Christmas Special 2017: The Science of Magic

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

When the lows of bipolar depression feel dark, capillita is a chance to let in the light.

Capillita, lumeteparone, is available by prescription only and can be taken alone or with lithium or Velproate.

Unlike some medicines that only treat bipolar 1, Capillita is proven to deliver significant symptom relief from both bipolar 1 and 2 depression.

And in clinical trials, movement disorders and weight gain were not common.

Caplita can cause serious side effects.

Call your doctor about sudden mood changes, behaviors, or suicidal thoughts right away.

Antidepressants may increase these risks in young adults.

Elderly dementia patients have increased risk of death or stroke.

Caplita is not approved for dementia-related psychosis or for people under 18.

Report fever, stiff muscles, or confusion, which may be life-threatening, or uncontrollable muscle movements, which may be permanent.

High cholesterol and weight gain may occur, as can high blood sugar, which may be fatal.

Monitoring is recommended.

These aren't all the serious side effects.

Most common side effects include sleepiness, dizziness, nausea, and dry mouth.

Ask your doctor about Kaplita.

Visit capillita.com or call 888-252-4824.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of C-Foam motor treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Available everywhere.

Automotive products are sold.

Seafoam!

Ah, the Florida Coast.

Verbo has over 57,000 exclusive vacation homes on the Florida coast that Airbnb wishes they had.

That's 57,000 exclusive perfect sunsets for your teen to miss because they're on their phone.

57,000 exclusive patios where grandpa can man the barbecue in his kiss me I'm flamous apron.

57,000 exclusive hideouts to gleefully ignore your email.

Make it a Verbo for your next Florida coast trip.

This is the BBC.

Hello, I'm Robin Inks.

And I'm Brian Cox.

And it is the Monkey Cage Christmas special.

And because it is Christmas, we are talking about the magic of science and the science of magic.

Now, of course, science has been magical really since the beginning of the 20th century when it became silly with quantum physics.

And that made the universe quite inexplicable, so things were dead and alive, and then other stuff was in no positions and in all positions.

And that is probably why telepathy is possible and also why I can bend spoons with my mind.

Dribble, is it?

The introduction is based on a complete misunderstanding of quantum mechanics, not surprisingly.

Imagine you have a turkey in the oven, and the on-off switch is connected via a Geiger counter to a radioactive nucleus that can decay.

Now, the wave function of the turkey can be written as a linear superposition of two orthogonal states.

We call them alive and dead.

In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, you'd collapse the wave function of the turkey into one of the eigenstates, alive or dead, when you open it.

And that is how you're cooking your turkey, isn't it?

That is your, I reckon I can usurp Mary Berry with my ideas of cookery.

Well, no, it's precise.

450 Kelvin temperatures, about

0.0388 electron volts.

It's fine.

Brian has a very large oven that is underneath most of Switzerland.

Does no one cook their turkey with the temperatures measured in electron volts?

I think it's a more fundamental unit of temperature than degrees Celsius.

If you would like to get any of Brian Cox's recipe cards, they're available on CFACS page 367.

Today, we will be looking at the biology, chemistry, and psychology that goes into creating magic tricks.

What is the easiest way to fool a human?

What is the easiest way to fool a physicist?

Has our our ability to see through illusion changed over time?

And because it is Christmas, we have a traditional variety bill of comedians, actors, conjurers, and Hebrew Bible scholars.

Because they were often cut out of the Sunday night at the London Palladium, but there would always be recorded after Brucey, a Hebrew Bible scholar.

It would always be, now please welcome to Tap Dance and explain Leviticus, the Rabbi Lionel Blue.

Anyway,

today's panel is.

I'm Professor Richard Wiseman, psychologist.

And would you like to hear about my favourite magic trick?

Yes, good.

My favourite magic, it's more of a stunt that people can perform at home.

You basically say to your kid,

go under the table, and I'm going to knock on the table three times.

And if you can stay under there while I'm knocking on the table, you get a hundred pounds.

And your kid goes under the table and you knock twice and then just walk away.

Favourite Favourite magic for me?

Christmas Day tip.

I'm Diane Morgan, I'm an actress, and controversially, I don't enjoy magic.

Hi, I'm Francesca Stavakopoulo.

I'm a professor of Bible at Exeter University.

And my favourite magic trick is Sutti's version of cutting a woman in two because it's less misogynistic than the human version.

And I am Andy Nyman, and I am an actor and a writer, and a director, and I dabble in a bit of magic.

Sorry, Diane.

I'm sure it's very good.

I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be too sure.

And my, I mean, I'm it's sort of obvious to say it, but I would think that my favourite magic trick is bizarrely called the infinite monkey card trick.

That was why I did you, I presumed that's why this show was called the Infinite Monkey Cage, was after the mystery of what was called the Infinite Monkey card.

No, it's because Radio 4 said they were going to call it top geek unless we thought of anything else.

Well, then, that is.

There's no way I'm going to be a faux Hammond.

Well,

so, well, that is my favorite trick, I think, because it's a sort of within magic there are perfect mysteries that you hear about.

And that was always, it was a sort of music hall one that it was, it's quite, it was quite a high-risk trick because the audience would boo.

That was part of it if it went wrong, and it was the odds genuinely were not infinite, that was just for the drama.

But the odds were always stacked very highly against the magician.

So, as someone who hates magic, Diane, if you were to name a card, but just the value of a card, like Ace, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, jack, queen, or a card.

You're to pick a number.

Yeah, that's what you're saying.

Right, I've picked one, and that is oh, you wanna to know?

Well, this would be what it would be.

This is what the infinite.

Eight.

So, Brian, what your job would be would be to say red, to choose red or black.

So we know the card would be an eight now.

So would that be a red eight or a black eight?

Red.

A red eight, you sure?

So then you would pick someone else as well now.

Francesca then.

Okay, so we know it's a red eight, so it would be hearts or diamonds.

Diamond.

So you'd have eight of diamonds and that would be the card that the audience would choose and then potentially that could go very wrong I do have a pack of cards right here right by you you should probably close your eyes if you hate just for the radio listeners he does have a pack of cards I do

And it's a pack of cards that's been right by Francesca all the time.

I didn't even notice it.

That's magic.

So look, I'm going to, the audience can't see too much.

You said the eight red diamonds.

So if I go through them, and Francesca, you can verify on mic as I go through.

They are, A, they are all different.

There's the Eight of Diamonds.

Just pop your finger on top of that, and I'll go through.

There isn't another Eight of Diamonds

for the radio audience.

No.

Yeah.

The Eight of Diamonds has been selected and placed on the table, and Francesca's finger is on it.

So here's the really interesting thing.

If, as an audience, you would have said Jack of Hearts, you could have come to Jack of Hearts.

Written, I took this deck this morning, and on the back of that card, in big letters, I wrote the word boo.

You see, the audience could boo if it was that.

The nine of booze is written on that.

Boo.

It's written on that card.

The three of spades is the next one, written on the back of that in big letters, boo.

In fact, Francesca and everybody else and listeners who cannot see.

On the back of every single card, it says boo, boo, boo, boo, boo, right the way through.

It's a load of booze.

It's a load of boos.

I say every single card.

There is one card under your finger.

Do you want to just pick that card up, turn it over and read out what it says on the back?

The infinite monkey card.

Yeah!

And this is our panel!

Oh,

I know it's a trick, but I can't work out how.

Anyway, so, wait, let's start with you, Richard.

Now, first of all, I suppose one of the things where sometimes magic and science has been some confusion is, say, for instance, ideas of spoon bending, or perhaps sometimes people who are able to draw the same picture of someone else is not in the same room.

Now, is it done by a trick, or is it breaking the laws of physics?

It's the same as magic.

It's breaking the laws of physics.

It's like magicians.

Magicians pretend that the things are trickery, but actually they have genuine magical abilities.

So they'll talk about mirrors and smoke, but it's not that.

They actually can make objects appear and disappear with the power of their mind.

And that's no one's ever said that on national radio before.

So I'm quite proud of that position.

No, it's what you're talking about is psychic trickery.

And this is to do with a psychological phenomenon called framing.

So if you go along to a magician, you're looking out for trickery, which means that it's quite hard to fool people.

But when you go along to see someone who claims to be psychic or a medium or so on, you're not looking out for the trickery.

And so, the tricks of the psychic trade can be terrible and obvious and still quite effective.

And that really annoys magicians.

So, yes, basically, you're looking at the same sort of trickery, but through a very different frame.

So, Andy, what do you think it is in terms of where we do see magic tricks sometimes becoming ideas of paranormal abilities?

If it is something like being able to use presumed telekinetic power to, you know, bend some cutlery, that is seen as possibly persuasive.

But if someone pretended that they really could cut a woman in half and then put her back together, somehow people would not then go, I presume they have magic powers.

What is the level sometimes of what might appear to be a trick that can work to

convince people of paranormal abilities?

I think it is a really interesting question.

One of the things that's amazing about magic as an art form

is that when an audience goes to see what

a magic show, they're sort of complicit in the game

because they understand the rules.

And the rules are the person that's on stage, we know it's not legitimate what they're doing, and they go along with the plot, and they go along.

And there are people, all joking aside, like Diane, who don't like magic, who feel that being fooled or is a sort of annoyance.

And I told you.

It's more magicians rather than

you're not going to have an argument over that.

No,

they're so needy.

Yeah.

Please love me.

Yeah, yeah.

But I think that the audience is absolutely complicit in it and they're happy to go along with that.

Where the rules start to change is when it starts to get really interesting because that's where either the pseudo-psychic world, the spiritualist world, or the mentalism, which is sort of a lot of the work that I've done, the sort of faux mind reading, let's call it that, sort of world, is really interesting.

And that becomes a slightly more dangerous world

because the power that the performer has over the audience is a very different sort of power, and it's an easier power to abuse.

It's always fascinated me how magicians go into that world

and oddly they treat it exactly the same as they would sawing a woman in half.

They don't see a lot of magicians don't see morally that there's any difference in their responsibility when they're performing mind-reading magic or psychic magic or bizarre magic is another branch that involves sort of speaking to the dead or things telekinetically moving or whatever.

Whereas I think that the moral weight is hugely different, but it sort of comes down to each performer's choice.

If I pick up on the word, you said it's a more dangerous area.

In what sense do you mean that?

Do you mean it is a dangerous thing to have people believe in?

I think it is because, you know, I've worked with Derren Brown.

We've written, you know, I've worked with Derren for 20 years and we

collaborated with Derren and between us we created, I worked on, did the first 10 years of the TV with Derren and then on the, I've done most of the stage shows, created them.

And

it's a constant ongoing source of moral decisions that you're having to make within that material.

Because you have to be very careful about what you want people to believe.

And you have to be very careful that you're not replacing one set of lies with another dangerous set of lies.

So Diane, do you when obviously we've now found out that

you're not keen on magicians, but the magic trick itself,

do you want it explained?

Does it annoy you when you see something done?

I mean that that card trick that Andy did is is is brilliant.

It appears to be simple.

It's just a pack of cards and I got kind of like there's a oh but what's the trick?

And then other people just sit back and go, well, that's, I know it was a trick somewhere, it doesn't matter.

Yeah.

There's a kind of jury.

The problem is that I have a lack of curiosity.

Sort of don't care.

Like, he could, I mean, that trick was great, you know, but you could disappear in front of me right now, and I'd still feel dead inside.

And is that just me?

No, it's not just us all magicians.

Francesca,

as a Bible scholar, as an atheist Bible scholar, did you find from the moment that you started investigating the Bible, there was always this curiosity of going, hang on a minute, right?

So you look at, say, the party in the Red Sea or walking on water,

you know, water into wine, that you would always think, right, well, what could be the logical version of why this might be presumed?

I mean, was that has that always been part of a kind of natural scepticism?

Um no, not not in a sense of thinking that it's logical.

It was always why is this being hailed as something that's unique and exclusive to Christianity or to the Bible when actually all these kinds of myths and miracles were really common in all the different sorts of religions throughout the ancient Near East?

Why are the miracles present in the Bible?

Is it just to say this is a special person?

As you said, it's common to many religions.

So

do they all have a different function narratively, or are they just there as a

some?

I mean, some are basically extended healing rituals.

So things like Jesus curing blindness by using his spit on the eyes of someone who's blind or kind of enabling the lame to walk, all of those things were being done anyway.

So magic meant, and the word magic is quite a kind of, we tend to think of it as quite a derogatory or pejorative term, but

especially Diane.

So, but there's a sense in which it was just a part of this much broader, richer religious world in which things were understood to the laws of reality as we understand them in the modern West were very different from the way in which ancient people understood them.

And so substances could have magical properties that could be transferred from one person or an object to another.

So when you know Jesus, if all the claims that are being made about him by his earliest followers, if they were to be taken seriously, then he had to kind of, it's almost like a tick box of functions that kind of divine men and magic men had to have.

You know, Honey the circle drawer, one of my personal favorites, he literally used to draw circles and stand in them.

But, you know, Jesus doesn't do that, but he does the walking on water thing, which is what some gods did.

He does the raising of the dead thing, which is what Elijah does in the Hebrew Bible.

So it's kind of like a tick box exercise.

Why was he joining circles and standing in them?

Because it was like to protect him and other people from demons.

All right.

Which makes sense.

They don't like corners.

No, it's true.

They don't like corners.

Yeah.

So quite often you find, in a lot of Mesopotamian households, you find

incantations written on pottery vessels that have been buried in the corners of houses because it's it's damaging.

It kind of the demon is kind of almost sucked into the bowl and into the corner, and they're trapped.

If they're in a circle, they can just keep creating havoc.

If they're in a corner, they can get trapped and you can get rid of them.

A bit like

a little bit like the thing that the trap that they put the ghosts in in ghostbusters, but not as scientific.

Andy, I know you

study a lot, I think, about the history of magic.

So, does are the origins of magic in entertainment or are they in this rather darker sort of world

there's a couple of different worlds really and they do cross over quite a lot and

I think I just wanted to pick up on something you were saying there that I think is really interesting is that

magic conjuring really rudimentary bas the most basic

are still used um shamans still use them all the time you know bringing bringing through a port in the clumsiest of ways, you know.

And

quite a lot of the cult leaders over the years have used very basic mind-reading tricks and very basic spiritual style tricks to convince people.

And again, it goes full circle to what Richard was saying: is that when sort of, you know, when people want to believe something, when you take, when you go through a different frame,

it's so convincing.

Because you don't want to see how simple it is, you know, you just want the answer because it's giving an answer to the darkest, biggest, most all-consuming questions that we have.

And if some me personally, if I could go, I mean, I've seen loads of mediums and spiritualists, and it's always

wretched and clumsy and depressing.

And the most depressing thing of all to me is that I'd love it to be real.

I'd love to sit there and think, okay, I don't know what's going on now, or to get a message that you think

I need to just sort of reframe and restart re-questioning, because that's sort of where my scepticism really comes from, is that it's just

if you could have proper proof, if it could be unquestionable, then everything could sort of change.

Is that Richard?

Is that for you?

Do you think sometimes that skeptics, you know, like Andy, some of that skepticism is actually because you really would love it to be,

to have this level of magical possibilities.

And the fact that very often it seems to be linked to charlatanism is the level of disappointment.

So, in fact, some of the keenest sceptics are the ones who really go, oh, wouldn't it be amazing if this really could pass through this table?

No.

You know what?

If I'd written your answer on a card, that is what I'd have written as well.

I mean, it would be lovely, I guess.

And magicians like being fooled.

I mean, there's a type of magic which only fools magicians and doesn't fool non-magicians, which is a bizarre moment if you're in the audience, because you go as a magician, wow, that's amazing, and everyone around you goes, it's really obvious.

And that's performed at magic conventions.

So magicians like being fooled.

So I think they would enjoy the challenge and enjoy the moment of a sort of genuine miracle.

But I just think that deep down as a magician, you're always sort of looking for the threads and the trapdoors and so on.

I suppose my question to Diane, though, given your deep-seated scepticism about, understandably so, about magicians, if the Son of God was to come back and offer to perform a miracle, would you be interested in that?

Do I know that it's the Son of God?

Or is he just some bloke?

Has he said, hello, I'm the Son of God?

Because if he has, I'll probably say, oh, I've got to get a bus.

Is there anything that would impress you on the magical front, given that the Son of God doesn't?

If someone levitated in front of me now, I'd be impressed.

Do it, Richard.

Do it.

No, it'd be back to him.

But Diane, you made a series recently through Radio 4 called Diane Morgan Believes in Ghosts.

Is that a correct statement?

I love a ghost.

But do you believe in ghosts?

I think I really want to believe that there are ghosts.

A bit like you, I'd really love to think that they were real.

Because I grew up with like

Arthur C.

Clarke and Tales of the Unexpected, and I think that must have gone into my head somehow.

Plus, I'm not religious, but I do need something to believe in.

So I think I just cling to ghosts in the hope that we carry on as a sort of gas.

Did you

find

anything

that convinced you that there may be such a thing or see something or hear stories that you couldn't explain?

Yeah, when I was a little girl, I saw a weird shadow, and I felt that someone was watching me.

And I think since that moment, I felt that

I can't explain what it was.

It was such a strong feeling.

Richard, what is the

explanation?

Because many people have these sorts of experiences,

alien abduction or seeing ghosts, etc.

So don't lock me in with the alien lot.

That's different.

I put them in the same box.

No.

The irrational box with the bow on the the top.

What is the the the standard explanation?

Because many people, perhaps the majority of people, have some sort of experience that they can't explain and then attach something and say it's a ghost or whatever it is.

Well, there's all sorts of psychological mechanisms.

So so the most common one is the notion of waking up and and and feeling there's some kind of entity pushing you down, which might be an alien if you believe in aliens, or ghosts if you believe in ghosts and so on.

And that's sleep paralysis, which is when you're asleep and when you're dreaming, you're paralyzed in in order that you don't act out the dream and hurt yourself.

And then, as you come through to waking state, some of that paralysis comes with you, and then your brain tries to make sense of why you can't move.

So, we know some of the sort of psychological mechanisms behind it, but it's all right saying that.

But when those things happen to you, they're really convincing, which is why you've got about a third of the population believing this stuff.

So, there are some sort of psychology underlying it.

Francesca, I suppose in our culture now, in the 21st century,

religion

seems to me to be the receptacle for this kind of thought.

So, we all, just as human beings, like magic and mystery and the unknown.

And

so, would that be a fair characterization of your entire field of study?

But

the question is:

is that the acceptable face of mystery now?

There are real similarities with, you know, as Andy was saying, between religion and magic.

There's not much difference between them.

It's all about imagined realities.

And our ancestors, you know, right the way back, even into Paleolithic times, there seems to be some evidence for our human ancestors having some sense of an alternate reality in which they were making contact with perhaps their dead ancestors or something.

So things like handprints on the walls in caves suggest some kind of attempt to communicate with another realm.

And we do have these, you know, particularly when it comes to talking to the dead, religion is a really useful place to put all of that stuff.

So, within the Western world, Christianity is the dominant religion, and there we have this sense of an afterlife, some kind of heavenly existence, some kind of, you know, the soul continues, but the body is kind of left behind.

But there's a sense in which what that's doing is reflecting the fact that as human beings, we are deeply, deeply social, and it's our sociality that makes us who we are.

And we can't break off the bonds, our social links, if you like, with those who have gone before us.

Is it necessary, Richard,

that the human beings have to have a sense of mystery?

Is it part of what it means to be human?

I think mystery is very important

to most people.

I also think there's that sense of hope.

I mean,

that people have terrible lives, and sometimes.

And so, the notion there's someone who can magically cure you or magically speak to a loved one who's passed on is just psychologically really appealing.

And so, you don't go in there being very sceptical.

You go in there wanting to believe.

So, you know, if you had a bad back and you went to your doctor and he or she said, What's the problem?

And well, you're the expert, you tell me.

It doesn't work like that.

You work together to try and work out what the problem is and how you can move forward.

And I think that's very similar to going to a psychic.

You want this stuff to be true.

You're working with that person.

Dan, do you find

when you decided to make the programme about ghosts, do you recognize

the same feelings?

It is necessary for you as a person to have an element of the unknown, an element of mystery.

Definitely, I don't think I could

get through life without it.

I need to cling to that.

I don't know what it is.

And even though I know it's completely irrational,

I still,

like earlier in the year,

I was in the kitchen and in another room.

The radio came on on its own, and my first thought wasn't electrical fault, it was ghost.

But do we need, is it because we need something, or some people need something inexplicable?

So if you could actually prove there were ghosts that would no longer be what was required by people who believed in ghosts because something that can't be because I was thinking in terms of you know Andy when you were saying the need for mystery now there is mystery over how we will ever unite gravity and quantum mechanics for a theory of everything but that doesn't fulfil our desire to believe in Bigfoot or ghosts or telepathy.

Because one of them it appears we have a way that through experimentation we might get to some kind of next stage conclusion.

Whereas ghosts allows you to have a variety of interpretations.

And so I wonder if each time a mystery, then that mystery would not fulfill the desire that people needed.

So if they say we've found out the ghosts,

there's the

I think it does though, actually.

When you think about some of the more mysterious objects in the universe, black holes and things.

And Carl Sagan.

You don't count.

This is a totally different thing.

You saying I feel fulfilled by Hawking radiation, I accept.

But you are very much in a minority.

I was about to say, I mean, you know, Carl Sagan, that wonderful quote where he said, somewhere out there, there's something wonderful waiting to be known.

I think that is the driving force behind a lot of scientific inquiry, that you enjoy standing on the border between the known and the unknown.

That's what I'm saying.

But I think that's a different thing, because what you're doing is you're trying to go, and I'm going to get an answer.

Whereas the other one says, I may have various experiences, but actually having a definite, actually going, it has now been proved, then it loses its potency as mystery.

I can't believe we've got this far on the show and we haven't even mentioned Ali Bongo.

This is meant to be about magic.

We've gone so off subject and made it so much easier to get those letters of complaint.

But no, I just wondered whether anyone had that idea of the need for something which will not be explained in our life.

When we have, we look at the world at the moment and it is very hard to actually say the idea there is specific meaning, the idea of some of the political things that we've seen seems so inexplicable that you kind of want to believe that maybe there is no explanation, but there is something wonderful and it may not be Hawking radiation or...

I I think when you listen to I mean if you go and see a magician and then you you go home and tell your friends what's happened, the worst possible thing is for them to tell you the solution to the magic trick and you think I'm one idiot for not saying so next time you tell the story you you cut out their their you know you say oh no no no he checked under the box there are no mirrors and so on and I think it's the same with ghost stories that as you tell and retell you're sort of setting up this scenario which is impossible and and I think that's that's at the root of it you you want to experience something for which there could be no explanation.

It makes you a very special person.

And also keeps this kind of sense of mystery going.

So I think that's true.

As a science-based Radio 4 show, this has really gone quite wonky for Christmas, hasn't it?

This is.

Well, I could bring it back by asking Andy when he's designing, when you're designing a trick or an illusion.

Yeah.

There's presumably often engineering involved in that.

There's art.

There's also something that's.

Yeah, there's a really interesting gift that magic has given me is it allows a sort of profound lateral thinking and a profound level of problem solving.

Because what you do is, it's all a good, everything's a good story.

You know, a good magic trick is just like any other good story.

It's got an intriguing beginning, hopefully not too boring a middle, and an excellent twist or an excellent ending.

And you have to reverse engineer a lot of the time when you're creating, and the hardest part is coming up with the plot.

And very often, the plot will be something that's utterly impossible or seemingly utterly impossible.

And then the task is, how can I take the rules that I know and understand and make something appear impossible with that?

And what's really interesting after a while, it has enabled me in life

not with magic at all, but with problem solving and problem solving within life.

And I think that you know, anybody who is thinking of getting their, I mean, I realize this is going out on Christmas, but anyone who's got a magic set for Christmas or is thinking of giving someone a magic set, or thinking of getting into magic as a hobby, aside from what an entertaining thing it is to do, there are profound life lessons that really do come with it after a while if you persist with it.

And I find that a really interesting and unexpected gift that

it's given me over the years.

In terms of lateral thinking, we can actually try something if you like.

Andy's absolutely right.

Magic is full of wonderful examples of that.

And we can try something for the listeners who are listening in.

I handed you a prediction actually before, Robin, somewhere a piece of paper there.

And we'll try this with Francesca, if I may.

If you can clear your mind.

That's quite hard for me to do, to be honest.

And then think of any number between 1 and 100.

So absolutely up to you what number, Francesca,

you think of.

All right, okay.

So hopefully you have that number in your mind.

And I didn't ask you to think of a number before.

I'd haven't come over there, whispered anything to you.

What number do you have in mind?

74.

74.

Okay.

And seriously, that just came into your mind.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

So, Robin, if you could open the prediction I made before the show, and it says, hopefully.

74.

Amazing.

So.

That's amazing.

Just to explain to the picture.

Diane is actually amazed.

I just want to say to listeners, it really has got 74 written on this piece of paper.

That's what I just explained.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So the folks listening in, I hope are sort of scratching their heads.

We didn't talk about it before.

I didn't ask you to come over there and ask you to think of 74.

That was a genuine prediction, all that.

And it's sort of how magic works.

And people at home now listening to this will be really quite annoyed that they don't know the solution when we all do here.

And

welcome to magic, basically.

I think that is exactly as Andy says.

It is a phenomenal skill set because you have to sit at home practicing a lot.

You've got to be to some extent socially skilled, although you wouldn't know it from most magicians' performances.

And then you've got to keep a secret, and you've got to be able to say one thing and do something else.

So, for example, you've got to be able to ask someone to think of a number between one and a hundred whilst holding up a piece of paper that says, please say 74.

And something that can't, all the elements of this radio show that can't really be expressed properly, one of them for the listeners at home is the utter glee on Richard Wiseman's face as he thinks of the three minutes that you've been at home going, but how did he do it?

He's really delighted in your personal agony.

Now, this is one of the things that, as a psychologist, you were a conjurer first, went to a magician first, then you became a psychologist.

Did one lead directly to the other?

As you watched the way that you could fool people, as you watch that, because so much of creating a magic trick, I presume, is knowing how a human mind is likely to work in different social situations.

Yeah, I mean, magicians are phenomenal psychologists.

They're much better psychologists than psychologists.

So if I do an experiment, we did, I don't know, some memory experiment, it would probably work on, at best, say, 80% of the audience.

And psychologists would go, yes, result.

And that's great.

Magicians can't come out and fool 80% of the people and say, that's a good night.

I mean, I know 20% of the people that worked it out, but still, majority.

Whoa, result.

That's a bad night.

So magicians have to think: how is somebody sitting in the audience thinking?

How are they feeling?

In order to fool a bunch of strangers night after night under tricky conditions.

So they really understand psychology.

So that's why I got into psychology.

Is it easier to fool someone with a trick if they certainly believe that they're very smart?

So perhaps someone who is

a professor or whatever it might be, that actually it's easier

to fool them because they are so certain that they can't be fooled, that they will see through you, that you are able to distract them with greater ease.

I think to some extent, I mean, magic often depends on assumptions.

So that the folks at home a while ago were probably assuming I wasn't holding up a piece of paper, no one would be that idiotic.

So, so it's about assumptions.

So, what would they assume it said on the paper?

Well, if they knew I was holding it up, then I assume they'd think it said, please say 74.

But I don't think that thought entered most people's minds.

I just think you wouldn't think like that unless you're sort of a magical thinker.

So, I think it's about assumptions.

And it is true that, quotes, bright people make more assumptions.

I've always wondered about hypnotism.

Do you have to be susceptible?

Because I don't think I'd be able to be hypnotized.

Can you hypnotise someone?

Yes.

Oh, can you?

Can you hypnotise me?

Well, I just did actually.

And it's been an hour since you've just come back.

And it all went very well.

Hypnotism is slightly different.

I mean, there's a lot of debate about it.

You have the sort of state hypnotist group that go, oh, you're in a weird state.

And then what's called the role-playing group that are saying, oh, no, you're just sort of playing the role of a hypnotised person.

I've never tried it.

I've never tried it.

But we can give it a go.

Actually, it's illegal on the radio.

We're not allowed to do the induction procedure, I think, on the radio.

I believe that's the case.

So, unfortunately, not.

No, no.

Why?

In case we hypnotise the entire nation.

I think we've definitely taken them to a different state with this show so far.

So you're saying that you could do something now, and we could hypnotise the entire nation, change their behavior completely, and then wake them all up again?

Yes.

Right.

So I know you've got a plan for at least 52% of them, haven't you, Brian?

So

that can't go out.

That can't go out.

And if you don't know why I said that, you don't follow his Twitter feed.

He's obsessed.

I wondered on this side really,

whether either, Francesca or Annie, that intriguing moment that happens, where there was a point in our culture where science and magic were united, where, for instance, people like John Dee or even Isaac Newton, they are both preeminent scientists as we would consider them now in terms of it, but also their exploration was mystical as well.

They were dealing with, and that's a lot of what drove what we now see as scientific imagination was also a kind of mystical imagination.

You know, when do we see, is there a point that either you could kind of define where that branches off and they become separate issues?

Well, I'm I'm not clever enough to be able to talk about that stuff but what is amazing to me about the invention stuff is the pursuit of an extraordinary idea and how you have to problem solve to get to it.

So that to me is the sort of the magical thinking of that is to take an idea that you were saying before Brian that thing of standing on the edge of something in the pursuit of trying to find an answer to an impossible.

I think that's that's that sort of thinking but other than than that, I'm not that's not really my

Newton was that one of the great biographies is called The Last of the Magicians because he was an alchemist as well.

Although, I suppose alchemy at the time we didn't know enough to know that you couldn't transmute elements, turn lead into gold.

I mean, you actually, you can actually now with particle beams and things like that.

You know, you can do that.

And we know how the elements were synthesized.

So, but I think that you're talking about someone who was on the cusp, the change between that rather more the early, we're talking about 1680 in the sense of Newton.

And I suppose that's the end of the magical world and the beginnings of the scientific world.

Do you see that in?

Yeah, I mean, to a certain extent, people like John Dee, they were deeply, deeply religious.

So there was no sort of conflict between a religious worldview and a magical worldview.

And a lot of John Dee's activities were lifted straight from the Bible.

So things like trying to communicate with the dead or with spirits or prophecy and astrology and what do I mean, astronomy?

Astrology.

I always move these books to the astrology section.

Oh, okay, good.

If you've been to any charity shops recently in Exeter or Plymouth, I've moved all of them.

And they're right next to a load of books about crop circles.

Because if you think about it, at the time,

there was no difference really.

I mean, Newton is a good example because he was the first to explain

how the planets moved in terms of a full mathematical framework.

And even today, scientists still use the sort of

glory of the universe to justify a belief in God, this idea that there must be some kind of divine mind behind it to make these sorts of things possible.

Well, the origin of the laws of nature is one of the great mysteries.

The fact that we live in an ordered universe that is amenable to our

intellect,

a universe that we can understand at a fundamental level, is

one of the great mysteries.

We don't know the answer to that.

And that's why I go back to the idea that, as Andy had said, I think that the pursuit and the delighting in mystery and delighting in the unknown is clearly fundamental because every human being does it.

And

even scientists do it, but they do it in a different way because they seek out the unknown on the assumption that they'll be able to understand it.

And that is one of the great thrills of magic conjuring is being able

to watch an audience

when magic really works,

when the trick is just unfathomable.

It's like watching a bomb go off because you feel this,

no,

you know, what?

And that's so rare because, you know, just look at what our phones do, what we can, you know, the magic that we, you know, that we walk around and take for granted and travel and fly and do this and do that, and yet someone taking a bottle and putting it through the table in front of you, or someone doing some extraordinary thing to a whole audience that takes them on a journey, and the finale of that show is like

mind-blowing.

That's a really special, unique, rare thing that works on so many complicated levels.

One of which I believe is we, as an audience, know,

well, I know that that that's not actual magic, but

whatever thinking is going on is something I am not privy to, and that's an extraordinary thing that's just shifted.

Yeah, I mean, Richard Wiseman holding up a piece of paper saying, please say 74 to Francesca.

And then she said it.

But hold on a second, because he did take me somewhere magic.

If you deconstruct what he did, there's actually brilliant thinking in that.

Yes, that's correct.

But there really, really is, because there are lots of levels in that that are, the first thing is, as an effect for an audience, that really will have worked for an audience at home.

And secondly, the language that Richard used to make it work is really clever because I didn't come over there.

I didn't ask you to do it before.

I didn't say to you, would you just play along and say 74.

All of those things are true, and linguistically,

it's easy to sort of

belittle.

I'm not saying you are belittling it, but it's easy to sort of, because Richard sort of did it as a joke,

but actually within that joke are really sophisticated things happening to make it work.

And socially.

So consider yourselves told off.

But I liked it as well because it was also very polite.

It said, please say 75.

But it really hit, because that made me socially complicit.

I then felt obliged to say 75.

It was actually terrifying doing it because you stared straight ahead.

I was holding up this notice.

I didn't think you'd read it.

You had to give it him a notice.

I had to be, yeah.

Oh, okay.

I was trying to think of a number.

But what's also interesting is about how simple magic secrets are.

That's why magicians keep them from you.

So the people at home, just hearing that little prediction there, will be going, Oh my gosh, I wonder how he did that.

And then you find out, oh, Richard just held up a piece of paper, and that kind of removes everything.

It removes everything from it.

That's why magicians keep secrets.

There's a brilliant quote: there's a man called Jim Steinmeier, who's a genius, who is who kind of created many of David Copperfield's most famous illusions and has built and designed just extraordinary things.

And he's got a brilliant book called Hiding the Elephant.

And one of the expressions he has in there is that magicians are guarding an empty safe.

And it's so profound because

the secrets are, and not always, because sometimes the secrets are extraordinarily clever, but for the most part, as Richard said, the secrets are a bit, oh.

again, that goes back to our desire for mystery, doesn't it?

And about why you might want to believe in the because you're right, every time I've actually seen the explanation, you go, I much preferred when I didn't know, and that is so that keys into a piece of human psychology, doesn't it?

Again, this hankering that everything is way beyond us and not merely the fact that you distract us with your hand or whatever it might be.

That's right.

I think the moment you have mystery, it's like, oh my goodness, I wonder what you do.

I wonder who.

And then the moment you find you dismiss it, it's God.

It's gone.

I I mean, what's great about Jim's book, which is called, as you say, Hiding the Elephant, is where that comes from, which is Houdini's Vanishing Elephant.

I think she performed at the turn of the last century.

And so he has an elephant on stage.

And the review was: five men bring on a huge box, the elephant goes in it, the elephant vanishes, 15 men push off the box.

Where's the elephant gone?

You're talking about the skill of Richard's trick or the precision of it.

Because you chose Francesca, you didn't choose Diane, and I wondered whether you thought that that was because Diane was more likely to play around.

If you held up that thing saying, please say 74 to a comedian,

then a comedian may well not say 74.

So there's an element of who you choose.

There's a lot, Andy said, there's a lot of stuff going.

I mean, do magic for a long time, and I think you just sort of intuitively go certain places with it.

Actually,

my favourite story, one of Jim's stories, is there was an illusionist called Thursdon, a great illusionist, like Copperfield his day, and he performed the levitating woman.

But the way that worked is that if you were standing behind it, you would see how that trick was done.

But what he did would get a little boy up from the audience, bring him behind the woman, and this boy would look amazed, and he'd put him down.

And all the magicians were going,

how can you bring this kid up?

It must have seen the solution.

And eventually, Jim, in that book, tracks down the kids.

And he said, what happened?

And the kids from the elderly, obviously, because Thurston was a long time ago.

The kids, they all told him the same story.

This gentleman magician, a bit like David Nixon, for those who remember him, would bring up a kid, they would go behind the levitating woman, and this kid would see the method, would see what was there, all the kind of strings and the gubbins and so on.

And Thurston would just simply whisper, you ever mention this to anyone, I'll break your legs.

Because I'm an assumption there that you may well not have said what was written on the paper.

Would you have said if the paper was held up and said, Please say seventy-four, would you have said it or would you have would you say?

Yeah, I would.

I don't want to ruin it.

It's a trick.

See, I think most comedians would actually say it.

Do you think?

I think most comedians would, because I think, oh no, this is part of the kind of entertainment of it.

Yeah, that's right, it's the please makes a big difference.

Really does, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Plus I sort of look like a simpleton.

So I just sort of go like that.

You look really needy.

For the radio listeners, he does look like a simpleton.

So anyway, this is Diane.

Now you've had a whole show where you've had a lot of magic talked about.

You initially, I think, had a certain level of negativity towards magicians and their ways.

How do you feel now after going on this journey?

Well, I don't see Richard or Andy as magicians.

Correct.

But it is magic.

When I think of magicians, I think of like cups and balls, you know,

and a man pulling flags out of his sleeve.

I'm so glad you went sleeve.

No, of course I enjoy what you do.

So we asked the audience, who would you like to be haunted by and why?

And their answers include the first one, Richard Dawkins, for the irony.

It's a similar on it.

Robin Ince, obviously, when he's dead.

Because at least he wouldn't take it too seriously.

Professor Brian Cox, because he would guide me through the wonders of the solar system, universe, and beyond.

A strawberry, so I will know when it really is dead.

Done, whoever that was.

Einstein, because it will be a relatively special experience.

Happy Christmas, everyone.

And thank you very much to our guests who have been Richard Wiseman, Francesca Stabra Cavulu, Diane Morgan, and Ali Nyman.

Enjoy the remainder of your very happy Christmas, I hope.

We'll be back in a couple of weeks with a new series.

And as has already been advised by members of our audience, if you are haunted by a ghost, just reminder that it is breaking the second law of thermodynamics, and that should see it it off.

You won't, though.

You won't be haunted.

Why not?

Because they don't exist.

Anyway, enjoy being haunted.

No, not enjoy being haunted this Christmas.

That wasn't the way we were meant to be haunted.

Can you hear something in the attic?

Welcome to Christmas.

You've been terribly miserly.

What was that knocking?

It's your child under the table.

Anyway,

I wanted to see at the end.

I thought, I bet I can persuade Brian to go under the table because he's very susceptible to those kind of tricks.

I'm a physicist.

I'm like a child.

I'm not coming out.

Anyway, so

thank you very much and happy Christmas.

Goodbye.

This is the BBC.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg Brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.