Fooling Houdini, page 18
In addition to scrambling our memories, misdirection also lowers our gullibility threshold, making us more prone to believe information we know is untrue. Psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin tested this idea by giving mock juries a series of written statements about an alleged criminal. All the participants knew which statements were true and which were false (because they appeared in different color type), but in the course of the trials, some of the jurors were presented with distractions. As it turned out, those who were distracted were far more likely to remember the false statements as facts. Not only that, but when the false statements made the crime seem worse, the addled jurors imposed a much longer prison sentence.
For obvious reasons, we tend not to recall events that our minds fail to register in the first place. It’s the tree falling in the forest. Put simply: we don’t remember what we didn’t notice. Because of this, we tend to overestimate our powers of observation. The gap between what we think we notice and what we actually notice is a reflection of our tendency to make judgments based on what readily comes to mind, something psychologists call the availability bias. When law enforcement agencies began putting pictures of missing children on the backs of milk cartons, for instance, the perceived rate of childhood abductions, as measured by national surveys, shot up drastically. To this day, parents fear kidnapping more than accidents, even though a child is one hundred times more likely to be killed in an accident than by a kidnapper. People also overstate the risk of shark attacks and lightning strikes simply because gruesome deaths make memorable headlines. In a similar fashion, we overestimate our powers of observation because we tend not to remember those instances when we failed to notice something.
In magic, when people fail to spot the secret to a trick, they tend to blame their vision, invoking the age-old saying “the hand is quicker than the eye.” In fact, the human eye is a blazingly efficient instrument capable of spotting flashes of light as brief as ten milliseconds—that’s 1/100th of a second, the shortest time interval on a digital stopwatch. A mere five photons—or quanta of light—are sufficient to trigger a conscious visual response. Magicians have long known that they don’t stand a chance of outrunning the audience’s eyes. “It is a common mistake to suppose that the quickness of the hand deceives the eyes,” observed the superlative English conjuror of the early twentieth century David Devant. “You cannot move your hand so quickly that its passage cannot be followed by anyone who is watching you.” The hand, in other words, is decidedly slower than the eye.
A better saying would be “the hand is quicker than the mind,” because, again, it’s the mind, not the eyeball, that’s at fault. A failure to notice, not an inability to see, is what characterizes cognitive illusions such as inattentional blindness. Misdirection, not speed, is the key to most magic tricks. “It’s more important to have good cover than it is to have good sleight of hand,” scam expert Whit Haydn told me at the Magic Castle. “If your cover is good you can get away with bad sleight of hand.” Magicians employ misdirection—be it verbal, visual, or tactile—to force us into multitasking mode, thereby inducing a temporary state of impaired awareness.
When magicians do employ speed, more often than not it’s to ensure that a given subterfuge falls within the span of an inattentional moment. A flash paper explosion or a puff of smoke, for instance, may distract you for only half a second before your focus snaps back to the magician’s sleeves, but that’s long enough. The glittery showgirls dancing about the stage also serve as instruments of inattentional blindness—drawing our attention (though not necessarily our gaze) away from the illusion at key moments. The same is true when doves fly into the air, as Vegas magician Lance Burton has observed. “At that point,” he once told a fellow conjuror, “you can do anything you want.”
I OFFERED TO SHOW ARIEN Mack a trick. I removed a red Bicycle deck and asked her to name any card. “Nine of diamonds,” she said. I smiled and placed the deck in her left hand. “Hold it tightly,” I said, grabbing both her wrists. “Imagine that the nine of diamonds is getting heavier, falling to the bottom of the deck.” I shook her wrists back and forth. “Can you feel it, Arien? Would you be impressed if I could get the card to jump out of the pack?” I let go of her wrists and told her to look at the bottom card. She turned the deck over to see the nine of diamonds on the face of the pack. “That’s very good,” she said, smiling and shaking her head. “I’m impressed.”
I said good-bye and made my way for the door. Just as I was about to leave, I spun back around and asked for the time. Mack looked down at her forearm, eyes narrowing, and a baffled expression crept across her face.
“Here,” I said, extending my left arm toward her. “Use mine.”
Upon seeing her orange diving watch coiled around my wrist, Mack’s chin hit her chest. She raised her arms above her head and laughed loudly then dropped them back down into her lap. “It’s amazing what you don’t notice when you’re distracted, isn’t it?” I said, flashing a cheesy grin. Mack straightened in her chair and pushed her tortoiseshell frames up to the bridge of her nose. She looked at me, head angled slightly to the right and back, a playful gleam in her eyes.
“Want to do an experiment?”
OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS, I became a fixture in Arien Mack’s laboratory, an oddball hanger-on who crashed her weekly group meetings with a deck of cards in hand. Tuesdays with Mack at the New School became as integral to my routine as Saturdays with Wes and Co. at Rustico II. Initially I was concerned that the other members of her lab construed my hyperactive eagerness as the telltale sign of a spectrum disorder. But whatever misgivings they might have had evaporated after a few card tricks.
Designing a psych experiment, I soon learned, is a lot like putting together a magic show. You begin by finding an audience (your test subjects), engaging them under what are typically false pretenses, and then you proceed to mess with their heads. The biggest difference is that you have to pay them, although it’s amazing the sort of Ludovico-style mind control undergraduates will subject themselves to for five bucks or candy from a stranger.
The experiment Mack and I designed was a test of tactile insensitivity—the tactile analog of inattentional blindness—using the watch steal as the critical stimulus. She’d done some preliminary studies on tactile insensitivity, in which it was revealed that people often don’t detect puffs of air on their arms when they’re focused on a demanding task. This was interesting, but nowhere near as dramatic as the results of her vision research. Our goal was to do for tactile insensitivity what her previous work had done for inattentional blindness. Mack was almost as excited about our scheme as I was. “This is the sort of experiment I’ve been wanting to do for years,” she told our group. We dubbed the project the Guerilla Experiment, a nod to Simons’s film but also to “guerilla magic,” the brand of street magic popularized by David Blaine, in which the magician walks up to random strangers and blows their minds with a few fast, hard-hitting miracles. The name was my idea.
MY FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE art of watch stealing had come a few years back, when my father’s Seiko was stolen from me by the man who calls himself Magick—a Harley-riding headbanger with long black hair and a prosthetic eye for a finger ring—on one of my Saturday visits to Tannen’s. I don’t remember any of the other tricks I saw that day. Nothing else compared. How could I have been so gullible? Could anyone, even people with two names, learn to do that?
“Teach me,” I pleaded. “I need to learn.”
A consummate salesman, Magick smiled calmly and pressed a VHS tape into my hands. “Here, man,” he said with a sidelong glance. “This is all ya need.”
The box cover showed a toothsome Dean Martin type smiling in a tuxedo and wearing seven or eight luxury timepieces on his left arm. It was called The Watch Steal Video, and it basically advertised itself as Thievery 101 for a mere $29.95. At that moment I would have thought it cheap at any price. The man on the cover was Chappy Brazil, a legendary New York street performer who moved to Sin City in 1999 and died shortly thereafter under tragic circumstances. In a morbidly ironic twist of fate, Brazil himself fell victim to the consequences of inattention. The night he finished making The Watch Steal Video, Brazil was riding his motorcycle to a friend’s house for a screening of the final cut when an LVPD squad car racing to a crime scene failed to notice him and slammed into his bike at pursuit speed, killing him instantly. He was thirty-three years old.
So how exactly do you remove a person’s watch without their noticing? It’s easier than you might think. The simplest watches to steal are the ones fitted with buckles, which work more or less like a belt. Slightly more challenging are watches with flip clasps; and by far the toughest are the expanding metal bands that have to be pulled over your hand. The Rolex is one of the hardest timepieces to steal. Even so, artful dodgers can pinch Rolexes off rich folk like candy from a baby. “The first watch I ever stole was a Rolex,” Magick told me with a chuckle. “I was just like . . . fuggit.”
For me, saying fuggit was the least of my concerns. Overcoming my instincts and ingrained guilt and ripping into someone’s jewelry required pluck of the sort I had not yet managed to acquire. Attempted robbery, even for entertainment purposes, was still attempted robbery, was it not? And although I didn’t know this at the time, I’ve since learned that several successful magicians stopped stealing watches after one or more spectators threatened to press charges. (Rumor has it Jerry Seinfeld once got a guy fired for stealing his watch at a show.)
Watch stealing is far more invasive than the average magic trick, which is why it gets such intense reactions. It’s the kind of thing people seldom shrug off. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that something so obvious could ever go unnoticed. Maybe we’ve learned not to trust our eyes in some cases, but our sense of touch? Few effects so starkly illuminate the holes in our perception. The watch steal is the invisible gorilla of magic.
For such an epic payoff, stealing watches is fairly straightforward, especially if you stick to the low-hanging fruit and only go for watches with buckles. To steal this type of watch, you make a C with your hand and press your thumb against the face of the watch while your middle finger curls around the person’s wrist. The tip of the middle finger should more or less align with the tip of the tongue. Most watches have a little loop to hold the tongue down against the band, so first you need to free the tongue by curling your middle finger inward, easing the tongue back out of the loop. Once this is done, your finger goes underneath the tongue and bends it all the way back, at an angle of almost 180 degrees, until the prong comes out of the hole. Once the prong is free, Chappy Brazil advises us to flick it back down and push the tongue slightly askew, just off to the side, so the prong doesn’t slip back into one of the holes as you yank the watch off the wrist. Finally, in a quick but fluid motion, you pull your hand away while palming the watch in your curled fingers.
An old Dickensian cutpurse’s training tool will help you get your criminal career under way. Grab yourself a broomstick or a mop and wrap a towel or rag around the pole enough times to make it roughly the diameter of a human wrist. Then secure the towel with tape or rubber bands. Strap as many watches as you can find around the pole and practice removing them one-handed without looking. With a little practice—okay, a lot of practice—you’ll get to the point where you can remove a watch in under five seconds.
As with any magic trick, the mechanics are but a small part of the illusion; psychology is the secret sauce. First and foremost, you need an excuse to grab your victim’s wrist, because if you yank at their watch for no reason they’ll almost certainly notice. I usually steal a spectator’s watch under the guise of doing a coin trick. Let’s imagine you’re that spectator and the watch is on your left wrist. I remove a coin and ask you to hold out both of your hands, palms up. If you’re wearing long sleeves, the watch will become exposed as you extend your arms toward me. After placing the coin in your right hand, I’ll tell you to close your fists as I grab both wrists and clamp my fingers around the watch.
“I’m going to show you how a coin can teleport,” I’ll say.
At this point I usually press down on the watch so that your touch receptors adapt to the sensation. The resulting sensory after-impression—literally, neurons still firing—blurs the pressure from the watch with the pressure from my hand, making it harder for you to feel the absence of the watch after it comes off your wrist (although it turns out that, while helpful, this isn’t really necessary). As I begin unbuckling the strap, I may move your arms back and forth in short straight lines while saying something like “If I shake hard enough, the coin will jump between your hands.” In magic as well as in pickpocketing, it helps to move in quick back-and-forth spurts when you want to shake off a person’s focus. If, however, you want them to follow your hand, it’s better to move along a smooth, curved trajectory. It’s not clear exactly why this is the case, but neuroscientists have hypothesized that these two forms of motion engage different parts of the visual system. Short linear bursts trigger so-called saccadic eye movements—extremely rapid but discontinuous darting of the eyes during which visual awareness is suppressed for intervals as brief as twenty milliseconds—whereas curved movements activate smooth-pursuit neurons, brain cells programmed to follow moving targets. This adaptation makes sense given that a straight line is a relatively predictable path, so your eyes can safely jump ahead, while a curved trajectory is less predictable and must therefore be tracked more closely.
If I know your name I’ll say it out loud two or three times as well. Your own name is like a tractor beam for attention. It pulls you in. Have you ever been in a noisy room when suddenly you hear your name called out amid the din? The peculiar ability to hear meaningful sounds selectively through white noise is called the cocktail party effect. In a similar vein, one of Mack’s experiments revealed that people are able to pick out their own names from a list of names even when under the spell of an inattentional state. If, however, the name is off by just one letter—Molly instead of Milly, or Bob instead of Rob—it tends to go unnoticed.
To add another layer of smoke, I’ll usually throw out some questions. Are you right- or left-handed? Can you feel the coin in your hand? Responding to questions is a lot like trying to count the number of passes in the gorilla video or comparing the vertical and horizontal lines of a cross. Parsing a question, accessing the necessary information, and formulating an answer are fairly demanding cognitive tasks, enough to bring about an inattentional state.
Once the watch is loose, I slip it off your wrist and, while you ponder the apparent anticlimax (the coin didn’t jump), I put the watch on my own wrist behind my back. Then I do a card trick to offset the awkward moment. I usually have to bite my lip at this point to keep from laughing, because your watch is on my wrist as I’m doing the trick, and you’re looking right at it. No matter how many times I do this, I always think my victims are going to notice.
But do they?
OVER THE COURSE OF SEVERAL months, Mack and I repeated this very same procedure in her lab, on subjects of varying age, gender, and race. Out of fifteen subjects in all, only three noticed, giving us a success rate of 80 percent. (As a comparison, the gorilla video fools between 50 and 60 percent of people on average.) We caught the whole experiment on tape, a cute little evidence film of crimes being committed in the name of science.
The most dramatic episode we filmed was the third trial, when the alarm on the watch I was stealing went off halfway through the scam, beeping loudly as I undid the buckle. At that point, I was sure the jig was up—but no, the woman didn’t even blink. This really took us by surprise as it provided dramatic evidence of inattentional deafness in addition to tactile insensitivity. Furthermore, in two separate trials—including the one in which the alarm went off—the prong stubbornly slipped back into one of the holes on the strap as I tried to pull the watch loose. As a result, I had to stall for time, re-grab the wrist, and unbuckle the strap again. I was afraid such a bold move wouldn’t fall beneath the critical threshold, and yet the two subjects in question were none the wiser.
In five out of the fifteen trials, we blindfolded the subjects and told them to focus on any strange sensations they felt. “I’m going to grab your wrists,” I said before starting. “I want you to tell me if you feel anything out of the ordinary.” I didn’t talk or say their names or ask questions throughout the trials—and yet, of those five, only two noticed. We conducted postgame interviews and recorded the responses, which included statements such as:
I didn’t feel a thing.
I can’t believe it.
I didn’t notice it until you told me.
I felt you tugging at one point, but I had no idea you took my watch.
I would never have thought it possible.
So you’re not a smooth-talking murderer. (I recruited some people off the street.)
Everyone expressed a similar strain of disbelief. It may not have been the most rigorous experiment in history, doing magic tricks and stealing watches, and one of our subjects, a bassist from the music school, may have been stoned, but we nonetheless gathered enough solid evidence from sober adults to provide a clear demonstration of tactile insensitivity under conditions of sustained inattention.
When we started our experiment I’d been stealing watches regularly for a while—yes, I always gave them back—and I was constantly amazed at how easy it was. Scanning people’s wrists had become second nature—it was one of the first things I would do when I met someone—and as soon as I walked into any sort of social gathering I started casing the room so I knew whom to target. I like to keep a running tally of the total value of all the watches I’ve stolen. After Mack’s experiment, I estimated my yield at around $50,000, although I should qualify this by saying that about half of this came out of one big score: a $25,000 Patek Philippe I lifted off an attractive blonde at a fancy dinner party.
