Could it be magic?

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You're about to listen to the Infinite Monkey Cage.

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First, on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Robin Ince.

And I'm Brian Cox, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Now, anyone who has been to a Barry Manilow concert, how many have been to a Barry Manilow concert?

Yeah, and there's no shame it.

Right?

That's the whole.

Obviously, the listeners at home can't see, but the whole audience, their hands went up there.

All of us fans, and I'm not saying this ironically, Mandy and Copika Banner, Stone Cold Classics.

But if you have been to a Barry Manilow concert, and I believe he's on tour again next year, then you will know that if Brian is ever in the audience, Barry Manilow has to actually book more security because the moment he starts singing Could It Be Magic, Brian stands up and shouts, no, it couldn't, though it could currently lie within the terrain of apparently anomalous activity which currently is not understood with the realms of of science, but the laws of physics will eventually explain this action and/or reaction.

And Barry doesn't like that because it doesn't scan.

Also, if you ever go to an ABBA tribute band, you'll find exactly the same thing happens when they do take a chance on me, and then Brian will immediately turn it from being a lovely three-minute pop song to a kind of epic poem of equations about probability.

It's like Beowulf, but without the fun.

Taking a chance is fundamental in science, as long as you work within well-established parameters.

And that, by the way, is what he writes in every Valentine card that he sends as well.

Today, we're looking at the science and psychology of magic.

What does our predilection to be bamboozled by sleight of hand tell us about how our mind works?

What can we learn about perception from watching a man with a cup and sponge balls?

Isn't that more of a medical problem?

He's getting into the pier, isn't he, for tonight?

Yes.

Anyway, I said it in my.

Isn't that more of a medical?

More of a medical problem.

He is getting a couple of Spongebobs, anyway.

So, what of the psychology of the magicians themselves?

And does the ability to link rings ultimately tell us something about the nature of matter?

No.

Okay, good.

That's the first part of the show dealt with.

We are now joined by three magicians, though it might not be three magicians by the time we let them out of the box.

It might be loads of magicians, or none whatsoever.

And also, someone who created the illusion of being a magician, and they are.

I'm Professor Richard Wiseman, psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, and been a magician since I was eight years old.

The most astounding thing I've ever read about in magic is one of my favourite tricks, the vanishing elephant.

And the description of it is: two people pushed on a large box, they put the elephant inside, open the doors, and it gone.

And then 15 people push off the box, and

where is the elephant gone?

My name is Dr.

Kusaf Khoon, I'm I'm an associate professor in psychology at the University of Plymouth.

My most amazing magic trick is probably the vanishing ball illusion.

For this trick, a magician throws a ball up in the air and it disappears.

Now, the trick itself is not really that amazing, but the psychology that underpins it is astonishing.

Because the way the trick works is it exploits the fact that we are all seeing the future.

It's not a huge amount, it's about a fraction of a second, but we're all doing this all all the time without ever really thinking about it and without this ability to see the future i wouldn't be able to catch a ball and i definitely wouldn't have been able to cross the road to get here

we're going to have to explore that because i believe you see the past you see because of the finite nature of the speed of light but

let us discuss

I'm Laura London, a close-up magician with a particular fascination in the world of gambling, cheating techniques and sleight of hand.

The most impactful magic trick I've ever seen is when I was six years old.

It's called the Run Rabbit Run.

It's actually a terrible trick, so I can see Richard's like, I'm really.

It is a terrible trick.

It's sort of a kid's magic effect.

But the way in which it made every single person feel at that party when I was six years old was the reason I decided I wanted to become a magician.

And if you don't know what it is, it's this little wooden contraption with a rabbit that sort of just appears and disappears.

And a bit like a Punch and Judy show, the kids go, oh, it's over there.

So a sweet little thing, not particularly mystifying, but certainly a classic and one that I love.

I'm Alan Davis.

I'm a comedian and I played Jonathan Creek, the master creator of illusions and solver of murders, obviously.

And the most astounding trick I ever saw, I went to see Jerry Sadovitz, a great close-up magician, and I was sitting in the front row, inches from him, and it was a small little venue, and he got very hot.

And he took his, I said, too hot in my hat.

And he took his hat off and put it on the table, did some tricks.

And when he lifted his hat to put it back on, there was a watermelon there.

Blew my mind.

And that's 20 years ago.

I'm not over it.

And this is our panel.

Could you start with

Richard?

I just want to ask Richard, though, about eight years old.

Is that the classic age to kind of start?

Gross magicians get into magic when they're either eight or ten, and it's normally something a grandparent has shown to them.

So I used to go and visit my grandfather most weekends.

So he would give me a Victorian penny, I'd put my initials on it, he'd make it disappear, and it'd appear in a box under his seat.

And every single weekend I would say, you know, badge him, tell me how this was done.

And he wouldn't.

And he did this great thing.

He said, the secret is in a book, and the book is in your local library.

So I had to go and work hard.

It's not like nowadays where everything is easily won on the internet.

So I read all the books on magic in the library.

Eventually went back to him, said, this is how it's done.

He said, that's correct.

I said, it requires a little secret something.

Magicians call a a gimmick.

He said, That's correct.

He handed me that secret something, and now in my office, it sits there on my desk.

And the other day, a journalist said to me, If your house was to burn down, what's the one thing you would take?

And I said, It's that little bit of metal because it changed my life.

That's fantastic.

Gustav, so picking up on what you said, but we all see the future.

So, what did you mean by that?

Well, to understand that, you need to take a look at how we process visual information.

Now, vision happens in the brain.

Like, we use our eyes to capture visual information, and that's then transmitted through lots of neurons to different centers in our brain and visual cortex, where the vision happens.

Now, this information processing is not instantaneous.

It takes a bit of time and takes roughly a tenth of a second.

So, what that means is that as I'm seeing the world, by the time I'm experiencing it, it's already the past.

Now, a tenth of a second doesn't really sound like that much, but in neural terms, that's a huge amount.

So, if you're walking down the street at about one meter per second, that basically means that the world should be lagging about 10 centimeters behind you.

But of course, it doesn't.

And the reason why it doesn't is because we are predicting the future.

So what you are seeing as the now is not actually the now, but it's your brain using information from the past to predict the future.

or the now.

And quite a lot of magic tricks rely on this.

So in the vanishing ball illusion, if I just pretend to throw a ball up in the air, most people see a ball moving up and then disappearing somewhere up in the air.

And the reason why this works is because your train is being tricked into anticipating what's going to happen in the future.

It's a bit like with the dog.

When you pretend to throw the stick, the dog runs, and it's the same with the vision.

So, well, all the magician's actually doing then is just making the ball disappear in their own hands.

Well, not all magicians, and there's lots of more complex tricks as well, but that is one principle that you can use.

Where are they putting the ball then?

Or did you get thrown at the magic circle if you tell me?

I'm not going to reveal that.

This is one of the great things about this show is we've basically got a panel of people who are members of the magic circle that is sworn to secrecy and telling you how any tricks work, which is like as if we did like our episode from CERN and it turns out they've started a particle physicist circle in which they're not unless sworn to secrecy to tell you how they discovered the Higgs field and the Higgs boson.

So this could be not as educational as we'd hoped.

Alan, so you you've heard Rich's touching story.

W were you interested in magic before you played Jonathan Creek?

There was a lot of magic on TV when we were kids.

This doesn't seem to be so much now.

There was that guy, Nixon.

Do you remember him?

It was Paul Daniels.

There seemed to be quite a lot of stuff going on.

And people were always getting sworn in half.

So I think everyone loved magic.

And when Jonathan Creek came along, I knew that Creek was obsessed with magic.

And this is one of the amazing things about magic:

if you want to be a magician, but perhaps you're confirmed this, you need to know know the entire history of the craft before you begin to embark on putting an act together.

It's very difficult to come up with new stuff because it's much more complicated than telling a funny story.

The actual kind of mechanics of a trick need to be rehearsed and practiced.

It's a great physical skill, so

even more than juggling or something.

It takes a huge amount of dedication and a lot of time spent alone.

And I was much too lazy to do that.

So I was much easier just to get a microphone and talk.

So I have a lot of admiration.

When we did one episode of Jonathan Creek, I had to learn to scale cards, which means to throw cards.

And I had Ricky Jay, the famous card manipulator, Ricky J's book, it's all about how to scale cards.

And I was throwing them around my living room, and one got stuck into a plant.

I'd throw it quite hard.

And I thought, I can really do this now.

And then I turned the page and it said, Do not practice for more than 15 minutes at at a time.

You'll get a repetitive strain injury.

Now, at that point, I'd thrown about 300 playing cards, and the next day I could not move my wrist and couldn't do the scene properly.

So, we had to get a card that was weighted with quite a heavy piece of metal that anyone could have knocked the bottle off the table with.

But no, it's much more.

I mean, I'm greatly impressed, but first of all, the dedication of it, but also that it's like a swan's legs underwater.

There's so much going on that you can't see, and it's fascinating.

Well, Laura, Alan was talking about that practice, and I know you were warming up with the cards in the dressing room, which was astonishing.

And I think you have a we're going to try something that is clearly silly for the radio audience, which is we're going to do

more like a scientist for this.

We're going to do something rather silly now as

magic on the radio.

Okay, well, we'll have to describe what happens, Valen, if you don't mind.

We'll do the magic with you as you're talking about.

Just getting the cards out of the pack.

The cards are out of the pack.

Next to me.

I'll ask you, Laura, just to just sign that, because in the green room, you were saying you still hadn't worked out which trick you were going to do.

So, just with that pack of cards, how many tricks do you think you have in your head that you think, once I've got a pack of cards, what are the choices?

I mean, there's 52 cards in a deck.

There are infinite possibilities with a deck of cards.

I mean, I have a show called Cheat, which has all gambling cheating demonstrations.

What I'm going to do with you is sort of, I guess, a bit of a standard and classic magic effect that we would do with cards.

They're actually quite extraordinary and can do so many things, but it does take a lot of practice.

I see, I'm now anxious.

And this is part of the magician's work.

It's made me feel unstable.

I could ask Richard to commentate here.

We should say, with 52 cards, there are so many combinations that when you shuffle them, it's a random shuffle.

And there's almost been no deck of cards ever that's been in that order.

So it's a phenomenal idea.

There's just so many combinations.

And a normal shuffle for a no deck.

And all the hundreds and hundreds, middle thousands of decks in the world have all been shuffled.

And there's not been that particular order before.

So there's lots of interesting science and stats built up in cards.

But yes, I'm very happy.

So Laura's now got the cards.

Yes.

All right, Alan, I tell you what, instead of saying pick a card, which is a sort of very standard thing magicians will say, I'll say name a card, one that you like.

Eight of Clubs.

Not going to lie, I was hoping you'd say the Ace of Spades, but sure, we'll go with it.

Okay, here's what we're going to do.

I'm going to shuffle these cards, and you and I are going to play a little game.

Okay, it's a very simple game, don't worry.

I'd like you to hold your hand out for me.

Oh, sorry, what was the card you said?

The Eight of

Cups.

Okay, we will come back to that in just a minute.

But before that, I'm going to cut the deck three times.

You can see that, that's fair.

We're going to take this top card.

Yeah, but you did that for the radio way.

You did it in a kind of a spinny, twisty way.

That way of cutting the deck is not the way that I would be able to cut a deck.

But can we all confirm on this panel I did indeed just shuffle the cards and I cut the deck?

Yeah, in a way with dexterity that

looked fancy.

Laura shuffled and cut the deck.

All right, so here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to take the top card of this shuffled deck and place it right there on your hand.

Okay, it doesn't actually matter what it is.

In this case, it's the Jack of Clubs.

You can all see that, the Jack of Clubs.

And I'm going to place it right there on the table.

And I want you to put your hand over the top of it.

Here's the game.

I'm going to take that from you without you noticing.

Okay.

All right, if this works, the rest will be easy, and I promise you, I will find your Eight of Clubs.

But before we do, we need to warm you up a little bit.

So I've got the Queen of Clubs, you've got the, I think it was the Jack, nice and convenient.

So here we go.

Here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to use this to distract you.

Are you ready?

One, two.

So if I just give that a spin on my finger,

I should now have the jack right here.

So if I have the jack in my hand, Alan, what's in yours?

It's the eight of clubs.

Oh, the eight of clubs, the one you want.

That works out very well.

All right.

Write your name on there for me.

We'll just do one more very quick thing.

Just write your name on there for me.

Okay, so now it's very distinctive.

Because you might think.

So Alan signed his name on the Eight of Clubs.

Alan.

It appeared under his hand.

You might indeed think I had a two of the Eight of Clubs or something like that.

So now it's got your name on it.

It is very distinctive.

If I take your card and I make a bend in it like so, so we can all see that.

Now it's even more distinctive because if you can all see that, and I'll just show you as well in the audience you can see it's got a bit bend so it's very distinctive and I place the rest of the cards on top there watch I'm gonna make it go through the deck okay so it hopefully will come to the top it's about it's about four now and it's okay like three

two now don't stop staring at it and it's your power that's making this happen quite three one card jumps to the very top of the deck and it has just a card has just popped to the top of the deck a card has popped to the top of yours is a remains to be seen but just take that for me and show everyone if it is yours.

It is.

It is mine.

Would you like me to tell you how it works?

I'll tell you very quickly how it works.

You see, I always know where this card is, always, by means of misdirection and practice.

For example, if I place this card inside the middle of the deck, which you can see me very fairly doing, and I cut the deck, I can shuffle the cards as much as I like.

It makes no real difference, Alan.

You see, I always know where the card is.

For example, I can shuffle these cards as much as I like.

I mean, I do know where it is because, I put it there, Alan.

But the thing is, the reason I can shuffle these is because your card is actually not here anymore.

Got?

Yeah, so the question is: Alan, if I don't have the card, where is it?

It could be anywhere.

It's actually right in front of you.

And if you look, everyone, there is a box.

I had that box there, the sorry, card case,

right there in the middle.

And if you all listen,

have a look.

Inside here, there is one card, and it's folded into four pieces.

Alan, if you just take that, if it is yours, please fold it and share with everyone.

I'm opening it up, and it's the Eight of Cubs with my name on it.

Yeah,

you never touched the case, though, did you?

Did you touch a case?

Did you see her?

Misdirection, Alan.

There we go.

You missed it.

You missed it.

Laura Olson does a lot of ID theft here.

You've given her half your signature.

So, Gustave, can we analyse that trick?

So, obviously, without, we're not able to describe how you did it.

I have no idea how you did it.

It's stunning.

But in terms of those ideas of misdirection, as you said, about human perception, how would you begin to break down what happened in a typical card trick like that?

A typical card trick involves loads of deception and misdirection and involves all of our senses as well and all of our cognitive processes as well.

So, on one hand, you manipulate what you see and what you don't.

So, we can use attentional misdirection to misdirect the information that you process and the things that you miss.

But even the things that you do see, so when you see something, you may not be able to remember exactly what happened, or you may falsely remember something as well.

So we call this memory misdirection, where you can use ways in which you can influence the way that someone will afterwards remember what they've just seen.

But even if you accurately remember exactly what's happened, you may just not have the reasoning capacity, or your reasoning may be influenced by certain biases, and that can then prevent you from actually working out how the trick is done.

So, a typical magic trick involves loads of layers of misdirection and deception that will hopefully prevent the audience from working out how the trick is done.

I mean, Laura's quite brilliant at it, you know.

But really, it's the speed with which she can do things

much faster with her fingers and her hands than I anticipate a normal human could be.

So, I have all this, you were speaking earlier about the knowledge we have of how the world works.

A person could do certain things, but a person can't fold a card up and put it in a box.

They can if they have no life

spend a lot of time on their own with a deck of cards.

That is one of the secrets of the cards.

That's absolutely the secret.

Just have no life and spend a lot of time on your own.

But also, that's the perception that's being played with, it seems to me, is it's much, much quicker than I expected it to be possible to do.

But also, we didn't mention the fact that for, again, people listening at home don't know about all the distractions because the way you levitated that hippopotamus was extremely impressive.

So, a lot of us were looking at that at the same time.

And if you could keep it up there, because it's going to mess with the sound

It's brilliant.

It's absolutely brilliant.

And Alan's right.

I mean, one of the things Laura's, well, two things Laura's amazingly good at.

One is doing one thing and talking at the same time, which we're not used to doing.

Normally, our actions are consistent with our words, but Laura needs to be talking and doing something completely different at the same time.

The other thing, which is so hard and where most magicians struggle, is you're lying to people, you're deceiving them, and yet you have to come across as likable.

And that's the real skill to magic and the bit where most magicians fail.

It's why most audiences hate magicians

and Laura's brilliant at doing that.

So, I think that's great.

But the other thing you should realize is I think most magic is like a science experiment.

So, there is a

procedure to be done, and the outcome of that experiment is the audience are fooled and entertained.

And it's really, really difficult.

And so, people have been doing those types of tricks, that particular one, since about 1850.

And every time they get it right, they write it down, and that goes into the literature of magic, which is as big as literature of science or law.

Magicians have their own secret Google that's got three million pages of information on.

And if you're going to perform that trick that well, you need to know all that stuff stretching back through history.

I mean, that trick was performed to Harry Houdini and fooled him, so it's known as the trick that fooled Houdini.

You need to know all that stuff if you're going to do it competently, and it's all hidden from an audience.

So that's what I find so amazing about that performance.

But also, when it comes to misdirection, I know that Gustav has done a lot of sort of study in this, but I sort of come from it in a very different angle in that because I perform very regularly and I do the same thing over and over again, or many of the things I do I do often, my misdirection comes from just doing it.

So I could, without even thinking, it just happens.

So I can tell you where this lady was looking or, you know, where she is, or if I'm surrounded by people, I'm very aware, almost without knowing I'm aware of it.

But for example, me putting a card in that card case, I could do surrounded now because I've done it so many times.

Well, I wanted to ask you, Stavin, in terms of studying human perception, which is what you do, how useful is it to study close-up magic?

Is it really kind of a focused, almost distilled experiment to see how it can be that humans can become distracted?

And does that give you insight into their cognitive process?

Yes, so we study misdirection in the lab and we use lots of scientific tools.

So, for example, we've got eye trackers that we can, there's like goggles that we can put on people's faces, then we can work out exactly where they are looking.

Oh, so with Alan, for example, in that tree, you could see that.

Yeah, so Alan will be wearing an eye tracker, and that gives me precise online measurements of exactly where he's looking.

Very worrying development,

and we can then correlate this with what they experience.

And so, one of the bigger surprises has been that quite often people can actually be looking at something and yet they don't see it.

So, we typically assume that if you're keeping your eye on something, then you should be able to see it.

But actually, if your attention is being misdirected from this, then huge things can happen in front of your eyes and yet you don't see them.

That's purely instinctive from your perspective, as you'd said.

So, you were not aware or are not aware of this detailed research, certainly when you started learning.

But you somehow instinctively are

misdirected.

You know, that someone can be looking at something, but actually, if you do something, then they won't actually see what you're doing.

And I was like, even if they're they're staring at you.

I mean, I knew when Laura put that card down, I said, put your hand on that, that's a jack of clubs.

So I was thinking, there's no way that's a jack of clubs.

This is a trick.

Everything happens ahead of time.

I was staring at the card and couldn't tell when she flipped it over that she'd changed it or what she'd done from six inches away.

It's really frightening.

I was scared because I thought you were going to be so angry that you'd been beaten, you were going to use it as a weapon.

Yeah, throw it into a plant.

We use our misunderstanding of attention.

Magicians use it against us.

So there's an old adage, which is, you know, the closer you look, the less you'll see.

So because you can really concentrate on here, that's where you put your attention.

Of course, at that point, the secret stuff is happening outside of that.

And then when you go big, the secret stuff is happening where you did focus your attention previously, but now aren't.

So magicians are ahead of the game all the time.

And you learn it by doing it again and again and again for real people.

Are there actually new magic tricks being invented or they're in t a bit like you know the fact they're only seven stories supposedly?

Are are we generally seeing a reinvention of the techniques that are now in existence?

Yeah, I think there's been a constant evolution of magic tricks.

The way that technology is being used now as well.

So there's internet magic, there's Zoom magic.

Our studies show this not very popular, unsurprising.

But a lot of magic is technology driven.

And so the kind of effects that you see now, you couldn't imagine to have seen back in the 1950s.

What about when you're performing to magicians?

I presume, much like when comedians used to do the water rats and all that kind of finding the joke that will break through them just go, oh, yeah, yeah, I know that done.

Oh, yeah,

are there you know extra tricks and layers of tricks there that are still going on all the time?

I would say there probably is, yes.

It's actually quite a big thing.

In magic, we have conventions all around the world, and actually, thousands of magicians gather together in several parts of the world quite regularly.

Actually, there's places in like Vegas, we've got one in Blackpool.

And when this happens, magicians will tend to be doing magic at six in the morning and trying to fool each other.

It's quite a thing.

I mean, I don't.

I think what's interesting is to see someone with great skill and presentation.

And I don't care whether it's a magician or not, what I want is to be entertained more than anything.

And I've always looked at magic in the way that I would hope my audience look at the magic I perform.

I went to Blackpool Magicians Convention once, four and a half thousand magicians.

I was staying in a hotel, and it advertised two sausages and beans for for £10 for breakfast.

And so, we, well, now that included the hotel, that was the entire thing.

That's still expensive for breakfast.

Out of season, definitely.

So, we're all there, and breakfast came.

And what they'd done is taken one sausage and cut it diagonally, put the two thin ends together, and covered it with beans so it looked like two sausages

to a room of magicians.

And we all sat there, no one said a word.

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Gustav, the card tricks.

We've talked about misdirection, but there's also persuasion.

So I'm thinking more of someone like Darren Brown, for example.

So could you talk a bit about that third technique, which is persuasion?

Yeah, so I mean, magicians use a lot of misdirection, but in a lot of card tricks, they can rely on forcing.

So forcing is a principle whereby you can influence the card that someone will choose.

And there's a whole range of principles that can be used to do this.

And the key to this is to influence someone's decision without them feeling that they've been influenced.

So if you're doing a card trick and I say, okay, here's the eight of diamonds, that's your card, that's a pretty rubbish card trick because you know that the card's been forced.

What's much more effective is if I use a principle that often relies on exploiting cognitive biases, for example, to get you to pick that card automatically.

So for example, if I place four cards on the table and I say to you, touch one of these cards, there's a 60% chance that you will touch the card that is right in front of you.

But the radio.

Now there's not.

Not now.

Now you know that it's done.

But the interesting thing is that people are not aware of these biases.

And these are the kind of biases that are often exploited by supermarkets, for example, or marketing, where they will put high-price items in more convenient locations for you to buy.

But that's not sufficient, is it, to build a trick around?

So, how do you is it possible to make a suggestion to someone that you absolutely know that they are going to do what you wanted them to do?

Rich is just shaking his head, so the answer maybe I should ask Richard no is the answer.

How can it be used then in this framework?

Well, as I said, kind of like magic relies on lots of layers of deception, and that could just be one of these layers.

There are other techniques, but I'm not really going to go into these here.

I told you.

We thought this might be a very short show.

How do you do that?

Not telling you.

Good night.

Well,

but there is a science to that.

Because why do magicians hold on to their secrets?

And most magic tricks, if you say this is the secret to it, it just sounds trivial.

You don't realise how hard it is.

It's really, really hard.

And if you go, this is the secret, but okay.

But not only that, magicians live in this rather miserable world because they haven't got any friends.

No,

they're not fooled by many things.

So they don't get that sense of wonder.

I'm looking at Laura's performance there.

It doesn't surprise me.

It's a wonderful performance.

It's extremely skilled.

I can see the skill, but I don't have that.

Oh my goodness, it's the Ata Clubs in the box.

And that's been taken away from me since I was eight or ten when you read all this stuff.

And it's such a wonderful experience.

It's so incredible to see something that you know to be impossible happen in front of your eyes.

That's the reason magicians don't tell you secrets.

So you can live in a wonderful world.

And that's why you should stop explaining the universe, Brian.

It's much funny.

But I'm also fascinated when science and magic start kind of working together.

Because I was wondering with you, Richard, is the first time when you see perhaps magic being taken seriously in the scientific world in, was it the 1970s, where there were various people who were doing conjuring tricks and selling them as things that were actually breaking the laws of physics?

And that seemed to be a time where people went, oh, magic's actually quite important to understand if people are selling it as I'm actually breaking the laws of physics and you have to rewrite them.

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, in the 70s, there was a big sort of increase in paranormal stuff, but then you have the spiritualism stuff before that, and Houdini being skeptical about it.

I think what is interesting is the frame around the magic.

So, Laura is being, to use the phrase, an honest deceiver.

We know that this is a card trick and we're looking for the secret.

There are lots of people who can use the same techniques in a different frame.

You can say, oh, I've got psychic powers.

You can say, I can contact the dead.

You can even perhaps say, oh, I'm reading body language and I'm not doing any of those things.

And what's interesting is you give people an explanation.

And once they've got an explanation, explanation, they're not looking for trickery.

So magicians are really up against it.

We're all looking for trickery, as Laura does that particular effect.

You go along to a psychic and you think, well, this is psychic stuff.

You're not looking for trickery.

It's why their sleight of hand normally is so appalling versus magicians.

You mean the earpiece that a lot of them have?

Sorry.

I remember once years ago, I was making a television show on the make-up truck, and there were about eight or ten people on the make-up truck.

It was a busy morning, a couple of extra extra make-up women in, and a woman came on and said, stood at the doorway and said, Someone in here's got a birthday.

And it wasn't anyone's birthday, but undeterred, she found someone who had a birthday in two weeks' time.

Ten, twelve people in there, and she said, I knew it, I knew it.

And then later on,

one of the makeup girls said, That was amazing.

Wasn't that amazing this morning?

She just came in and went straight up to Laura and said, it's your birthday in two weeks.

I said, she did not do that at all.

That isn't what happened at all.

You want to believe that?

She just came in and fished around for something and only you fell for it.

And it takes one.

Facebook has really spoilt that.

Somebody in here has got a birthday, haven't they?

I mean, one of the things that's quite worrying is just how...

little it takes for people to believe that it's real magic.

So we've been doing lots of scientific studies and looking at the impact that spiritualist demonstrations can have on people's beliefs.

So, to do so, we invite a magician around to come and do a demonstration.

These are usually to a whole group of about a hundred psychology students.

And I introduce the magician.

I say, Yeah, this is a psychic who

I don't know, but it is going to work, but we're going to try some experiments.

And he can then predict some numbers and contact some dead people as well.

And

half the participants, it's just such a great

mix, that isn't it.

Well, it's kind of your Uncle Colin.

And the colour as well.

You're thinking of the colour red.

But the thing that's really worrying is that half the participants in a lot of these studies, they're told that what they are seeing is not real.

They are explicitly told that this is a magician using tricks.

And yet, in the evaluations,

when we ask them, what did you just see?

They exclaim it was a psychic and this was genuine psychic powers.

And at first, we thought, well, maybe they just didn't read the instructions properly.

So we asked them to write the instructions out in their own words.

So they would write, Lee is not a real magician.

He's a member of the magic circle using tricks.

What did you see?

A psychic reading someone's mind.

And what's really worrying about this is that it perpetuates these beliefs in pseudosciences as well.

And we've done this by evaluating their psychic beliefs later on.

And even if they're told that what they are seeing is not real, it can still perpetuate some of these beliefs in psychic experiences.

It's an interesting line, I suppose, you have to walk, isn't it?

Because you're, as you said, you are as a magician exploiting biases or expectations or defects in perception.

Yeah, and none of it matters.

What matters is people have a good time.

I also think that you can have conflicting beliefs that can live in our brain simultaneously.

So, for me, magic is all about a conflict in beliefs.

Like, it's a conflict between the beliefs and what we believe to be possible and the things that you just experience.

So, you know that rabbits can't appear from hats, and yet that's exactly what you've experienced when the magician pulls the rabbit out of the hat.

And we've done neuroimaging work where we scan people's brains whilst they watch a whole range of different magic tricks.

And one of the things that's really interesting is that we get neural activation and areas that are generally activated when we experience other kinds of conflict.

So for example here you may try and listen to what I'm saying but your attention is also being distracted by the person next to you.

So that creates a cognitive conflict and that kind of cognitive conflict activates similar brain areas to when you're watching a magic trick.

So, for me, I think kind of like the core of magic is all about this conflict between the things that we believe to be possible and the things that we've just experienced.

So, part of the enjoyment of it or the stimulation of a magic trick is that you know it's not possible and yet you see it happen.

So, it's that conflict with no suspension of disbelief.

That's that's correct.

And it should teach us humility.

It should teach us that sometimes we can be incredibly confident and hugely wrong.

What about

I'm interested?

Do you find that the more that you've understood magic tricks, the more you've understood conjuring, are there certain things in the world that you can now navigate?

Are there certain things that you see, thinking for all the audience who might not go on to do card tricks, whatever it might be, the pragmatic things of learning about how we perceive and how not being taken in?

I mean, apart from the obvious one, which magic gives you the confidence to go and speak to people, which I think is

something that we're not born with at all.

You know, some people are more introverted, some people are obviously extroverted.

But magic, which is why they always say a lot of young boys start doing magic so they can talk to girls.

That's not how I started, but still, it is one of those things that I think magic, it just is such a wonderful way.

Even if you just do it as a hobby, it's a little, you know, or even just for yourself.

I mean, just the nature of practice in itself is a really good thing to be able to do, to focus.

I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was six years old, so not like now a lot of people are sort of finding out what these things are.

I knew about it since I was a very little girl.

And the doctors told my mum she's not going to do well in school, she's not going to hold down what they called a proper job.

I've actually got that on paper, it says proper job.

I don't know what that meant.

And of course, it was true.

I don't have a proper job.

But what it was, they said that if there's anything she's into that's creative, that it should be encouraged, which is why they always say often learning a musical instrument with someone with ADHD is a really good thing.

But I always say magic.

Magic is that thing.

Because you have to do the same thing thing over and over and over again until you get it right.

And when you do,

it's such a great feeling.

It's an amazing thing to know that once you've nailed it, you go out there and you actually perform this thing that you've been practicing to someone.

They haven't seen how you've done it, but more than that, they've enjoyed it and they've had that sense of wonder.

It's such an amazing feeling.

Could you imagine your life without magic?

Oh no, it's all I've ever done.

I've never known any other world and I didn't get into it, you know, because I had someone in my family show me a magic trick.

I mean, I did it because I had to.

You know, when I saw that first magic trick, that run rabbit run,

I'm looking for something to do, and that was it.

And so I've never, never not done it.

And no, I can't imagine my world without magic.

I love it.

I love the history of magic.

I worked in the library at the magic circle.

We have thousands, 13,000 books in that place alone full of secrets.

I mean,

there's never a moment where you're not going to be able to study something in magic, that's for certain.

You'll never be bored.

I don't lost tricks in there.

There's so many books.

Could you imagine going and looking through there and finding a trick that you didn't know about?

You didn't know about it.

Oh, that's very, very.

Yeah, that's what magicians do.

They go back to 1910, 1905, they find something, they fall magicians with it, and everyone goes, oh my goodness, amazing, you invented that.

And you go, you know, it's 120 years old.

That's fairly kind of common.

It's incredible.

One of my favorite things to do is we also have magic magazines and quite a lot of them.

And they've been going for over 100 years, some of them.

And they always say, if you want to hide a secret in magic, you know, publish it in a magazine, which is what a lot of magicians have done.

And I've made a thing of collecting them all, and I'm trying to look through them all.

And the gems you find that was invented and created by a man nobody's heard of, you know, in 1890, and you suddenly go, wow, gosh, that's amazing.

And then you do it.

And then you show another magician, they go, oh, wow, you've just invented that.

You go, no.

Actually, it was invented over a hundred years ago.

And that's how the skilled kind of magic that, you know, that we all know as you know, pulling rabbits out of hat, using misdirection, cards, all of those sort of more commonly known things in magic, have been around for a long time.

And I wouldn't say there's an awful lot that's now new in that world.

Only in presentation is new.

I'd read about one the other Harry Houdini, 1920s.

He'd be locked into, he'd arrive at a city and to get some publicity be asked to be locked into a jail cell.

And in Glasgow, he was locked into a cell and he got lock picks on him and he worked for two and a half hours and he couldn't pick the lock.

And he's sweating, and he's confused, and he's panicking.

It's the first time his life is going to fail.

And he leans against the door, and it swings open, and it's never been locked.

So, the great magician is trapped by his own assumptions.

So, yeah, magicians are forward in that way, but also that's a kind of new thing, and you find it.

I think that's kind of interesting.

We could do something with that.

So, like Laura said, you know, get into magic, you will never be bored.

Alan, apart from killing pot plants with the seven of diamonds, making Jonathan Creek, and I know you made a documentary about Houdini as well, did you find going into that world and researching that world, did that change any of your presumptions about what was around you?

I took Creek's attitude on board, which is you don't want to know how it's done.

It's really dull.

Once you know how it's done, don't ask.

Even with Houdini?

It's a trick.

Houdini was slightly different because it's really about the illusions.

And also for him, he was like an athlete, really.

So So, a lot of it was physical endurance.

He could hold his breath for a very long time, he could endure cold temperatures, he was immensely strong.

But I really found that I became very cynical, like creekers, extremely cynical.

Every time I see a magician, I think, okay, what are you doing here?

You're fooling me, don't tell me how you do it.

But please, and I'm like, you know, of course, you're not reading my mind.

No, you're not in two places at once.

So I became quite dry and cynical about magic generally.

And that worked, that helped very, very much in playing the role.

So we asked our audience a question what magic trick would you most like to be able to perform and why?

What have you got there Brian?

This one is I would like to be able to turn blank pieces of paper into £50 notes.

Why?

Because I'm an accountant.

I'd like to be able to diss a pear because I don't really like pears.

I've got abra cadabra.

My husband not only listens to me but agrees with everything I say.

Clearly he doesn't, Ruthie.

I'd like to turn my children into spider plants until they're 18.

Spider plants are low maintenance and just need water and don't answer back.

There's a level of negativity in terms of a lot of people in the audience tonight.

Family life has not worked out for them.

There's some more for you.

Vivian says, which magic trick would he most like to be able to perform a wife to transform myself into a new particle so Brian can discover me for himself.

I love it when people use the joke sheet for flirting.

And

is there a phone number?

There's directions to the row and the seat.

Turn water into wine because drinks can only get better.

Magically reverse entropy so that things can only get better.

The ability to breathe underwater indefinitely because things can only get wetter.

Thank you very much to our panel, Gustave Kuhn, Laura London, Richard Wiseman, and Alan Davis.

Anyway, in

the next thrilling episode, I'm very pleased we are going to be dealing with something that always puts a big smile on Brian's face, and that is we will be dealing with the potential for all life on earth to be destroyed.

Does make you happy, that doesn't it?

Entirely fair.

Actually, to be fair, that is not.

Well, one, it's a lie because you always have a big smile on your face, it's very much your angle.

But also, two, it's not really the thing that makes you happiest.

Any regular listeners know the thing that really makes Brian happy is imagining the end of all life in the universe, as well as the loss of all structure and form.

And so, it's nothing more than an inactive sea of particles.

You love a heat death, love you.

He loves a heat death.

Who's up for a heat death?

Hello.

Thanks very much.

Bye-bye.

In the infinite monkey cage.

Till now, nice again.

Hi, I'm Kiri Pritcher-McLean.

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