Name: Fooling Houdini
Author: Alex Stone

What’s in it for me? Discover what science and magic have in common and what they could learn from one another.

If you were like most other children, you probably loved magic. Whether it’s a friend’s new card trick or a birthday magician with a hat full of rabbits, there is something mesmerizing about magic.

As we grow up, many of us lose that sense of wonder, because we learn that – spoiler alert! – there is no “real” magic. It’s all just tricks and illusions, and we come to assume that reason and science are completely different from magic. As these blinks will show you, however, magic and science not only have a lot in common; they also have a lot to learn from one another.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how you can have a gorilla right in front of you without noticing it;
whence “hocus-pocus” derives; and
why children are harder to fool than adults.

Magic has a lot in common with gambling and business.

What is magic, exactly? Entertainment? Deception? Well, it’s many things. Some of magic's characteristics are intuitive; others you might find surprising.

Magic is closely connected to gambling, for instance. A lot of skilled magicians have used their talent to gain a fortune through gambling, and many sleight-of-hand card tricks originate from gambling, as they were used in that field first (often illegally!).

In both gambling and magic, it's vital that you don't reveal your secrets or all of your skills at once. If you're too open about your trade, your audience will grow skeptical or lose interest.

Magicians and gamblers both have to see the world the way con artists do. Con artists look for the secret workings behind any game, be it politics, Wall Street or everyday life. They fool people; they trick them. Similarly, magicians also seek out such secrets and use them to their advantage.

There's a connection between finance and magic, too. Finance, gambling and magic have something significant in common: they all require a deep understanding of risk. They also all encourage you to bluff and throw off your opponents – and they're all partly based on luck.

Succeeding in magic (and in finance and gambling!) is largely about staying ahead of what others are thinking. You have to let them think they know something. Then they'll want to prove they've understood, a typically human urge.

Magicians employ a lot of tricks to help with this. Some of these, like the ego hook, are more common than others.

The ego hook refers to the strategy of catering to people's egos by making them feel smarter than they really are. It's like tricking someone into thinking they should go for a particular investment because it's “safe.”

Magic isn't about secrecy – it's about deception.

You might be familiar with the Masked Magician, the first person to explain magic tricks on television. Giving away secrets like this might seem bad for the art, but, actually, it isn't – it can even help strengthen it.

A lot of prominent magicians live in constant fear of having their secrets revealed. Magic tricks are like quantum states: if you examine them too closely, you destroy them.

Touch sensitivity is very important in magic tricks.

Can you discern what something is just by touching it? This ability is called touch sensitivity, and it’s a vital tool for magicians. When performing card tricks, they need to be able to arrange cards within a deck into a certain order without looking at them – and this happens in the few seconds that they seem to be casually shuffling them.

Let’s explore touch sensitivity further:

Magic can be emotional and frightening, but it still needs an element of comedy.

Have you ever had someone read your fortune and conclude by telling you something so personal you thought it must be magic? That can be frightening!

Mentalism – palm reading or fortune telling – is the branch of magic people tend to find the most emotional or scary. Mentalism often works by leveraging the Barnum effect, whereby people assume that general things apply to them specifically.

Magic has a lot in common with science.

Science sometimes seems magical, and that’s because – well – it is! Science and magic have a surprising amount in common.

People tend to regard magic and science as opposites: the former is based on superstition, the latter on rationality. But this binary sort of thinking is misguided.

Key ideas in Fooling Houdini