speaker 1: it is what it is. It wasn't meant to be sexy.
Speaker 1: She wouldn't in some way or at least sexually provocative.
Speaker 1: She probably wouldn't be in her underwear, or the same
Speaker 1: with him, he wouldn't be in his underwear if you
Speaker 1: weren't intended to two toy with us in that way
Speaker 1: on some level. But that being said, you know, there
Speaker 1: was not I didn't think there's anything overtly sexual about
Speaker 1: what she was wearing, and and you could it's an
Speaker 1: interesting commentary about the gazziness of it in the potential
Speaker 1: loincloth pricings. Yeah, I was gonna say, I think that
Speaker 1: there's so many different ways you could read this um movie,
Speaker 1: and some people have certainly looked at the religious aspects
Speaker 1: of that fits in nicely with some of the thematic stuff.
Speaker 1: So it's interesting that, um that that you pick that up.
Speaker 1: We'll see with the next thirty years of academic papers
Speaker 1: on the top you have to say about it all right, Well,
Speaker 1: if you have something you want to share with us,
Speaker 1: if you want to talk about magic, if we have
Speaker 1: some magicians, some illusionists, some pickpockets out there, right in
Speaker 1: and let us know. We'd love to hear from you,
Speaker 1: and you know what your thoughts on all of this
Speaker 1: happen to be. Or if you just have a particular
Speaker 1: magician that you like and you want to get their
Speaker 1: name out there, then right in, let us know. You
Speaker 1: can find us on Facebook where we are stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind, and you can find us on Twitter
Speaker 1: where our handle is blow the Mind, and you can
Speaker 1: always drop us a line at Blow the Mind at
Speaker 1: Discovery dot com. Be sure to check out our new
Speaker 1: video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join houstaf Work staff
Speaker 1: as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.