When you work I think with any sort of magic you become a very good applied psychologist
just in a very niche area, which is why it’s generally magicians that are brought in to
kind of test for psychic claims and that kind of thing to sort of debunk or look for that
kind of evidence because scientists get fooled very easily like the rest of us, magicians
are just very good at understanding how that sort of thing can work and be fooling.
So, you’re working with conscious and non-conscious processes, so for example, to take an idea
of just a card trick, say you start a card trick and the deck has to be in a special
order in order for the trick to work, but there’s a point halfway through the trick
where it’s safe for the person to shuffle the cards, but if they shuffle at the beginning
it would ruin the whole trick.
So, maybe at the beginning you shuffle yourself as the magician but it’s a false shuffle
you’re not really shuffling the cards but it looks like you are, but halfway through
the trick you hand them the deck and you say to the spectator, who so far has not shuffled
the cards, you say to them, “Shuffle the cards again but this time do it under the
table.”
Now, that doesn’t make any sense because they haven’t shuffled the cards before,
but in as much as they’re now taking the cards and shuffling them under the table and
following that instruction you’re starting to play with the memory of what actually happened
in the trick.
So, now you’re essentially planting a false memory that they had shuffled the deck before.
It’s not a guaranteed thing, but when they start to narrate the trick afterwards you
start to see how these false memories are fitting into play.
So, a big part of performing any sort of magic is controlling that narrative afterwards by
playing with things like false memories so any magician becomes very good at doing that
sort of thing.
My tool kit is the ongoing experience of both the audience and the people that come up on
stage so I use rapid hypnotic induction techniques with people that come up on stage and they
vary in efficacy from night to night, but generally they work.
So there, for example, I would be using an unconscious process there of using bafflement
and bewilderment to my advantage.
So, if you imagine that somebody comes up to you in the street and says it’s not 7:30,
your reaction isn’t to go oh yes I know it’s 20 to two, your reaction is normally
would be to feel baffled and thrown by that like you’ve sort of missed something.
And when we are baffled we become hyper suggestible because we’re looking for a way out, we’re
looking for a clear steer, a clear direction out of that towards information that makes
sense so I use that a lot.
Politicians use it a lot so they give you a bunch of statistics that you can barely
follow and then they say so therefore…
And you’re much more likely to then accept that information than if they’ve started
off with that information because it’s relief from the sort of the bafflement of the figures
that they’ve just given you.
So, I use it when people come up on stage they are naturally disoriented by the experience
of suddenly being in front of 2000 people that they can’t see because it’s just
dark and it’s odd and they’re suddenly looking to me for directions.
That’s a very powerful position in terms of influence.
It’s great because from the audience it doesn’t necessarily look any different,
I mean someone has just walked up on stage, but you don’t quite appreciate the level
of sort of confusion that that person can then be in.
So, I hypnotize through a handshake, I go in for a handshake and then halfway through
the handshake I interrupted it, which again is just adding another level of bafflement
because now you’ve got this automated process of a handshake that’s suddenly interrupted,
which leaves us completely flummoxed.
So, then an instruction to go to sleep, or to, you could stick someone’s feet to the
floor.
You could maybe take their voice away.
There’s a whole lot of things that you can do at that moment because you’ve created
this sort of maximum responsiveness gets in at a level that seems to bypass the normal
conscious filters.
So, I’m using that sort of stuff a lot.
And then the whole show is really structured around those kinds of things.
I’m filtering for suggestibility, filtering for people that are going to respond well
to what I do.
It’s sort of a constant sort of juggling of the conscious things that we are appreciating
and the unconscious things that are guiding how we are appreciating them.