All right.
There are two sections of today's event
that I want to talk with you and put the magic aside
for a moment.
And I want to illustrate the first one with a trick
that I am going to teach you.
So let me show it to you first and then-- it's
a very simple trick.
It's almost a puzzle.
And we'll go through it.
So I need everybody's participation in this.
Everybody in the room go like this.
Now go with your pinkies up.
Now cross one hand over the other.
And now lock your hands together and don't let go.
Whatever you do, don't let go.
Now wiggle your thumbs.
Good.
That's easy enough.
Wiggle your pinkies.
Here's the tricky bit.
Wiggle just your right middle finger.
Just the right one.
It's on the left side.
There you go.
Now wiggle your pinkies.
Wiggle your thumb.
Pinkies one more time.
Good.
Don't let go.
Do not let go.
And here's the rub.
Here we go.
On the count of three, do this--
one, two, three.
[LAUGHTER]
Give yourselves a little applause.
[APPLAUSE]
So I didn't just fool you.
You fooled yourself.
I used a principle that you've heard of,
but you probably don't know intimately,
which is misdirection.
This is the magician's biggest tool-- misdirection.
Now, most of you will have heard that term,
but you may not be familiar intimately with what it means.
And I'm going to tell you.
There are two kinds of misdirection
that magicians consider.
There's physical misdirection and mental misdirection.
Physical misdirection would be actually distracting your eyes
with something else.
This is a big explosion.
This could be a loud noise.
This could be a scantily clad assistant
walking across the stage.
There are many ways to get your eyes
to look somewhere else, and more importantly,
look away from what we don't want you to see.
That's physical misdirection.
But a more interesting to me kind of misdirection
is mental misdirection.
And that's where I distract your mind,
so that you don't perceive what I'm doing.
And I use the word perceive because what's
so fascinating about mental misdirection is
you will often see the move, you will see the secret technique.
And I promise you, all 500 of you
did see the technique that I just did, but none of you
perceived it because you were mentally misdirected.
Now, this trick uses both mental and physical misdirection
and you will catch me this next time, because I'll point it out
to you.
But we are going to do it one more time.
So you ready to learn this?
Hold your fingers out like this.
Remember, I did this?
Then I said, pinkies up.
Then I said, cross one hand over the other.
And then I said, lock your hands together and don't let go.
And I hope you didn't.
Now this is-- this gets into some rudimentary neuroscience
here.
If you've read Thinking Fast and Slow,
you know there are two systems--
systems one and system two.
System one is breathing, blinking.
You don't have to think about it.
So I'm going to exercise system one for you
and then switch you over to system two and make you think.
So the first one's easy.
I say wiggle your pinkies and you didn't even
have to look down to do it.
You wiggle your pinkies.
Then I said wiggle your thumbs.
Again, you know where your thumbs are.
You know how to do that.
No problem.
But then I said, now wiggle your right middle finger.
And all of a sudden-- this isn't rocket science--
but it's just tough enough, it's just
difficult enough that you had to give it a little thought.
System two had to come assist you.
And when I say wiggle your right middle finger,
I pinpoint one unfortunate soul.
It was you today.
And I say, no, no, no, on the right side--
it's on the left side.
It's the right one.
There you go.
And I came out.
And when I went back in, I went back in a different way.
Now as soon as I do that, I begin with scripting--
and this is important.
This is an equally important point.
As a magician, I have to color in your memory
and I can affect your memory.
So what I say is remember we're not letting go.
We never let go.
I just let go.
[LAUGHTER]
So now we let system one back in.
Wiggle those pinkies one more time.
Wiggle the thumbs.
Wiggle the pinkies.
I'm putting time-- time displacement we call it.
I put time between the secret move and what I'm doing.
And now I do this.
Nobody else can do that.
And you have a magic trick.
[APPLAUSE]