Fooling Houdini, page 17
By the fall of 2009, I’d made major strides, which was encouraging. But I had yet to put together a routine that I could enter at the IBM competition. I needed to start crafting new material soon, or I’d have nothing to show for my efforts come contest time the following summer. Up until now, I’d focused primarily on the physical side of magic—building my chops and learning new moves, skills Jeff McBride associates with the archetype of the Sorcerer. I’d attained a certain measure of technical mastery, and I was proud of this accomplishment. But magic is more than just a technical pursuit.
Indeed, most of the magicians I’d spoken to stressed the importance of the psychology behind the magic. The refrain I kept hearing was “Magic happens not in the hands of the magician, but in the mind of the spectator.” Although I’d gained some insight into the deeper cognitive underpinnings of the art, my knowledge was at best superficial. The path to the realm of the Oracle, McBride reminds us, is a journey inward, an exploration of the hidden mysteries of perception. As I set my sights on the next stage of my voyage, I decided it was time to confront these mysteries head-on. I was further galvanized by a discussion I had about magic and the brain with cognitive scientist and philosopher of the mind William Hirstein. “It’s almost as if part of magicians’ routine training ought to be a course in neuropsychology,” he told me at the end of our talk.
School was about to be in session.
Chapter 8
How to Steal a Watch
Founded in 1919 as a counterweight to the tide of nationalism and censorship that swept the nation during the First World War, the New School in New York’s Greenwich Village has long been a bastion of avant-garde thinking and progressive ideals. Early on it served as a sanctuary for professors fleeing repressive policies at other schools—most notably, Columbia—and during World War II it became a haven for Jewish intellectuals escaping the Nazis. Former students include Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Norman Rockwell, Marc Jacobs, Tony Curtis, Ani DiFranco, and sexologist Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
The New School currently houses the laboratory of Arien Mack, a research psychologist and pioneer in the field of cognition who for the last twenty years has paved the way for a rigorous scientific study of attention and misdirection—the very bedrock of magic.
I’d seen misdirection in action ever since I started doing magic, but I wanted to understand how it actually affects the brain. What are the underlying cognitive mechanisms at work when a person watches a magic show? What role do these mechanisms play in other areas of our lives? And how can a deeper understanding of the psychology of attention be used to enhance one’s magic?
I met Professor Mack at her cozy office in the maze of rooms that is the New School’s psychology department, housed within a cement tower in downtown Manhattan. On the floor beneath Mack’s, in rooms filled with toys and outfitted with small TV sets, infants were being temporarily separated from their mothers to see what attachment type they were—secure, avoidant, ambivalent, or disorganized. (Whichever attachment style you display in infancy can determine the fate of your adult relationships, one of Mack’s graduate students explained to me.) There were also labs studying memory, motivation, guilt, shame, racial awareness, kinship, reciprocity, OCD, ADD, and autism. Waiting for the elevator, I’d asked a young researcher what her group was working on. “We look at how the perception of spatial distances affects moral judgments,” she said brightly. I showed her a card trick, and she threw me a puzzled look—probably not unlike the one I gave her when she told me her specialty.
A charmingly frank Brooklyn-born skeptic—when I looked at her Facebook profile, I saw that under “Religious views” it read, “confirmed atheist”—Mack has lucid brown eyes, a warm smile, and a highly sensitized bullshit meter. She’s one of those academics who can field questions with a gesture—an arch of the eyebrows, a shrug of the shoulders—to let you know if your thought is worth pursuing or if you’re better off keeping quiet, and in this regard she reminded me of my physics professors, only more stylish in her navy slacks, white blouse, and chunky gold jewelry. As I shook her hand, my eyes lingered on her bright orange diving watch.
Having told her a little bit about why I was interested in her research, I soon found myself staring at a black computer monitor inside one of her testing stations, my head cradled between an ophthalmic chin rest and a padded plastic brace. It felt a lot like being at the eye doctor, except instead of a technician asking me which was clearer, one or two, A or B, a British grad student was telling me to hit any key. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said.
I took a deep breath, turned my focus to the monitor, and pressed the space bar. My task was to watch for a large lopsided cross that appeared in the center of the display and to determine whether the horizontal line or the vertical line was longer. After a series of trials, Mack’s grad student asked me if I’d seen anything else while looking at the cross. I sat back and shook my head. I was then shown four pictures—a house, a car, a boat, and an airplane—and asked if any of them looked familiar.
I shook my head again. “Nope.”
“If you had to pick one, which one would it be?”
None of them stood out, but I went ahead and picked the car. Wishful thinking, perhaps? The downtown train had been cheek by jowl.
The test I’d just participated in was the latest twist on an experiment Mack had designed years ago to investigate the relationship between perception and attention. The cross, Mack explained, was a distraction. While I watched it, comparing the vertical and horizontal lines, a picture had flashed briefly on the screen. Under normal circumstances, it would have been obvious, easily spotted by any observer. But because my mind was preoccupied with the cross task, it escaped my notice. Later, when repeating the experiment multiple times sans cross, I spotted the pictures with ease—car, boat, road—and was able to describe them accurately.
Mack first began carrying out this sort of experiment in 1988, with her late colleague Irvin Rock, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interest began with a simple question: How much of the world do we consciously take in when we aren’t paying attention? Mack has since carried out this brand of experiment on hundreds of subjects in an attempt to figure out just how much we notice when we’re distracted.
The answer, verified time and again, is next to nothing. In scores of studies, the evidence points to a simple yet astounding fact: inattention all but eliminates conscious experience. Objects and events appearing directly before our eyes, in what psychologists call the zone of fixation, frequently go unnoticed when our attention is elsewhere, as if our vision somehow stops working when we’re distracted. Mack and Rock coined the term inattentional blindness to describe this astonishing failure of awareness, all the more astonishing for having escaped discovery until recently.
What’s more, our vision isn’t all that’s affected. Audible noises become inaudible, simple words turn to gibberish, and even tactile sensations go unfelt when our attention wanders. “Attention appears to be necessary for all sensory modalities,” Mack explained to me in her office. “There is no conscious perception without attention.” Even minor distractions can render us deaf and blind, unable to perform simple tasks, regardless of the nature of the distraction. A visual task such as measuring a cross, in other words, can dull not just your sight but also your hearing and your sense of touch.
Misdirection has an uncanny ability to blind us to the obvious. Perhaps the most famous experimental example is a thirty-second film, created by University of Illinois cognitive scientist Daniel Simons, in which six basketball players—three in white T-shirts and three in black T-shirts—are seen passing a ball. The viewers are instructed to count the number of passes by the white team. Halfway through the film, a woman in a gorilla suit walks on-screen, stops in the middle of the tussle, and beats her chest repeatedly before exiting stage left. The gorilla remains on-screen for a total of nine seconds. Our intuition tells us that anyone not in a coma would notice the gorilla. But as Simons has discovered time and again, most people do not. More than half of all the subjects to whom he’s shown the film completely miss the gorilla because they are focused on the passing game. When I later spoke to Simons (whose book, The Invisible Gorilla, chronicles this and many other gaps in our awareness), he admitted that even after having screened the film hundreds of times at lectures and conferences all over the world, it still stuns him. “Every time I show the video I still kind of hold my breath because I’m convinced that everyone is going to notice,” he said.
Inattentional blindness is shocking for the simple reason that, as Mack put it, “We all think we see what we’re looking at”—and in a sense, we do. Technically speaking, everyone sees the gorilla. It’s on-screen for nine seconds—thirty thousand times longer than the shortest event a human can perceive. The image enters our pupils, strikes the retina, and barrels down the optic nerve all the way to the brain. Experiments using eye-tracking devices confirm this fact. People who don’t perceive the gorilla spend just as long looking directly at it—a full second on average—as those who do.
The same is true when watching magic. People tend to think magicians use misdirection to control where a spectator is looking. While this is certainly true some of the time, misdirection in magic is mostly about controlling a person’s attention—which can be totally independent from their gaze. UK psychologists Gustav Kuhn and Benjamin Tatler recently illustrated this with a series of experiments in which subjects watched a magician vanish a cigarette by dropping it in his lap during a moment of misdirection. (This is called lapping in the argot.) Using the same eye-tracking tools Simons employed in his gorilla experiment, they found that a person’s odds of spotting the secret method—that is, the lapping—did not depend on where they were looking at the time of the drop. Even those who were staring directly at the magician’s hand when he lapped the cigarette failed, in almost all cases, to spot the ditch.
As these experiments demonstrate, seeing isn’t believing. Just because you look directly at something doesn’t mean you will perceive it. If the brain doesn’t process a given visual stimulus, it’s as though it never existed. Misdirection, in a sense, masks the image, rendering it invisible. Psychologists sometimes call this loss of information “functional blindness,” to distinguish it from blindness caused by physiological defects in the structure of the eye, like what Richard Turner has. Inattentional blindness is a cognitive illusion as opposed to a visual one, an illusion not of the eyes but of the mind.
As it turns out, cognitive illusions have staggering real-world consequences. Inattentional blindness, for instance, is why you shouldn’t talk on the phone while driving. It’s not because your hands are busy, as is commonly thought, but because your mind is busy. The competing cognitive task is what puts you at risk, not the mechanical act of holding the phone to your ear. At highway speeds, a fraction of a second may be all the time you have to avoid a crash, and anything that widens your reaction gap can drastically increase the odds of an accident. Multitasking—not that other m-word your grandmother warned you about—is what makes you go blind.
A wealth of evidence has confirmed that using a phone severely lengthens reaction times and diminishes overall alertness, profoundly impairing one’s ability to drive. Studies comparing drivers on cell phones to drunk drivers have found no measurable difference in performance: both are equally dangerous behind the wheel. According to one analysis, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, the use of a phone while operating a motor vehicle quadruples your risk of a collision.
Far from a safety measure, hands-free devices are just as dangerous, if not more so, as regular handheld phones, because they promote a false sense of security while still hogging your attention. Indeed, several experiments have shown that hands-free devices do nothing to reduce the cognitive impairments associated with phone use. And yet many states, such as New York and Maryland, will waive citations issued for driving with a handheld phone if the motorist agrees to purchase a hands-free device.
(You may be wondering if talking on a hands-free phone is any different from chatting with a passenger in the car. It is—for several reasons. For one, the passenger may provide an additional set of eyes with which to watch the road for any imminent dangers. Other reasons include the fact that people who are in the car with you will likely understand if you need to focus and adjust the tempo of the conversation accordingly.)
Brain blindness of a sort not associated with cell phones may also account for the astonishingly high number of motorcycle accidents in the United States (much higher than in many other countries). Most motorcycle accidents on U.S. roads involve cars, and the vast majority of these occur when the car hits the motorcycle: the driver sideswipes the bike during a lane change or cuts off the cycle in mid-turn. In a significant number of these wrecks, the motorists did everything they were supposed to do—they signaled, checked their rearview and side mirrors, looked over their shoulders to make sure nobody was in their blind spot—and yet they still hit the bikes. What happened?
One explanation, Simons has argued, is that the drivers technically saw the motorcycles—that is, the image struck the retina and travelled down the optic nerve—but as with the gorilla, they didn’t consciously perceive the motorcycles in time to avoid a collision because they weren’t expecting to see them. A series of experiments in Mack’s lab has revealed that expectations play a pivotal role in what we perceive and that under certain circumstances the absence of expectation in and of itself is sufficient to induce a temporary state of inattentional blindness. Simons’s research confirms this result: we are less likely to notice that which we do not expect. And since motorcycles are far less common in the United States than they are elsewhere, and certainly less common than cars, drivers often don’t expect to see motorcyclists, which in turn makes them less accessible to conscious perception.
This interpretation jibes with studies on traffic accidents involving cyclists and pedestrians. Loosely speaking, the safest places to walk and bike are those with lots of pedestrians and cyclists. The reason for this is that the average driver expects to see pedestrians and cyclists in places where they are common and is therefore more likely to register them in time to avoid a collision. In New York City, for example, where there are more cyclists and pedestrians per square mile than anywhere else in the country, the rate of automobile accidents involving cyclists and pedestrians is well below the national average, most likely because motorists know to look out for them.
If memory is attention in the past tense, as psychologist Daniel Goleman has put it, Mack’s work on misdirection also helps shed light on why magic tricks often produce false memories—something virtually every conjuror has seen firsthand. This phenomenon was demonstrated some years back by the American magician John Mulholland when he performed for a group of psychology students during a lecture he gave at a major university. Midway through his talk, Mulholland described—but did not perform—a trick in which a coin teleports across the room. When asked a few weeks later to recount what had happened during the lecture, four out of five students said they remembered a coin traveling instantaneously from one end of the classroom to the other, even though this had never happened. This sort of anomaly can occur because, as has now been verified in dozens of studies, the mere act of imagining an event is enough to produce a false memory of it.
The inherently suggestive nature of magic automatically works in favor of encouraging false recollections, and even the hobbyist knows that spectators will remember all sorts of crazy things. More than once I’ve stood among a group of magicians trading war stories about spectators who swore they had witnessed true miracles:
I just thought of a card and he found it.
The card was flying around the room and bouncing off the walls.
He floated five feet in the air in the middle of my living room.
Spectators convinced they’d once seen the impossible often put me on the spot:
Can you make my card fly out of the deck and burst into flames?
No, but I can make it appear inside a lemon!
Of course, false memories aren’t confined to magic. Through the power of suggestion, psychologists have managed to implant all sorts of bogus memories in the minds of normal adults. People have been made to remember objects—buildings and cars and stop signs and electronic equipment—in scenes where no such objects were present. Memories of objects that were present were found to be highly malleable. Cars in a mock crime scene changed color. A yield sign became a stop sign. Mickey Mouse underwent gender reassignment to become Minnie Mouse. In one study, psychologists even managed to instill impossible memories of early infancy, despite the fact that the first two years of everyone’s life are opaque to memory, for reasons that are poorly understood. Even when the participants knew they were being fooled, these mnemonic swindles still worked. And once implanted, false memories can be tough to distinguish from real ones, even with the use of brain imaging machines.
The real-world implications of false memories can be quite serious. For one, false memories can undermine the legal system, sending innocent people to prison while acquitting guilty ones. Eyewitness testimony, even in the age of DNA evidence, remains a deciding factor in most criminal cases. But memory research suggests that eyewitness misidentification accounts for roughly 90 percent of wrongful convictions. Many accepted police procedures—lineups, interrogations using leading or accusatory questions, and the visualization techniques utilized by sketch artists—have been proved to distort memories. In certain extreme cases involving highly suggestible individuals, these methods have triggered fictitious confessions on the part of innocent people who, over the course of an investigation, developed false memories of a crime they did not commit.
