
Teller Reveals His Secrets - stevengg
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Teller-Reveals-His-Secrets.html?c=y&story=fullstory
======
zecho
The real trick here is that Teller hasn't revealed anything new about the
secrets of magic. One of the dirty secrets is that a magician does her best
work with a willing audience.

People want to be amazed. All magic requires misdirection, sure, but the
audience is usually in a frame of mind that's willing to suspend disbelief for
a moment long enough for the magician to exploit it. Think about how a street
magician works a group: "Would you like to see a magic trick?"

I know one magician who sets the frame of mind of his audience by doing
something so ludicrous it attracts a crowd. He sits outside a fast food joint
eating lunch and pulls an amazingly large straw out of the bag. It's more
clever than "would you like to see a trick," but the effect is the same.

I've always been amazed how great magicians can take a relatively simple
trick, like a forced card (which always offers an audience member a choice,
but the card is always predetermined). Magicians do the sleight of hand right
in front of a crowd of people, in plain sight, but nobody notices. Because
they don't want to notice. They've allowed their minds to wander for a moment,
which is why magicians rarely repeat tricks with the same audience and when
they do, its usually a variation of the first that combines another trick
(Teller's #5).

One of my favorite card tricks is a classic. Select a card and put it back in
the middle of the deck. It keeps rising to the top of the deck every time you
stick it in the middle. The reality is that you never actually get to put your
card in the middle of the deck. You may have selected initially your card, but
everything after that is controlled, down to how the magician makes you hold
your card when it's handed back to you. My favorite way to start the trick is
with a mental magic joke: Tell the subject to think of a card. Then flip over
the top card in the deck, which is almost never the card, but would be pretty
cool if it was. Then I pull their card out of the deck and begin controlling
it through the routine. The whole point is to keep people off balance and to
allow them to have what they truly want: entertainment.

Teller's story about the Cub Scouts is funny to me because I've found that
children of a certain age (around 8-15 or so) are simply unwilling to get into
the mindset.

Books are filled with advice for how to deal with members of the audience who
are unwilling. They usually involve some kind of ridicule of the skeptics for
the benefit of the rest of the audience (Teller's #2).

~~~
sc00ter
"Magicians do the sleight of hand right in front of a crowd of people, in
plain sight, but nobody notices."

Could you define "in plain sight" in this context? Are card manipulations that
are almost impossible to detect, even when known and watched for considered
"in plain sight", just because they don't happen "out of frame" to use
Teller's term. If so, it isn't "because you don't want to notice", it's
because you can't see them even if you're looking.

And what of the crafty moves that do happen in plain sight, but are genuinely
missed due to misdirection (selective attention) [1]. This isn't because you
don't want to notice either. (Amusingly, at first glance I missed the hand
dipping in Tellers back pocket in the photo sequence accompanying the article,
because I was concentrating on the cards in Teller's hand).

Suspension of disbelief relates to the enjoyment of the effect in the full
knowledge that it is an illusion, not that you willfully ignore the mechanics
of an illusion that are otherwise apparent (although this can be a fun
manipulation of the audience when the mechanism is apparently unintentionally
revealed allowing the audience to "catch the magician out" , but subsequently
shown to be inconsequential to the effect, catching the audience out in
return).

There are exceptions - Penn & Teller's cups and balls springs to mind - where
the joy is in watching just how much more trouble "the secret [is] than the
trick seems worth". [2]

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSQJP40PcGI>

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrw3euF2cIg>

~~~
zecho
Excellent points.

For example, I'm specifically referring to things like in the rising card,
having the person place the card in the "middle of the deck" and holding out
the entire deck minus a single card. That's not out of frame at all. It's a
reframing of the definition of the middle of the deck. It's in plain sight and
depending on the size of the crowd, it's impossible to completely control all
your angles.

Another example would be the double or triple lift where the magician lifts
more than one card as though they are a single card. This always happens in
frame. Everyone is looking at the cards. Even sloppy lifts, from a magician's
standpoint, usually pass without detection, regardless of the speed of the
lift. I've always figured this is because people focus their attention on the
pattern on the back of the card and not the edges of the card.

Lastly, in pickpocketing tricks, the lifts always happen right in plain sight.
For example, I may ask you step forward "so I can do card trick," lift your
wallet, and with your wallet in my hand (in plain sight to anyone looking at
my hand) reach into my own pocket for a deck of cards. I'll try to limit
people noticing the wallet by gesturing to something with my other hand. I'll
do a card trick or two and then move into the routine that involves your
missing wallet. This is what I think Teller means by "out of frame."

The misdirection needs to be there, but if you watch, they happen several
steps before a reveal. Savvy members of an audience might watch other parts of
a magician's body, but they don't have the correct timing. They're thinking
cause, then effect. Not cause, some random things in the middle, then effect.

Anyway, in that time between, people tend to wander in and out. In one moment
they may be trying to figure out the trick, in the next, they're being amazed
by the trick.

So, I guess to clarify: Once the illusion is completed, people have given up
trying to figure it out. They allow themselves to suspend their disbelief in
that moment.

~~~
sc00ter
What I was questioning was _"nobody notices. Because they don't want to
notice"_ , as opposed to it having been obfuscated by "magic, suggestion,
psychology, misdirection and showmanship" to coin a phrase, but from the
examples you've given above, it sounds like we agree in principle.

------
gdubs
The coolest magic trick I've witnessed was at a small club in Los Angeles, by
a regular of the magic castle. He had me pick a card and without showing him
the card, he had me rip the card into pieces and asked me to tightly close my
fist. He said he was going to reconstruct the card. I stared at my hand,
keeping the fist clenched and waiting for a misdirection. He simply tapped my
fist and asked me to open my hand. There was the card, back together again,
folded up with the creases -- as far as I could tell -- where the rips had
been earlier. To this day I'm still unsure how it works. One of the coolest
things I've ever seen.

~~~
darksaga
There's a myriad of ways to do this, but usually through slight of hand, he
slipped you the duplicate card which you thought was the ripped up version -
when it reality, was a folded version.

Here's a great video of how this is done: <http://bit.ly/yWQgQL>

~~~
terinjokes
In the parent's description, it doesn't sound like he ever gave the card back
to the magician. He himself ripped the card, then immediately keeping the
pieces tight in his fist.

~~~
darksaga
An easy way to do this is to have the folded card in your right hand (palmed),
you place the ripped pieces in the same hand, but hold them with your fingers.
You look like your folding the pieces up, then make the switch as you place it
in his hand, fold it up and tell him to hold it tight.

Of course this is done in one fluid motion, so he doesn't see the slight of
hand switch - like the guy does at the very end of the video.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
The magician wasn't holding the card if I read this correctly.

------
sedev
"Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be
fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or
any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I
once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show
host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We hired an entomologist who
provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches (the kind from under your
stove don’t hang around for close-ups) and taught us to pick the bugs up
without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we built a secret compartment
out of foam-core (one of the few materials cockroaches can’t cling to) and
worked out a devious routine for sneaking the compartment into the hat. More
trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians."

Does anyone else see a strong isomorphism between that and the advice Seth
Godin usually gives? It definitely seems like something an entrepreneur or
marketer could learn from - like a way to delight people.

~~~
zecho
There's a grave marker in Los Angeles for Penn and Teller with a 3 of Clubs on
it. It's definitely one of their "make a trick a lot more trouble than it's
worth" routines. The payoff is featured in one of their videos from the late
80s.

~~~
anothermachine
Cenotaph, not a grave marker (yet)

It's a chapter in _How to Play in Traffic_ :
[http://books.google.com/books/about/Penn_Teller_s_how_to_pla...](http://books.google.com/books/about/Penn_Teller_s_how_to_play_in_traffic.html?id=rAJWN5mVbWUC)

Pic:
[http://www.ldphotography.net/Graves/Famous/P/slides/Penn%20a...](http://www.ldphotography.net/Graves/Famous/P/slides/Penn%20and%20Teller.html)

------
jawns
"You think you've made a choice, just as when you choose between two
candidates preselected by entrenched political parties."

That about sums up American politics.

~~~
mladenkovacevic
And there he reveals the biggest trick pulled on the "free world"... and it's
performed over and over and over with the same resulting awe and enchantment
in the magicians' subjects. With this trick the viewers are distracted enough
to fail to realize that they've selected the same person with the continuation
of same agenda every single time.

~~~
zackattack
> With this trick the viewers are distracted enough to fail to realize that
> they've selected the same person with the continuation of same agenda every
> single time.

And what agenda is this?

~~~
omegant
Doctor Evil´s one.

------
Avshalom
Here's a video of a similar talk he gave:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=J...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=J5x14AwElOk)

------
gruseom
_Choice is not freedom._

That's a great aphorism.

------
vilius
"It’s hard to think critically if you’re laughing."

I find this very useful while giving speeches. Most of the audience are quite
critical before you can prove yourself worth their time. Putting an
appropriate joke beforehand helps to grab their approval earlier.

OFF-TOPIC: Copying any part of the article automatically adds the url of an
article to the clipboard. This is first time, I've seen this, very annoying!

~~~
shashashasha
I think you've found their use of Tynt, or something like it:
<http://www.tynt.com/>

~~~
Lockyy
Yeah, I was just about to post that I'd found it was Tynt via ghostery.

------
Tycho
The magic industry is like a monument to the shortcuts taken by our mental
apparatus of perception.

------
kennyma
Is he revealing his secrets or is he using #6 against us? :)

------
bipolarla
When we have a passion, skill and master something we create magic. Have you
ever seen an athlete, teacher, speaker, salesperson, dancer, lawyer or the
written word that put you in awe? This magic is created by transmuting energy,
love, skill and practice. These are great skills to master. Anyone pitching to
an investor or gaining new clients will do well to learn how to develop this
magic.

------
Uglyfruit
To me those 7 points in Teller's article are very much related to EMOTIONAL
DESIGN which is getting very popular among web designer. It is a very interest
reading. Thanks for posting it.

------
kanchax
It is funny how it is fine to be manipulated. Perhaps it's something in our
desire/bias to follow, and we do cause we feel respected by those two.

------
GreekOphion
Teller should make a show that shows all of his secrets.

~~~
zecho
He does. It's the Penn and Teller show at the Rio in Vegas. Quite a few
routines show you exactly how they work. And then they continue the trick to
mess with your perception of how the trick was done.

------
vacri
A great article, but it has a misunderstanding about what is 'science' trying
to figure stuff out. He's right about the neuroscientists - they're trying to
figure stuff out from the bottom up, and it's a fairly new discipline. But
he's wrong to think that that's all science is. The other half of science in
this field is psychology.

Neuroscience is a 'bottom-up' field, starting from the smallest components and
trying to understand how they're interacting. Psychology is the 'top-down'
field, starting with complex phenomenon and trying to break them down. The
psychology of cognition and attenion is the stuff that's relevant where
magic's involved. Much of the things that Penn & Teller expose in the workings
of magic is known to cognitive and attentional psychology - it's the flawless
execution to make it work that is the trick, an idea supported by the
magician's mantra 'practise practise practise'.

The problem with the two disciplines above is that there's so much we don't
know - we're nowhere near being able to make them 'meet in the middle'. The
human mind is incredibly complex.

