Instant Genius - Illusions and Magic - Everything you ever wanted to know about... illusions, magic and the paranormal, episode 1

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

Our guest Prof Richard Wiseman is a spectacularly creative scientist who started off his career as a magician before becoming a psychologist. Over the last few decades, Richard has studied the art of deception, parapsychology and the concept of good luck alongside many other aspects of the human mind. Richard has a hugely popular YouTube channel called Quirkology, with a mere 2.15m subscribers and has written a book called Shoot For The Moon (£20, Quercus), which takes a closer look at the psychology that achieved the Moon landings. Over two quickfire, 30-minute episodes, Richard tells BBC Science Focus magazine editor Daniel Bennett how to make himself luckier, whether magicians make the best psychologists and why the stories we tell ourselves matter. And if you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, check out any of Richard’s books at richardwiseman.wordpress.com or follow him on Twitter @RichardWiseman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome back to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Dan Bennett, the editor of BBC Science Focus magazine. Today we're finding out everything you want. wanted to know about illusions, magic and the paranormal. Our guest is the brilliant Professor Richard Wiseman, a spectacularly creative scientist who started off life as a magician

before going on to spend the last few decades investigating deception, parapsychology and the concept of good luck, along with many other aspects of the human experience. Richard has a hugely popular YouTube channel called Quercology, which is a mere 2.15 million subscribers. and a new book out called Shoot for the Moon, which is all about what the moon landings and the psychology that achieved that feat can teach us about success in other areas of life.

So I sourced questions from Google, the magazine team and our listeners and readers, and put them to Richard. So I just want to start off with something quite obvious, I suppose, which is everyone loves magic, but why did you decide to study? it. Well, not so, everyone does love magic, actually. Lots of people loathe magicians. And so, and quite rightly, I mean, you sort of approach groups with a pack of cards and you can see them back off. It's quite an effective form of social distancing. I think the government should be considering it. So I got into, I do love magic, though. And I got into it because of my

granddad, which is true of many magicians, not not lingering because of my granddad, but they're going because of their own granddad. And when I was around about eight years old, I was would go and see my granddad every Sunday. And he showed me the same trick. He wasn't a magician, but he'd learnt one trick during the war, which was that I would sign a coin. He'd make it disappear. And then there would be a box with some elastic bands on. He'd take off the elastic bands. Inside was my coin. And he did that every single Sunday. And it's a great trick. It's a really good one. And like all good magicians, he wouldn't tell me how that was done. And I said, well, come on. And he said, well, tell you what? I'll tell you where the secret is.

It's in the local library. So I went to the library. I read all about magic, eventually found the secret to that trick and, of course, lots of others. And that meant, as magicians say, I was bitten by the bug. And then it becomes something you sort of dedicate your life to. Most magicians get into it pretty young around eight or nine, something like that. And stick with it.

It's a very small, tight community of magicians. So I know you went from being a teenage magician. and then sort of blending a career between that and being a, I suppose, a professional psychologist. So what does the study of magic and the study of illusions tell us about our brains? I think what magic and illusions tell us is that, well, first of all, we are very sophisticated. That's the first thing we should realize. You know, we put a person on the moon, for goodness sake.

We've done amazing things at curing disease around the world, incredible engineering marvels, and yet I can make a coin disappear right in front of you and you'll have no idea how it's done. And I think that is the tension right there between the fact that we are incredibly skilled observers and problem solvers at one level and another level tripped up by the smallest of illusions. So I think all they tell us fundamentally is that we are making assumptions without. realizing it. And that those assumptions most of the time are right, and that's why we are so wonderful, but magicians and illusionists exploit those assumptions for entertainment. And that they show us that we're not really seeing the world. We're making assumptions. So, for example, if you see a chair from such an angle that you can only see three of the legs,

you don't go, oh, I think that's a three-legged chair. I'll go and check that out. You assume there's a fourth leg to it, because most chairs have got four legs. And if you were to check out all your assumptions all of the time, you wouldn't be doing any of the amazing things that humans do. We make assumptions. But when magicians see a chair from the right angle, they go, oh, you could lose that back leg, and now I can do a trick. So it's showing that with that, as I say,

we make assumptions, we make mental shortcuts without realizing it, and that those shortcuts can be exploited under certain circumstances. So when I told my podcast producer that we were going to do one about, you know, illusions and magic in the paranormal, he said, well, what's science got to do with that? And my answer to him was, well, actually, you know, in a way, most magicians are psychologists. So what psychology do magicians use? Well, before that, I should say they're not just psychologists. They are brilliant psychologists. So psychologists go out and you do an experiment, I've done many in my life, and you hope you get an effect. But that effect normally is pretty fragile. If you do it again, you might not get exactly the same effect or you vary the people and suddenly it doesn't work anymore or whatever. Magicians have to walk out with their experiments, their tricks, in front of every single audience under all circumstances and their effects, their tricks have to work every single time. You can't fall 70% the audience and 30% are going, well, it's obviously.

And not only does it have to work in the room, when they all get together and talk about it afterwards, they can't solve the trick then either. So, magicians are hitting every single part of the human sensory system, the way in which we attend to information, the way in which we perceive it, the way in which we think about it and problem solve, the way in which we recall it. And you can't be a good magician without being aware of all of that. Not in the same way the psychologists are, it's a different type of awareness, but it's very very, very much. very practical and it's something you have to use on an absolute daily basis. So it's not that you have to understand the human mind, it's that you have to have a deep understanding of the human mind. So I am in awe of what magicians do. I think it's incredible. And so this one, this question comes from my boss. And I think it's an interesting one because it touches on

a tension that you kind of touched on early, which is some people do actually kind of hate magic, I suppose. Not me at all. I really enjoy the joy that comes from it. But it seems like, in a way, a lot of us like to be deceived. We like, we have that expectation and that enjoyment when someone tricks us. Have we, you know, do you have any insight to why that is? I think there's a few things going on there. So as, I mean, most people don't like to be deceived, actually. Obviously, lying is normally frowned upon. and people get very upset if people are lying to them. Magic occupies this very odd space, as one magician once said,

we're the honest deceivers. We will tell you we're going to deceive you, and that's exactly what we're going to do. I think some people enjoy the experience of seeing something magical. Not really the experience of being fooled, but the experience where the impossible seems to be possible, that someone can click their fingers and somebody else levitates, or an object's disappeared.

So you enter for a brief period of time, this world where these things seem to happen. And in that sense, there's a suspension of disbelief. The other side of it is, well, now I want to figure out how that's done. And obviously, most people can't figure out how tricks are done. And for some people, that's really annoying. And for others, they go, wow, you know, I'd rather enjoy this kind of ambiguous, weird thing that I can't quite figure out.

And so that's why I think the split is, it's on, Do you enjoy ambiguity and not knowing, or are you the sort of person that wants everything to be put into a box and you know exactly how the world works, in which case magic tricks are living hell for you? Where do you find yourself in that dichotomy? Well, magicians are very odd. They're very odd in that because once you learn the basics of magic, sort of nothing falls you. I mean, I'll go along to a magic show even in Vegas. I'll kind of know how everything is done. And that is because they're all being done for a lay audience. And magicians make very different assumptions about the world. However, what's lovely is when you go along to a magic convention, there's a type of magic, which is designed to fall magicians, but not lay people.

And so I get fooled by that. So to give a very concrete example, there's a very famous card trick where you have a card selected. You place it into the center of the deck. you then click your fingers, it comes up to the top of the deck. Now, that involves quite a lot of sleight of hand. You have to practice a long time to be able to do that trick. The one way you wouldn't do that trick is use 52 cards that are all the same because somebody will just rumble you instantly.

They'll just go, hold on a second, but those cards are all different, and then you get rumbled. So when you see that trick as a magician, if you're a magic convention, has happened to me a few months ago, if someone is using 52 cards that are all identical, it'll fall to you as a magician. Because I'm assuming that deck must all be a regular deck, only an idiot would do it with a deck where they're all the same.

So I got fooled, a layperson wouldn't be fooled by that. So you can still get that sense of wonder, but under very different circumstances. That's nice to know. You can still get that joy of being fooled. So we talked then earlier about, you know, magicians being psychologists. And then it falls the other way because psychologists actually use illusions to gain insight into the brain. Can you just speak a little bit about that, how

psychologists use these to study the mechanisms of our minds? I think probably most of the direction of travel is psychologists learning from magicians. Magicians really don't learn very much from psychologists at all. So there is a lot of research where psychologists, sorry, have studied magic and realized there are effects in there. And that's every part of the perceptual system. So it might be that you're looking at attention, and we are social animals, so we take attention from one another, attentional cues. So you look where the performer tends to look.

And magicians are very good at looking at one place where something secret is happening somewhere else. It could be perceptual, that they do exploit perceptual. illusions, certainly in terms of problem solving, you know, what assumptions are you making about the world, a bit like I was saying with the deck of cards. And then in terms of memory, you know, magicians will manipulate your memory. They'll say, let's recap the trick. And they'll then say, give a whole description, none of which may have actually happened. But what you remember is their verbal recapping, not what actually happened. And it's almost

as if, if you want to put a single wrap around it, you've got kind of two narratives. You've got the magic trick narrative, which is something amazing is happening, and you've got the genuine narrative, which is, here's the secret, ugly bit of why the trick works. And what magicians are doing are using misdirection to keep you on the magic narrative and to keep you well away from the truth. And by the time you realize that magic narrative is deeply flawed, because something impossible happens, it's too late to backtrack. That's basically how the whole of magic works. Hi, sorry, I'm just going to interrupt for just a second to tell you about a new subscription offer we've got going for BBC Science Focus magazine.

At six issues for 99, it's great value and it comes straight to your door, which is ideal in these strange times. Don't miss out because we've got some great issues coming up. We're soon going to be digging into the science of dogs, and we're going to be finding out whether life could have started around black holes. And we've even got a behind-the-scenes. feature coming up about the UK's next moon mission. To get the offer, head to www.w.w.com forward slash science, focus, spring podcast offer. Anyway, back to the show. So, so I actually did a psychology undergrad degree and the kind of general sort of teaching of, you know,

cognitive psychology, the, you know, the way we make. decisions and we process information, etc., etc. It had this interpretation that essentially our brains are a very limited machine. Is that essentially what magic relies on and this ability to trick people? Or is it a little bit more nuanced in that magicians are able to understand the specific limitations and then, you know, manipulate those? Yeah, I don't think we are limited. I think we're amazing.

I think we do astonishing things all of the time. But in order to do those astonishing things, we have to make assumptions. And most of the time there's assumptions true, and magicians create scenarios where they turn out not to be true. So I think there is a cognitive component to what's going on. There's a social component as well, because magic is interactive. Without an audience, there is no magic.

If you like the performer, then it's much, much easier than if you dislike the performer. As a magician, it's much easier if you're liked. So there's a cognitive side, there's a developmental side to this because children, you know, obviously looking at magic tricks, sometimes think they're genuine magic and so on. So it cuts across pretty much every area of psychology. And in most of those areas is a celebration of how wonderful we are and incredible things we can achieve. and it celebrates that and demonstrates that by tripping us up. So I'm going to move on a little bit to some of the stuff I've found while searching around the

internet. And obviously the internet loves illusions, particularly more so in the last few years. But there's also some on the sort of periphery that makes some pretty bold claims like, you know, look at this image and it will measure your stress level as one. I saw run a certain very popular news site, which I write a name. Or another one which was, if you watch this, it'll improve your mood, which was obviously a watch static image that was a visual illusion of something moving. So my question is, can visual illusions change our mood?

Or is there any evidence that they can measure our mood? I think if someone else to stare at an internet page for half an hour and nothing happened, It would improve my mood immensely. If it was me doing it, I think it would change my mood, but not in a positive direction. So, no, I mean, for the most part, those claims are pretty wild and wacky. We did some work a while ago on the duck rabbit illusion, which is the Joseph Jastro illusion, which is a bi-stable image, and so it looks like a rabbit, and then suddenly it'll flip into a duck and back again. And what we looked at was how frequently the flipping occurs, because some people get stuck

on a rabbit and can't see a duck. And for other people, it's flipping all the time, a bit like the NECA cube that flips in one direction than the other. And then we compared it to creativity levels. And in fact, the more flipping that's going on, the more creative you are. And that makes sense because creative people are constantly rearranging their environment. So there's some of that out there, but not very much. I mean, most magic tricks in particular have to work with all the people all the time.

And so actually they're pretty bomb-proof, as it were. There aren't individual differences there. Okay. And then here's one that came from one of the members of the magazine team. And you can sense the frustration in this one. Do magic eye illustrations really work? Or was it just a big conspiracy? It's a huge conspiracy.

basically it was just an excuse to get people to stare at those sort of jazzy posters for as long as possible and then what happened was that word got round that you were supposed to say you could see a 3D image there which made the even more annoying for the people that couldn't see it and my how we've laughed over the last decade with those no as far as I know they work they always work for me and you do get those 3D effects suddenly so jump out it requires a bit of defocusing but it doesn't No, they're great. Yeah, so your colleague needs to just stare at, you know, a little bit longer. I'd give it up to a day, no longer than a day, staring at those things.

Another colleague just respond to that question with maybe you don't have magic eyes. Yes, that's right. That's right. That's right. No, that's right. Yes, that is cool. Yeah. So that brings up to something else.

When we see an illusion or, and this is probably, this is probably, something that's also true of comedy as well. What do we know about what's happening in the brain when we experience an illusion and we get that joy out of seeing something impossible happen or something that defies expectation? I don't think we know very much about either the mind or the brain. I'm a psychologist, so my sort of focus is very kind of mind rather than brain. I think that we know that people like certain sorts of surprises. So you mention jokes there, and I think there's a very strong parallel between magic tricks and jokes.

So there is a theory that when you see something which is surprising and threatening, you cry out to warn others. But when you see something as surprising and non-threatening, which is like the end of a joke, for example. So two fish and a tank, one turns the other and says, do you know how to drive this? that suddenly you get this surprise at the end, but it's non-threatening, and to signal that, you laugh. So we know a little bit about why surprising things make us laugh under certain circumstances. We know that when we see something in Congress, something we didn't expect to see, we become very curious. Magic tricks are a great use in education for that reason. But what we don't know very much about is what magicians refer to as this kind of sense of wonder,

the moment of magic. Does it even exist? But that moment of, I don't believe what I've just seen, and somehow that's making me query everything I know about physics and the world and so on. So we don't know whether that really exists, but magicians do talk about it. I think for me, all these things, it's about that word impossible. I think the symbolism of magic is that often we assume things are impossible and actually there are ways of making them possible. So for me, it is a sort of inspirational moment that you know, what I love about the mindset of magicians is that if you're in room with 20 magicians and you say, hey, look, we have to levitate that table.

There's not one of them that goes, well, don't be stupid. It's a tableist. Like, because what are you talking? They all go, well, you could do this or you could do that or so-and-so did this. Well, in Victorian times, they use it. You instantly get into the mindset of making impossible things possible. And I think that's a wonderful mindset. And I think that has led, in reality, to many of the most amazing breakthroughs in the history of humanity.

It's that same openness to the impossible. Is that just a possibly slightly personal question, but has that bled into your life? It sounds like you've gained a really appreciable. and love for that sense of defying the impossible? Yeah. And has that made your life better? I think magic makes my life better in three ways. One is social because lots of my mates are magicians.

Two is that magical thinking means that when I give talks or make videos of the internet, you're always thinking as a magician and that's helpful. But I think three, it's exactly what you're saying there, that often I'm in meetings with people that we can't do this. And you just don't think that as a magician. You think the exact opposite. And the last book, which shoot for the moon, was about how you put a person on the moon.

And when I spoke to all the mission controllers, the Apollo mission controllers, you know, they said they started off with this impossible task. It was just unbelievable to think you'd send a person to the moon and back again in 62. And there were so many cynics and so many skeptics. They got rid of all of them at NASA essentially, brought in this group of incredible. incredibly young people, in the words of one of them, was so young we didn't know it couldn't be done, that we believed this impossible thing might be possible,

and it was that that drove us forward. So I think it's really important. And so magic in that sense is a very important moment because it gives you this simulation of going, wow, wow. And that gives us hope, I think, outside of that moment. So we should all try and think a little bit more like magicians? I think we should be open to the notion that we have limitations in our minds. We think certain things aren't possible about our lives or about humanity or about whatever it is.

And those are self-imposed a lot of the time and that we can do and have done amazing things. And that for hundreds of years, a small group of very strange people are dedicated their lives to taking a coin and making it look like it's disappeared. And, you know, great they've done it. and at one level it should give us all some hope. Brilliant. Well, that's a great place to wrap up for now. In next week's episode, out Thursday, we'll pick up where we left off and find out how you can make yourself luckier

whether extra sensory perception is real and what this all has to do with the moon landings. If you've enjoyed this episode and we'll be tuning into the next one, please do subscribe. And if you can spare a minute, leave a review. It lets us know you're enjoying the format, and you can even let us know what topic you want us to tackle next. And of course, for more guides to the big ideas in science and technology, head over to our website, ScienceFocus.com.

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