Fooling Houdini, page 9
Besides learning Braille—which is extraordinarily difficult to do, especially as an adult—there are a number of more practical ways you can develop your tactile skills. You can practice identifying common objects by feel. You can teach yourself to navigate your home with your eyes closed. Children can be taught to hone their touch through tactile recreation—playing with textured objects, identifying raised letters and numbers by feel, running obstacle courses without looking. (This sort of play is an integral part of the Montessori method.) “Finger sensitivity is much like the sense of hearing,” notes vision impairment expert Maureen Duffy. “Over time, you will gain awareness and learn to use your sense of touch to distinguish items and features of items.”
In Turner’s case, sheer obsession probably played as big a role as anything in the actualization of his talents. He started going blind relatively late in life, and it was a gradual process. At age fourteen he still had minimal peripheral vision, about 20/400, and for several years after that he could still tell the color of a card by holding it off to the side of his face.
But Turner’s devotion to a pack of playing cards is without equal. When he’s in the car or at the movies, he shuffles on a small felt-covered plastic support in his lap. He regularly falls asleep while shuffling and palming cards on his living room sofa. “Hell, I’ve done that once or twice,” Jason England, one of Turner’s close friends, told me. “Richard does it once a week.” At the grocery store, he shuffles on the plastic ledge at the checkout counter. When he goes to church, he shuffles an inconspicuous blank deck (white on both sides), which his wife holds for him in her zippered Bible. On the rare occasion that she fails to bring them, he shuffles the donation envelopes. And if you take away his cards, he shuffles nothing—as if playing air guitar, except with an imaginary deck of cards instead of an imaginary axe.
Apparently one of the few times he will put down the cards is if he’s doing karate. (A hardcore fitness buff, Turner, now fifty-eight, wears the same size pants he did in high school.) “But notice both things [cards and karate] involve his hands,” England pointed out. “It’s not that he can’t put the cards down, it’s that if he puts the cards down, something else has to come up. He just can’t sit still and not do something with his hands.” Turner, it seems, has been addicted to tactile sensation his entire life. Touch has become his primary connection to the world. “It’s all he knows,” England told me. “Seventeen hours a day since he was nine.”
By his own estimates, Turner has logged more than 135,000 hours of practice—the equivalent of 24-hour days for 15 years. He’s performed his signature second deal more than 5 million times in front of a live audience. (Imagine a basketball player shooting that many free throws.) “In practice, I stopped counting at forty-three million. Now I just estimate that it’s somewhere between fifty and sixty million. That’s why nobody else has ever been able to do this. Who’s gonna sit there and do it eighteen times in a row each day and then do that year after year?”
I sure wasn’t. But after hanging out with Turner, I decided it might be a good idea to step back for a moment and focus on my hands. Next to the brain, the hand is the most important evolutionary adaptation in human history, our main interface with the world. Hands shape not only our environment but also the way we perceive it. Would we ever have adopted the decimal system, for instance, if we didn’t have ten fingers? Unlikely. Most anthropologists think that the base ten numbering system, developed some five thousand years ago, caught on in large part because our ancestors counted on their fingers. Our hands, with their seventy-odd muscles and fifty-four bones (more than any other part of the body other than the spine), are astonishingly versatile. Concert pianists can strike the ivory at a hummingbird-like rate of twenty keystrokes per second. Experienced mountain climbers grip rock fissures with their fingertips, at pressures of eighty pounds per square inch. No other organ system performs such a wide range of functions. “It is in the human hand,” wrote Charles Bell, the Scottish anatomist, “that we have the consummation of all perfection as an instrument.”
Like pianists and competitive table tennis players, magicians live by their hands. (It’s called sleight of hand, after all.) “You have to transform your hands, to break them in,” wrote Arturo De Ascanio, the patriarch of Spanish close-up, “and that requires practice.” Magic requires strong fingers, delicate motor skills, and ample flexibility in one’s tendons. Not surprisingly, big hands tend to be an asset in most cases, although there are exceptions. One notable exception is the fake deal (seconds, middles, bottoms), where long fingers can get in the way. To circumvent this problem, some early cheats would amputate the ends of their own fingers. As a result, one finds a number of “missing finger deals” in the literature.
I wasn’t quite ready to cut off my fingers, but I did want to make them stronger and more dexterous. Some hand abilities are genetic. Only about 60 percent of people, for instance, can bend their little finger at the first joint without moving their ring finger. But mostly it’s practice, so I began a daily exercise routine for my hands, called Finger Fitness, developed by a former musician from Cincinnati named Greg Irwin. Finger Fitness, as I learned from Irwin’s training manuals, is like calisthenics for your hands. It consists of a series of movements—some of which, quite frankly, look hilarious—designed to isolate your hand muscles and increase strength, dexterity, finger independence, and overall range of motion.
It starts with stretches and warm-ups that look a bit like jumping jacks—you cross and uncross your fingers in alternating pairs. Then you steeple your palms prayer-style, but with your fingers splayed out, and fold down the index fingers of both hands so that your right finger is closest to you. After that, you switch the fingers so that your left first finger is now closest to you. You then repeat this motion with your middle finger, ring finger, and pinky. Once you’ve folded all four fingers, you reverse the motion and go the other way, back toward the index finger.
Eventually you do this with all your fingers, up and down the hands, in various patterns—two at a time, three at a time, every other finger. As you build up speed, it starts to look like your fingers are dancing a can-can. The Finger Fitness program also includes a series of taps and folds, bends and splits, finger push-ups, finger shuffles, and variations on the Star Trek Vulcan V salute, all of which can be linked together into a total hand workout. Irwin has even choreographed the moves into a musical number he calls Finger Ballet, which he’s performed on The Tonight Show and at the Magic Castle in Hollywood.
Even without the tiny tutus, Finger Fitness can help just about anyone who works with their hands. Typists type faster. Guitarists shred more like Slash. A number of surgeons have embraced the program. Pending the results of a controlled study on Irwin’s exercise routines, Winston-Salem University may soon make Finger Fitness a standard part of their dental school, as many aspiring dentists lack the necessary fine motor skills.
Finger Fitness has also shown promise in helping those who suffer from repetitive strain injuries (RSI)—an umbrella term for symptoms of discomfort and disability caused by prolonged, repetitious use of the hands. RSIs account for roughly half of all workplace illness, costing U.S. businesses $20 billion annually, more than back injuries. Carpal tunnel syndrome, the most frequently diagnosed RSI, affects millions of Americans and has become the most commonly reported work-related medical problem in America. Operations to treat carpal tunnel syndrome are now among the most frequent surgical procedures, with some 260,000 operations performed each year.
But by far Irwin’s most vocal enthusiasts are magicians. The first time I saw his finger routine was at a lecture by card pioneers Dan and Dave Buck, otherwise known as the Buck Twins, whose finger-blistering Extreme Card Manipulation (XCM) system puts incredible strain on the hands. Thanks in part to Irwin, finger manipulation has carved out its own little niche within the world of so-called Extreme Hand Sports—a subgenre of magic that includes XCM, pen spinning, cup stacking, and ring manipulation, and which has its own conventions and online forums and championships.
In the end, Finger Fitness is designed to make your hands more efficient at learning new skills. “I look at finger fitness as like jumping jacks or sit-ups or push-ups,” Irwin explained to me over the phone. “None of those is football, but it’ll certainly help you play football better. And what’s great about finger fitness is that you can incorporate it into your daily schedule.” (When Irwin and I finally met, at the 2009 World Championships in Beijing, and we shook hands, he uncurled his digits one by one in a graceful, if somewhat creepy, finger flourish.)
In addition to doing Finger Fitness, I designed a workout to help me with palming. Take a coin, press it into the center of your palm, and hold it there by a slight contraction of the muscles at the base of the thumb (the thenar). This is the classic palm, the most important concealment in all of coin magic. (According to J. B. Bobo’s Modern Coin Magic, the coin worker’s Bible, “This is one of the most difficult of all concealments to master but one of magic’s finest secrets. The layman cannot imagine it possible to conceal a coin this way.”)
I’d palm coins in both my hands and squeeze them repeatedly: three sets of one hundred reps, every day. I’d whale on my thenars until they were bruised stiff, then practice rolling a coin through my fingers to loosen up the tendons and increase my agility—that, and it looked cool. (Turner, incidentally, holds the world record for coin rolls: eight coins at a time in one hand.) I practiced with rings. I worked on speed and evenness and tried to synchronize both hands in one unbroken ten-finger roll.
As time went by, I could feel the difference in my fingers. Little by little, my palm muscles grew larger. My hands began changing shape, adapting to their new abilities. (I was also bitten by a radioactive spider around this time, but I don’t think that had anything to do with it.) People complimented my increasingly confident handshake (then asked me to let go), and I felt like a stud flexing my pinky finger in front of the ladies.
I began noticing that I would pick up new moves more quickly, and that manual tasks unrelated to magic—like writing for long hours on the computer or playing stretchy chords on the guitar—became more manageable. I felt more in tune with my hands, more aware of the area surrounding them, what psychologists call the action space. As a result, I became less accident-prone (though I’m still a klutz) and more ambidextrous.
To further sharpen my sense of touch, I started blindfolding myself during practice sessions. Studies have found that visual deprivation causes almost immediate changes in the brain. In one study, blindfolded adults picked up tactile cues in their visual cortex after just five days. Another group of researchers has shown that people become more touch-sensitive after ninety minutes of sitting in a pitch-black room. Under the right conditions, anyone can learn to see with their fingers.
In fact, touch is a powerful and precise sensory tool. It’s our first sense to develop—we enter the world through touch—and the cornerstone of the infant-parent relationship. The skin is the largest organ of the body, about the size of a twin mattress when spread out, comprising more than 15 percent of the body by weight. The tiny whorls and ridges that make up our fingerprints likely evolved for two reasons: to improve our grip and to aid in the perception of texture. (“Texture information plays a huge role in our ability to identify objects by touch,” observes Sliman Bensmaia, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago.) The density of nerve endings in the fingertips is higher than anywhere on the flesh, with the possible exception of the male foreskin, and baseline laboratory measurements reveal that the average person can quickly and accurately identify hundreds of objects—the buttery leather of a broken-in baseball glove, the bristles of a toothbrush, the roughness of an emery board, the softness of a sweater—by feel alone.
Even more striking, touch can convey subtle nuances of meaning. In 2006, psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, and DePauw University discovered that a five-second touch on the arm of a blindfolded stranger can signal highly specific emotions, including love, fear, anger, disgust, sympathy, and gratitude. Accuracy rates were comparable to and in some cases better than those seen in studies of facial expressions and verbal communication. The researchers concluded that “the tactile signaling system is just as differentiated, if not more so, than the face and voice.”
In the complex grammar of touch, the meaning of an action depends on subtle variations in velocity, pressure, location, abruptness, and duration. When stroking someone’s arm, for instance, a few extra seconds can turn a show of sympathy into a gesture of love, while a slight variation in pressure can mean the difference between anger and fear. Despite all this complexity, the language of touch is remarkably universal. Like magic, it transcends culture, age, and gender, and often bypasses the rational side of the brain.
Minor tactile cues can exert a measurable influence on our judgment, our perception of people and places, our decisions and social behaviors, even our willingness to part with cash. Waiters and waitresses who casually touch customers on the hand or shoulder for a second or even less at the end of a meal earn bigger tips and boost their restaurants’ ratings, as measured by exit surveys. A friendly pat on the shoulder from a broker makes clients less risk-averse. The chance that a grocery store shopper will agree to sample a new treat increases by 28 percent when the product demonstrator touches them lightly on the upper arm during the request. Shoppers who’ve been touched leave the store later, spend more, and rate the store more favorably on average. A slight, unobtrusive tap on the arm makes random strangers more willing to participate in mall intercept interviews and street surveys and predisposes them to bum you a smoke or comply with marketing requests. By promoting group cohesion, interpersonal touch also improves the performance of sports teams and enriches family life.
Even an act as simple as holding a warm drink can make a difference in how we perceive others. In a study at Yale, psychologists found that we tend to see strangers in a kinder light, and are more giving ourselves, when holding something warm. In an analogous vein, a study at the University of Toronto found that volunteers who were asked to recall a time in their lives when they’d experienced rejection felt five degrees colder than those who summoned memories of acceptance and approval.
Cognitive scientists think these results stem from the fact that rudimentary material concepts like warmth, hardness, heaviness, and roughness—which we learn during infancy, when touch is our primary scaffolding to the world—form the basis for abstract psychosocial concepts like warmhearted, hard bargain, weighty matters, and rough times. That the language of emotion, or feeling, is so often cast in tactile terms—“my hands are tied,” “a touching story,” “can’t handle the truth,” “between a rock and a hard place,” “the gravity of a situation”—is also telling.
These figurative links are embedded in our brains at the cellular level. The fact that people conflate physical warmth (holding a hot cup of coffee) with interpersonal warmth (generosity and caring) aligns with recent studies implicating the insular cortex—a small chunk of gray matter in the midbrain—in the processing of both physical temperature and emotional warmth, especially trust and compassion. The same cluster of brain cells that springs to life when the sun warms your skin, in other words, also lights up when you feel affection toward a friend or loved one.
The picture that begins to emerge from this research is one of mind and body working in concert as an integrated system. This idea is central to an emerging field known as embodied cognition, which seeks to redefine the relationship between the body and the brain. Embodied cognition does away with the Cartesian view of a disembodied consciousness—the brain in a vat, so to speak—in favor of a model wherein abstract thoughts and physical sensations are inextricably linked.
Embodied cognition helps explain, for instance, why slouching tends to make you sad, or why people who reflect on their own misdeeds feel physically dirty. In the embodied viewpoint, your body actively shapes your mind-set. High-level concepts are grounded in the flesh. Feedback from our muscles helps us process information and regulate our emotions. Our hands, meanwhile, are intelligent devices, extensions of our consciousness.
After doing my exercises awhile, I could feel my own hands becoming more intelligent. I was able to detect the subtle ridged milling around the edges of coins and the wearing of the patina. I became more conscious of the edges of cards. I could sense the humidity in a deck from the way the cards bent. (Cards are like barometers, highly sensitive to weather conditions.) I could estimate the size of a block of cards to within three or four cards, just by feel. Eventually I got to the point where I could reliably cut the deck exactly in half most of the time—and I could tell if I was off by just one card.
Turner’s tactile sensitivity was of course sharper than mine by several orders of magnitude, allowing him to cut straight to any card one-handed, but this minor breakthrough nonetheless helped me realize how little I had appreciated my sense of touch. In a world swamped by vision, touch is an undervalued commodity, a second-class sensation. But for Turner, it has brought the world to him. I recalled his parting words, when I asked him if he thought of his blindness as a gift. “You bet,” he said, smiling. “The mind can adapt in so many ways. And the thing is, you can apply that to so many other areas. I think we totally discount the power of the mind.”
Chapter 5
The Hype
A wiry man in a tattered gray North Face coat and black skullcap worked the cards on a makeshift table made from cardboard boxes. His arms crisscrossed Charleston style as he mixed two black Bee-brand jokers and a red queen. “I’m gonna hide it—you try and find it. I’m gonna hide it—you try and find it.” A cordon of onlookers—three men and two women of different ethnic backgrounds—were placing bets, clacking and hooting at the action, while a pair of lookout men stood at the flanks. The police had already shown up twice, momentarily dispersing the mob in what seemed like a well-choreographed dance. Minutes later they regrouped and fired up the game again. Someone was on the take.
