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.<p>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?"<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).
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.
"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."<p>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.
"You think you've made a choice, just as when you choose between two candidates preselected by entrenched political parties."<p>That about sums up American politics.
Here's a video of a similar talk he gave:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=J5x14AwElOk" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=J...</a>
"It’s hard to think critically if you’re laughing."<p>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.<p>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!
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.
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.
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.<p>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'.<p>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.