The audience member whom magician Apollo Robbins invited up to the stage appeared to harbor second thoughts—and with good reason. Robbins, “the Gentleman Thief,” specializes in pickpocketing, sleight-of-hand and con games.
Sure enough, despite the audience member’s heightened awareness, Robbins lifted the man’s watch from his wrist (and put it on his own) and swiped his cell phone.
Robbins and fellow magician Eric Mead were the guests of honor at the fifth “Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society” lecture, one of the first events at this year’s Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting in Chicago.
“There’s no better way to find out how our brains work … and by extension how our minds work, than to find out how we can be deceived and how we can be made to believe the impossible,” SfN President Tom Carew said in introducing the pair.
Mead led off with a memory trick, asking an audience member to memorize shapes on a card. He then had her close her eyes and visualize a scene that included only four of the five shapes she had seen. Sure enough, she remembered only those four shapes afterward.
Memory is central to the magician’s craft, Mead said after the trick. “It’s important after the show that people remember certain things and forget certain things,” he said. If an audience member describes a show a week later, he wants them to have forgotten certain revealing details. His methods include distractions that prevent a memory from being encoded in the first place or implanting a benign false memory, such as getting a participant to agree that things happened in a subtly different way than they actually occurred.
Robbins, who has established a counter-theft organization that draws on knowledge from both law enforcement officials and former criminals, cited three tools he uses to deceive: proximity, movement and manipulating another person’s internal dialogue.
The use of personal space can begin to divide a subject’s attention, Robbins noted. Entering someone’s personal space head-on can be uncomfortable, but less so if eye contact breaks or if one person moves to the side of the other.
Certain movements, meanwhile, draw the eye—smooth motion in particular. Moving a coin in this way distracted Robbins’ audience member and helped the magician in his thievery. Robbins also got the man thinking about the coin and where Robbins would make it appear next; in second-guessing what Robbins was doing with the coin, the man stopped paying attention to his watch and cell phone.
“We’re your guides, and our job is to misguide you,” Robbins said. “Albert Einstein said, ‘Reality is an illusion, albeit a very good one.’ If somebody can control where you put your attention, then perhaps they can manipulate your reality.”
After the presentations, the magicians discussed the parallels between magic and brain science with Carew and Susana Martinez-Conde of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona, who has studied the neuroscience of magic. In response to a question from the audience, Martinez-Conde noted that susceptibility to being fooled might help diagnose neurological problems.
A disease “might have something to do with the way a subject perceives magic,” she said. Carew added that magic might have therapeutic potential, too, as a means of working with attention.
The ability to use principles of magic to gain insight about the brain, it seems, is no illusion.
-Dan Gordon
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