Ever since I was little, I’ve loved magic. I used to watch the David Copperfield specials obsessively and was always fascinated by the tricks. I took a few magic classes when I was younger and learned some basic tricks. Of course, the pursuit of magic excellence is a lifelong endeavor and not really something you can do in your spare time. So as I got older and other things became more important to me, the few magic lessons I had learned were left behind. But my fascination didn’t end.
Being a software engineer really means being a problem solver. My curiosity about magic, and my little bit of magic background, led me to thinking about a generic way to figure out how a trick was done. After some thinking, I figured out that magic tricks work because of a series of assumptions that we, the spectators, make. The assumptions are:
This isn’t possible. Your initial reaction to a trick is, “no way.” It seems to defy everything you know about the universe. Things appear and disappear seemingly at will and with no rhyme or reason. It just can’t be possible…right? You saw everything. Magicians are masters of diverting your attention. David Blaine must say, “look,” about 20 times a minute. And so you look at what you think is the important thing. The magician is working alone. This is such a basic assumption that you don’t ever question it. The magician is the one waving his hands around, and you’re fixating on him (or her). It’s who the camera focuses on and who your eyes go to. But is the magician really the only one involved? The props are legitimate. A lot of tricks involve props, either one the magician provides or one that is offered by someone in the audience. Most of the time, you take the props at face value, especially when the magician lets you inspect it. You had a choice. The magician asks you to choose something: a card from a deck, a number within a range, a color. Somehow, he/she is able to know exactly what you picked! That should be impossible because mind reading isn’t possible!
When you add together all of these assumptions, you have someone who can’t possibly figure out how the trick is done. There is no way to disect a trick so long as you’re holding onto any one of these assumption. The way to debunk a trick is to start with each assumption and then assume the opposite.
The very first thing to do is assume that what you saw is, in fact, possible. The biggest block is continuing to assume that what you saw is impossible. Impossibility never leads to solution; possibility does. So accept that the end result of the trick is completely possible and not only that, there’s a logical explanation for it.
Next, you need to assume that you didn’t see everything the first time around. Your attention was distracted and directed to something or someone. Wherever the magician is instructing everyone to look is the exact place where you should not be looking. Typically, the real action is taking place away from everyone’s focus; it has to, the trick wouldn’t work if everyone was looking away from the subject. And then there’s the things that happen right in front of your eyes that you don’t realize. I’ve seen some incredible illusions using nothing other than slight of hand. Anytime an object leaves your sight, even for a moment, you can almost be assured that it was swapped out and is on its way to its final destination.
A key part of magic is the use of a secondary player. This goes back to the “lovely assistant” of old-school stage shows. Of course, the lovely assistant was primarily used as a distraction and prop…everyone looks at beautiful women. Nowadays, the secondary player isn’t so obvious. They blend in with the surroundings, they may be the camera man, a guy in the crowd, a woman at a restaurant; it doesn’t cost much to hire a small-time actor for a half hour. If your first thought is that the trick could only be possible if there was someone else involved then someone else probably was. No one can be in two places at once, not even magicians.
The props in a trick are always suspect. Just because you provided the magician with the prop doesn’t mean that it actually gets used for the core of the trick. A quarter you pulled out of your pocket can’t be melted and brought back to form within the span of five minutes but a trick quarter can be. At some point, the magician will swap out your quarter for the trick quarter and later on returned. Never assume that props are what they seem; they usually aren’t.
Last, a lot of tricks that seem to involve choice actually leave you no choice at all. Techniques such as card forcing, where the card you pick is prearranged and subtley placed in your possession, makes you think that the choice is random when nothing could be further from the truth. The magician knew exactly what card you’d pick, exactly what you were going to say or write. Think about it: if you knew what someone’s answer to a question would be, it would be easy to create a trick around that, right? Magicians use all of kinds of clues, both conscious and subconscious, to force you to make a certain choice. If you want to see this in action, do a search for Derren Brown.
The bottom line is that anyone can figure out how magic tricks are done when you reverse all of the assumptions we typically make about the tricks we’re seeing. Magicians work very hard and are incredibly brilliant in their approaches, but they are human just like the rest of us. They need to play by the same rules; they just know how to manipulate the rules to dramatic effect. First and foremost, magicians are performers putting on a show. Never forget that and you’re already going down the road to figuring out the tricks.
