The Infinite Monkey Cage - Could it be magic?

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

Brian Cox and Robin Ince pull scientific explanations out of a hat and go down the rabbit hole to explore the science of magic with comedian Alan Davies, sleight of hand artist Laura London and two experts in the psychology of magic Richard Wiseman and Gustav Kuhn. They ask what our predilection to be bamboozled by sleight of hand can tell us about how our minds work. Alan has a card trick played on him and we learn how our choices aren’t always what we think they are. Producer: Melanie Brown Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcast. You're about to listen to The Infinite Monkey Cage. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays wherever you get your podcast. If you're in the UK, the full series is available right now. First on BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And this is The Infinite Monkey

Cage. Now, anyone who has been to a Barry Manilow concert, how many have been to a Barry Manilow concert? Yeah, and there's no shame in... Right? That's the whole... Obviously, the listeners at home can't see, but the whole audience, their hands went up there. All of us fans.

And I'm not saying this ironically. Mandy and Copacabana, Stone Cold Classics. But if you have been to a Barry Manilow concert, and I believe he's on tour again next year, then you will know that if Brian is ever in the audience, Barry Manilow has to actually book more security because the moment he starts singing Could It Be Magic, Brian stands up and shouts,

no, it couldn't, though it could currently lie within the terrain of apparently anomalous activity which currently is not understood with the realms of currently lie within the terrain of apparently anomalous activity, which currently is not understood with the realms of science. But the laws of physics will eventually explain this action and or reaction. And Barry doesn't like that because it doesn't scan. Also, if you ever go to an ABBA tribute band, you'll find exactly the same thing happens when they do Take A Chance On Me, and then Brian will immediately turn it from being a lovely three-minute pop song

to a kind of epic poem of equations about probability. It's like Beowulf, but without the fun. Taking a chance is fundamental in science, as long as you work within well-established parameters. And that, by the way, is what he writes in every Valentine card that he sends. And that, by the way, is what he writes in every Valentine card that he sends us. Today, we're looking at the science and psychology of magic. What does our predilection to be bamboozled by sleight of hand

tell us about how our mind works? What can we learn about perception from watching a man with a cup and sponge balls? Isn't that more of a medical problem? He's getting into the pier, isn't he, for tonight? Yes. Shouldn't I have said it in my... Isn't that more of a medical problem? He's getting into the pier, isn't he, for tonight? Yes. Shouldn't I have said it in my... Isn't that more of a medical problem?

More of a medical problem. He's getting a couple of sponge balls. Anyway. So, what of the psychology of the magicians themselves? And does the ability to link rings ultimately tell us something about the nature of matter? No. OK, good.

That's the first part of the show dealt with. We are now joined by three magicians, though it might not be three magicians by the time we let them out of the box. It might be loads of magicians or none whatsoever. And also someone who created the illusion of being a magician, and they are. I'm Professor Richard Wiseman, psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, and been a magician since I was eight years old. The most astounding thing I've ever read about in magic is one of my favourite tricks, the vanishing elephant. And the description of it is two people pushed on a large box, they put the elephant inside, opened the doors and it had gone,

and then 15 people push off the box. And where has the elephant gone? My name is Dr Gustav Kuhn. I'm an associate professor in psychology at the University of Plymouth. My most amazing magic trick is probably the vanishing ball illusion. For this trick, a magician throws a ball up in the air

and it disappears. Now, the trick itself is not really that amazing, but the psychology that underpins it is astonishing because the way the trick works is it exploits the fact that we are all seeing the future it's not a huge amount it's about a fraction of a second but we're all doing this all the time without ever really thinking about it and without this ability to see the future i wouldn't be able to catch a ball and i definitely wouldn't have been able to cross the road to get here. We're going to have to explore that

because I believe you see the past, you see, because of the finite nature of the speed of light. But let us discuss. I'm Laura London, a close-up magician with a particular fascination in the world of gambling, cheating techniques, and sleight of hand. The most impactful magic trick I've ever seen is when I was six years old. It's called the run, rabbit, run. It's actually a terrible trick, so I can see Richard's like,

really? It is a terrible trick. It's sort of a kid's magic effect, but the way in which it made every single person feel at that party when I was six years old was the reason I decided I wanted to become a magician and if you don't know what it is it's this little wooden contraption with a rabbit that sort of just appears and disappears and a bit like a Punch and Judy show the kids go oh it's it's over there so a sweet little thing not particularly mystifying but certainly a classic and one that I love. I'm Alan Davis I'm a comedian and I played the Jonathan Creek the master creator of illusions and solver of murders obviously and the most astounding trick I ever saw I went to see Jerry Sadovitz a great close-up magician and I was sitting in the front

row inches from him and it was a small little venue and he got very hot and he took his too too hot in my hat and he took his hat off and put it on the table did some tricks and when he lifted his hat to put it back on there was a watermelon there blew my mind and that's 20 years ago i'm not over it and this is our panel should we start with uh richard i just want to ask Richard, though, about eight years old. Is that the classic age to kind of start? Most magicians get into magic when they're either eight or ten, and it's normally something a grandparent has shown to them.

So I used to go and visit my grandfather most weekends. So he would give me a Victorian penny, I'd put my initials on it, he'd make it disappear, and it'd appear in a box under his seat. And every single weekend, I would say, you know, badge him, tell me how this was done. And he wouldn't. And he did this great thing. He said, the secret is in a book, and the book is in your local library. So I had to go and work hard. It's not like nowadays, where everything is easily won on the internet. So I read all the books on magic in the library, eventually went back to him, said, this is how it's done. He said, correct I said it requires a little secret something magician's called a gimmick he said that's correct he handed me that secret something and now in my office it sits there

on my desk and the other day a journalist said to me if your house was to burn down what's the one thing you would take and I said it's that little bit of metal because it changed my life that's fantastic Gustav so picking up on what you said, that we all see the future. So what did you mean by that? Well, to understand that, you need to take a look at how we process visual information. Now, vision happens in the brain.

We use our eyes to capture visual information and that's then transmitted through lots of neurons to different centres in our brain, the visual cortex, where the vision happens. Now, this information processing is not instantaneous. It takes a bit of time. It takes roughly a tenth of a second. So what that means is that as I'm seeing the world, by the time I'm experiencing it, it's already the past. Now, a tenth of a second doesn't really sound like that much but in neural terms that's a huge amount. So if you're walking down the street at about one meter per second that basically means

that the world should be lagging about 10 centimeters behind you. But of course it doesn't and the reason why it doesn't is because we are predicting the future. So what you are seeing as the now is not actually the now, but it's your brain using information from the past to predict the future or the now. And quite a lot of magic tricks rely on this. So in the vanishing ball illusion, if I just pretend to throw a ball up in the air, most people see a ball moving up

and then disappearing somewhere up in the air. And the reason why this works is because your train is being tricked into anticipating what's going to happen in the future. It's a bit like with a dog. When you pretend to throw the stick, the dog runs, and it's the same with vision. So all the magician's actually doing then is just making the ball disappear in their own hands. Well, not all magicians, and there's lots of more complex tricks as well, but that is one principle that you can use.

Where are they putting the ball then? Or do you you get thrown at the magic circle if you tell i'm not going to reveal that this is one of the great things about this show is we've basically got a panel of people who are members of the magic circle it's sworn to secrecy and telling you how any tricks work which is like as if we did like our episode from cern and it turns out they've started a particle physicist circle in which they're not unless sworn to secrecy to tell you how they discovered the Higgs field and the Higgs boson. So this could be not as educational as we'd hoped. Alan, you've heard Rich's touching story. Were you interested in magic before you played Jonathan Creek?

There was a lot of magic on TV when we were kids. There doesn't seem to be so much now. There was that guy Nixon, do you remember him? There was Paul Daniels. There seemed to be quite a lot of stuff going on and people were always getting sawn in half. So I think everyone loved magic and when Jonathan Creek came along,

I knew that Creek was obsessed with magic and this is one of the amazing things about magic. If you want to be a magician, perhaps you're a cavernous, you need to know the entire history of the craft before you begin to embark on putting an act together it's very difficult to come up with new stuff because it's much more complicated than telling a funny story the actual kind of mechanics of a trick need to be rehearsed and practiced it's a great physical skill so you know even more than juggling or something it takes a huge amount of dedication and a lot of time

spent alone and I was much too lazy to do that so it was much easier just to get a microphone and talk so I have a lot of admiration when we did one episode of Jonathan Creek, I had to learn to scale cards, which means to throw cards. And I had Ricky Jay, the famous card manipulator, Ricky Jay's book, it's all about how to scale cards. And I was throwing them around my living room and one got stuck into a plant. I'd thrown it quite hard and I thought, I can really do this now. And then I turned the page and it said,

do not practice for more than 15 minutes at a time you'll get a repetitive strain injury now at that point I'd thrown about 300 playing cards and the next day I could not move my wrist and couldn't do the scene properly so we had to get a card that was weighted with quite a heavy piece of metal that anyone could have knocked the bottle off the table with but no it's much more i mean i'm greatly impressed but first of all the dedication of it but also that it's like a swan's legs under water there's so much going on that you can't see i think it's fascinating well laura i was talking about that that practice and i know you were you were warming up with the cards in the dressing room, which was astonishing, and I think you have a...

We're going to try something that is clearly silly for the radio audience, which is we're going to do... They've done ventriloquism on the radio. More like a scientist than this. We're going to do something rather silly now. There's magic on the radio. OK, well, we'll have to describe what happens, Val, and if you don't mind, we'll do the magic with you as you are.

She's getting the cards out of the pack. The cards are out of the pack. Next to me. Can I ask you, Laura, just to sign that, because in the green room you were saying you still hadn't worked out which trick you were going to do. So just with that pack of cards, how many tricks do you think you have in your head

that you think, once I've got a pack of cards, what are the choices? I mean, there's 52 cards in a deck. There are infinite possibilities with a deck of cards. I mean, I have a show called Cheat, which has all gambling, cheating demonstrations. What I'm going to do with you is sort of, I guess, a bit of a standard and classic magic effect that we would do with cards. They're actually quite extraordinary and can do so many things, but it does take a lot of practice. I see I'm now anxious. And this is part of the magician's work. It's made me feel unstable.

I could ask Richard to commentate here. We should say with 52 cards there are so many combinations that when you shuffle them, it's a random shuffle, and there's almost been no deck of cards ever that's been in that order. So it's a random shuffle, and there's almost been no deck of cards ever that's been in that order. So it's a phenomenal idea.

There's just so many combinations. And a normal shuffle for no deck, and all the hundreds and hundreds, thousands of decks in the world have all been shuffled, and there's not been that particular order before. So there's lots of interesting science and stats built up in cards. But yes, I'm very happy.

So Laura's now got the cards. All right, Alan, I tell you what. Instead of saying pick a card, which is a sort of very standard thing magicians will say, I'll say name a card, one that you like. Eight of clubs. Not going to lie, I was hoping you'd say the eight of spades, but sure, we'll go with it. Okay, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to shuffle these cards and you and I are going to play a little game. Okay, it's a very simple game, don't worry. I'd like you to hold your hand out for me. Oh, Sorry, what was the card you said?

The eight of clubs. OK, we will come back to that in just a minute. But before that, I'm going to cut the deck three times. You can see that. We're going to take this top card. Yeah, but you did that in a really weird way. For the radio audience. You did it in a kind of a spinny, twisty way.

That way of cutting the deck is not the way that I would be able to cut a deck. But can we all confirm on this panel, I did indeed just shuffle the cards and I cut the deck is not the way that I would be able to cut a deck. But can we all confirm on this panel, I did indeed just shuffle the cards and I cut the deck. In a way, with dexterity. Which looked fancy. Laura shuffled and cut the deck. Thank you.

All right, so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take the top card of this shuffled deck and place it right there on your hand. It doesn't actually matter what it is. In this case, it's the jack of clubs. You can all see that, the jack of clubs. And I'm going to place it right there on the table. And I want you to put your hand over the top of it. Here's the game. I'm going to take that from you without you noticing. All right. If this works, the rest will be easy. And I promise you, I will find your eight of clubs. But before we do, we need to warm you up a little bit. So I've got the queen of clubs.

You've got the, I think it was the jack. Nice and convenient. So here we go. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to use this to distract you. Are you ready? One, two. So if I just give that a spin on my finger.

Yep. I should now have the jack right here. So if I have the jack in my hand, Alan, what's in yours? It's the eight of clubs. Oh, the eight of clubs, the one you want. That works out very well. Alright. Write your name on there for me. We'll just do

one more very quick thing. Just write your name on there for me. Okay, so now it's very distinct, because you might think... So Alan signed his name on the Eight of Clubs. I wrote Alan. Which appeared under his hand. You might indeed think I had a two of the eight of clubs, or something like that.

So now it's got your name on it. It is very distinctive. If I take your card and I make a bend in it, like so, so we can all see that, now it's even more distinctive. Because if you can all see that, and I'll just show you as well in the audience, you can see it's got a bend, so it's very distinctive. And I place the rest of the cards on top there.

Watch. I'm going to make it go through the deck, OK? So it hopefully will come to the top. It's about four now. And it's OK. Three, two. Now, don't stop staring at it. It's your power that's making this happen, Quire.

Three. One card. Jumps to the very top of the deck. And it has just... A card has just popped to the top of the deck. A card has popped to the top of the deck. Whether it's yours remains to be seen. But just take that for me and show everyone if it is yours.

It is. It is mine. Would you like me to tell you how it works? I'll tell you very quickly how it works. See, I always know where this card is, always, by means of misdirection and practice. For example, if I place this card inside the middle of the deck, which you can see me very fairly doing, and I cut the deck, I can

shuffle the cards as much as I like. It makes no real difference, Alan. You see, I always know where the card is. For example, I can shuffle these cards as much as I like. I mean, I do know where it is, because I put it there, Alan, but the thing is, the reason I can shuffle these is because your card is actually not here anymore. But?

Yeah, so the question is, and if I don't have the card, where is it? It could be anywhere. It's actually right in front of you, and if you look, everyone, there is a box. I have that box there, the sorry, card case, right there in the middle, and if you all listen.

Yeah. Look, inside here, there is one card, and it's folded into four pieces. Alan, if you just take that, there is one card, and it's folded into four pieces. Alan, if you just take that, if it is yours, please share with everyone. I'm opening it up, and it's the eight of cups with my name on it. You never touched the case, though, did you?

Did you touch the case? Did you see her? Misdirection, Alan. There we go. You missed it. You missed it. Laura also does a lot of id theft you've given her half your signature so gustav can we analyze that trick so obviously without we're not how to describe how you did i have no idea how he did it was stunning but in terms of those ideas of misdirection as you said about human perception how would you begin to break down what happened in a typical card trick like that a typical card trick involves loads of deception and misdirection and involves all of our senses as well and all of our cognitive processes as well so on one hand you manipulate

what you see and what you don't so we can use attentional misdirection to misdirect the information that you process and the things that you miss but even the things that you do see so when you see something you may not be able to remember exactly what happened or you may falsely remember something as well so we call this memory misdirection where you can use ways in which you can influence the way that someone afterwards remember what they've just seen. But even if you accurately remember exactly what's happened, you may just not have the reasoning capacity,

or your reasoning may be influenced by certain biases, and that can then prevent you from actually working out how the trick is done. So a typical magic trick involves loads of layers of misdirection and deception that will hopefully prevent the audience from working out how the trick is done. I mean, Laura's quite brilliant at it, you know. But really, it's the speed with which she can do things. It's much faster with her fingers in her hands than I anticipate a normal human could be. So I have all this, you were speaking earlier

about the knowledge we have of how the world works. A person could do certain things, but a person can't fold a card up and put it in a box. They can if they have no life and spend a lot of time on their own with a deck of cards. That is one of the secrets of being a magician.

That's absolutely the secret, just have no life and spend a lot of time on your own. But also, that's the perception that's being played with, it seems to me, is it's much, much quicker than I expected it could be possible to do. But also, we didn't mention the fact that, again, people listening at home don't know about all the distractions

because the way you levitated that hippopotamus was extremely impressive. So a lot of us were looking at that at the same time. And if you could keep it up there, because it's going to mess with the sound otherwise. It's brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant. And Alan's right. I mean, one of the things Laura's...

Well, two things Laura's amazingly good at. One is doing one thing and talking at the same time, which we're not used to doing. Normally, our actions are consistent with our words, but Laura needs to be talking and doing something completely different at the same time. The other thing, which is so hard when most magicians struggle, is you're lying to people, you're deceiving them, and yet you have to come across as likable and that's the real skill to magic and the bit where most magicians fail it's why most audiences hate magicians and laura's brilliant at doing that so i think that's great but the other thing you should realize is i think

most magic is like a science experiment so there is a there's a procedure to be done and the outcome of that experiment is the audience are fooled and entertained. And it's really, really difficult. And so people have been doing those types of tricks, that particular one, since about 1850. And every time they get it right, they write it down, and that goes into the literature of magic, which is as big as literature of science or law.

Magicians have their own secret Google that's got three million pages of information on. And if you're going to perform that trick that well, or magicians have their own secret Google that's got three million pages of information on. And if you're going to perform that trick that well, you need to know all that stuff stretching back through history. I mean, that trick was performed to Harry Houdini and fooled him, so it's known as the trick that fooled Houdini. You need to know all that stuff if you're going to do it competently,

and it's all hidden from an audience. So that's what I find so amazing about that performance. But also, when it comes to misdirection, I know that Gustav has done a lot of sort of study in this but I sort of come from it in a very different angle in that because I perform very regularly and I do the same thing over and over again or many of the things I do I do often my misdirection comes from just doing it so I without even thinking it just happens so I can tell you where this lady was looking or where she is. Or if I'm surrounded by people, I'm very aware, almost without knowing I'm aware of it.

But, for example, me putting a card in that card case, I could do surrounded now because I've done it so many times. I wanted to ask you, Stav, in terms of studying human perception, which is what you do, how useful is it to study close-up magic is it really kind of a focused almost distilled experiment to see how it can be that humans can become distracted and does that give you insight into their cognitive yes so we study misdirection in the lab and we use lots of scientific tools so for example we've

got eye trackers that we can there's like goggles that we can put on people's faces then we can work out exactly where they are looking oh so with alan for example in that tree you could you could yeah so alan will be wearing an eye tracker and that gives me precise online measurements of exactly where he's looking. It's a very worrying development. We can then correlate this with what they experience. And so one of the biggest surprises has been that quite often people can actually be looking at something and yet they don't see it. So we typically assume that if you're keeping your eye on something

then you should be able to see it. But actually if your attention is being misdirected from this then huge things can happen in front of your eyes and yet you don't see them that's purely instinctive from your perspective as you'd said so you were not aware or are not aware of this detailed research certainly when you started learning but you somehow instinctively are misdirected you know that someone can be looking at something, but actually if you do something, then they won't actually see what you're doing,

even if they're staring. I mean, I knew when Laura put that card down, I said, put your hand on that, that's a jack of clubs. I was thinking, there's no way that's a jack of clubs. This is a trick. Everything happens ahead of time. I was staring at the card and couldn't tell when she flipped it over that she'd changed it or what she'd done from six inches away.

It's really frightening. I was scared because I thought you were going to be so angry that you'd been beaten, or what she'd done from six inches away. It's really frightening. I was scared, because I thought you were going to be so angry that you'd been beaten, you were going to use it as a weapon. Yeah, throw it into a plant. We use our misunderstanding of attention. Magicians use it against us. So there's an old adage, which is, you know, the closer you look, the less you'll see.

So because you can really concentrate on here, that's where you put your attention, of course at that point the secret stuff is happening outside of that. And then when you go big, the secret stuff is happening where you did focus your attention previously but now aren't. So magicians are ahead of the game all the time and you learn it by doing it again and again and again for real people. Are there actually new magic tricks being invented

or a bit like the fact there are only seven stories, supposing? Are we generally seeing a reinvention of the techniques that are now in existence? Yeah, I think there's been a constant evolution of magic tricks, the way that technology is being used now as well. So there's internet magic, there's Zoom magic. Our studies show it's not very popular, unsurprising. But a lot of magic is technology-driven,

and so the kind of effects that you see now, you couldn't imagine to have seen back in the 1950s. What about when you're performing to magicians? I presume, much like when comedians used to do the water rats and all that, finding the joke that will break through them, just go, oh, yeah, yeah, I know that. Are there extra tricks and layers of tricks there that are still going on all the time I would say there probably is yes it's actually

quite a big thing in magic we have conventions all around the world and actually thousands of magicians gather together in several parts of the world quite regularly actually there's places in like Vegas we've got one in Blackpool and when this happens magicians will tend to be doing magic six in the morning and trying to fool each other it's quite a thing I mean I don't I think what's interesting is to see someone with great skill and presentation and I don't care whether it's a magician or not what I want is to be entertained more than anything and I've always looked at magic in the way that I would hope my audience look at the magic I perform. I went to Blackpool Magicians Convention once.

Four and a half thousand magicians. I was staying in a hotel and it advertised two sausages and beans for £10 for breakfast. That's expensive. Well, that included the hotel. That was the entire thing. That's still expensive for Blackpool. Out of season, definitely.

So we're all there and breakfast came and what they'd done is taken one sausage and cut it diagonally, put the two thin ends together and covered it with beans so it looked like two sausages to a room of magicians. And we all sat there and one said a word this is the first radio ad you can smell the new cinnabon pull apart only at wendy's it's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long taxes extra at participating wendy's until may 5th terms and conditions apply in In our new podcast, Nature Answers,

rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. Gustav, the card tricks, we've talked about misdirection, but there's also persuasion.

So I'm thinking more of something like Darren Brown, for example. So could you talk a bit about that third technique, which is persuasion? Yeah, so magicians use a lot of misdirection, but in a lot of card tricks, it can rely on forcing. So forcing is a principle whereby you can influence the card that someone will choose. And there's a whole range of principles that can be used to do this. And the key to this is to influence someone's decision without them feeling that they've been influenced.

So if you're doing a card trick and I say, OK, here's the eight of diamonds, that's your card, that's a pretty rubbish card trick because you know that the card's been forced. What's much more effective is if I use a principle that often relies on exploiting cognitive biases, for example, to get you to pick that card automatically so for example if i place four cards on the table and i say to you touch one of these cards

there's a 60 chance that you will touch the card that is right in front of you but the really now there's not not now now you know that it's done but the interesting thing is that people are not aware of these biases and these are the kind of biases that are often exploited by supermarkets for example or marketing where they will put high price items in more convenient locations for you to buy but that's not sufficient is it to build a trick around so how do you is it possible to make a suggestion to someone that you absolutely know that they are going to do what you wanted them to do rich is just shaking his head so the answer no should i stretch no is the answer how can how can it be used then in this framework well as i said kind of like magic relies on lots of layers of deception and that could just be one of these layers there are other techniques

but i'm not really going to go into these here. I told you. We thought this might be a very short show. How do you do that? Not telling you. Good night. But there is a science to that because why do magicians hold on to their secrets?

And most magic tricks, if you say this is the secret to it, it just sounds trivial. You don't realise how hard it is. It's really, really hard. And if you go, this is the secret, people go, sounds trivial you don't realize how hard it is it's really really hard and if you go this is the secret okay but not only that magicians live in this rather miserable world because i haven't got any friends no they're not fooled by many things so they don't get that sense of wonder i'm looking at laura's performance there it doesn't surprise me it's a wonderful performance it's extremely skilled i can see the skill but i don't have that oh my goodness it's data clubs in the box and that's been taken away from

me since i was eight or ten when you read all this stuff and it's such a wonderful experience it's so incredible to see something that you you know to be impossible happen in front of your eyes that's the reason magicians don't tell you secrets so you can live in a wonderful world and that's why you should stop explaining the universe brian it's much more the um but i'm also fascinated when science and magic start kind of working together like because i mean i was wondering with you richard you know it's the first time when you see perhaps magic being taken seriously in the scientific world in was it you know the 1970s where there were various people who were doing conjuring tricks and selling them as things that

were actually breaking the laws of physics and that seemed to be a time where people went oh magic is actually quite important to understand if people are selling it as i'm actually breaking the laws of physics and you have to rewrite them yeah i think so i mean the 70s there's a big sort of increase in paranormal stuff but then you have the spiritualism stuff before that and Houdini being sceptical about it. I think what is interesting is the frame around the magic. So Laura is being, to use the phrase, an honest deceiver. We know that this is a card trick

and we're looking for the secret. There are lots of people who can use the same techniques in a different frame. You can say, oh, I've got psychic powers. You can say, I can contact the dead. You can even perhaps say, oh, I'm reading body language and I'm not doing any of those things. And what's interesting is you give people an explanation. And once they've got an explanation, they're not looking for trickery. So magicians are really up against it. We're all looking for

trickery as Laura does that particular effect. You go along to a psychic and you think, well, this is psychic stuff. You're not looking for trick trickery it's why their sleight of hand normally is so appalling versus magicians you mean the earpiece that a lot of them have i sorry i remember once years ago i was making television show and on the makeup truck and about eight or ten people on the makeup truck was a busy morning a couple of extra makeup women in. And a woman came on and stood at the doorway and said, someone in here's got a birthday. And it wasn't anyone's birthday, but undeterred,

she found someone who had a birthday in two weeks' time. 10, 12 people in there. And she said, I knew it! I knew it! And then later on, one there, and she said, I knew it! I knew it! And then later on, one of the make-up girls said, that was amazing. Wasn't that amazing this morning? She just came in and went straight up to Laura and said, it's your birthday in two weeks. I said, she did not do that at all! That isn't what happened at all! You want to believe that?

She just came in and fished around for something, and only you fell for it. Only takes one. Facebook has really spoiled that. Somebody in here has got a birthday, haven't they? I mean, one of the things that's quite worrying is just how little it takes for people to believe that it's real magic. So we've been doing lots of scientific studies

and looking at the impact that spiritualist demonstrations can have on people's beliefs. So to do so, we invite a magician around to come and do a demonstration. These are usually to a whole group of about 100 psychology students. And I introduce the magician. I'll say, yeah, this is a psychic who I don't know whether this is going to work, but we're going to try some experiments. And he can then predict some numbers and contact some dead people as well.

And half the participants... It's just such a great mix, that, isn't it? Seven and your Uncle Colin. And the colour as well. You're thinking of the colour red. But the thing that's really worrying is that half the participants in a lot of these studies, they're told that what they are seeing is not real. They are explicitly told that this is a magician using tricks.

And yet, in the evaluations, when we asked them, what did you just see? They exclaimed, it was a psychic, and this was genuine psychic powers. And at first we thought, well, maybe they just didn't read the instructions properly. So we asked them to write the instructions out in their own words. So they would write, Lee is not a real magician. He's a member

of the magic circle using tricks. What did you see? A psychic reading someone's mind. And what's really worrying about this is that it perpetuates these beliefs in pseudosciences as well. And we've done this by evaluating their psychic beliefs later on and even if they're told that what they are seeing is not real it can still perpetuate some of these beliefs and psychic experiences it's an interesting line i suppose you have to walk isn't it because you're as you said you you are as a magician exploiting biases or expectations or defects in perception yeah and none of it matters what matters is people have a good time. I also think that you can have conflicting beliefs

that can live in our brain simultaneously. So for me, magic is all about a conflict in beliefs. Like it's a conflict between the beliefs and what we believe to be possible and the things that you just experienced. So you know that rabbits can't appear from hats and yet that's exactly what you've experienced when the magician pulls the rabbit out of the hat.

And we've done neuroimaging work where we scan people's brains whilst they watch a whole range of different magic tricks. And one of the things that's really interesting is that we get neural activation in areas that are generally activated when we experience other kinds of conflict. So, for example, here you may try and listen to what I'm saying, but your attention is also being distracted by the person next to you, so that creates a cognitive conflict, and that kind of cognitive conflict activates similar brain areas

to when you're watching a magic trick. So, for me, I think kind of like the core of magic is all about this conflict between the things that we believe to be possible and the things that we've just experienced. So part of the enjoyment of it, or the stimulation of a magic trick is that you know it's not possible and yet you see it happen so it's that comfort with no suspension of disbelief that's that's correct and it should teach us humility it should teach us that sometimes we can be incredibly confident and hugely wrong what about i'm, do you find that the more that you've understood magic tricks,

the more you've understood conjuring, are the certain things in the world that you can now navigate, are the certain things that you see, thinking for all the audience who might not go on to do card tricks, whatever it might be, the pragmatic things of learning about how we perceive and how not being taken in i mean apart from the obvious one which magic gives you the confidence to go and speak to people which i think is a something that we're not born with at all you know some people are more introverted some people are obviously extroverted but magic which is why they always say a lot of young boys start doing magic so they can talk to girls um I mean that's not how I started but still it is one of those things that I think magic it just is such a wonderful way

even if you just do it as a hobby uh it's a little you know or even just for yourself I mean the just the nature of practice in itself is a really good thing to be able to do to focus I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was six years old so not like now a lot of people are sort of finding out what these things are i knew about it since i was a very little girl and the doctors told my mum she's not going to do well in school she's not going to hold down what they called a proper job i've actually got that on paper it says proper job don't know what that meant and of course it was true i i don't have a proper job um but what it was they said that if there's anything she's into that's creative, it should be encouraged, which is why they always say

often learning a musical instrument with someone with ADHD is a really good thing. But I always say magic. Magic is that thing. Because you have to do the same thing over and over and over again until you get it right. And when you do, it's such a great feeling. It's an amazing thing to know that once you've nailed it, you go out there and you actually perform this thing that you've been practising to someone. They haven't seen how you've done it but more than that they've

enjoyed it and they've had that sense of wonder it's such an amazing feeling could you imagine your life without magic oh no it's all i've ever done i've never known any other world and i didn't get into it you know because i had someone in my family show me a magic trick i mean i did it because i had to you know when i saw that first magic trick, that run, rabbit, run, I'm looking for something to do. And that was it. And so I've never, never not done it. And no, I can't imagine my world without magic. I love it. I love the history of magic. I worked in the library at the Magic Circle. We have thousands, 13,000 books in that place alone, full secrets i mean there's never there's never a moment where you're not going to be able to study something in in magic that's for certain you'll

never be bored are the lost tricks in there there's so many books could you imagine going and looking through there and finding a trick that you didn't know about you didn't know oh it's very very yeah that's what magicians do they go back to 1910 1905 they find something they fool magicians with it and everyone goes oh my goodness amazing you invented that and you go you know it's 120 years old that that's fairly kind of common it's incredible one of my favorite things to do is we also have magic magazines and quite a lot of them and they've been going for over a hundred years uh some of them and they always say if you want to hide a secret in magic you know publish it in a magazine which is what a lot of magicians have done. And I've made a thing of collecting them all, and I'm trying to look through them all.

And the gems you find that was invented and created by a man nobody's heard of, you know, in 1890, and you suddenly go, wow, gosh, that's amazing. And then you do it. Then you show another magician, they go, oh, wow, you've just invented that. You go, no, actually, you've just invented that. You go, no. Actually, it was invented over 100 years ago and that's how the skilled kind of magic that we all know as pulling rabbits out of hat,

using misdirection, cards, all of those sort of more commonly known things in magic have been around for a long time and I wouldn't say there's an awful lot that's now new in that world. Only in presentation is new. I read about one or the other, Harry Houdini, 1920s. He'd arrive at a city and to get some publicity,

he'd be asked to be locked into a jail cell. And in Glasgow, he was locked into a cell. And he got lockpicks on him and he worked for two and a half hours and he couldn't pick the lock. And he's sweating and he's confused and he's panicking it's the first time his life is going to fail and he leans against the door and it swings open and it's never been locked so the great magician is trapped by his own assumptions uh so so you know magicians are fooled in that way but also that's a kind of new thing and you find it i think that's kind of

interesting we could do something with that so like laura said you know, magicians are fooled in that way, but also that's a kind of new thing, and you find it, I think that's kind of interesting, we could do something with that. So, like Laura said, you know, get into magic, you will never be bored. Alan, apart from killing pot plants with the seven of diamonds, making Jonathan Creek, and I know you made a documentary about Houdini as well, did you find going into that world and researching that world,

did that change any of your presumptions about what was around you? I took Creek's attitude on board, which is, you don't want to know how it's done. It's really dull. Once you know how it's done, don't ask. Even with Houdini? It's a trick. Houdini was slightly different because it was really about illusions.

And also for him, he was like an athlete, really. So a lot of it was physical endurance. He could hold his breath for a very long time. He really so a lot of it was physical endurance he could hold his breath for a very long time he could endure cold temperatures he was immensely strong but I've really found that I became very cynical like Creek is extremely cynical every time I see a magician I think okay what are you doing here you're fooling me don't tell me how you do it but please and I'm like you know of course you're not reading my mind. No, you're not in two places at once. So I became quite dry and cynical about magic, generally.

And that helped very much in playing the role. So we asked our audience a question, what magic trick would you most like to be able to perform and why? What have you got there, Brian? This one is, I would like to be able to turn blank pieces of paper into £50 notes. Why? Because I'm an accountant.

I'd like to be able to dis a pear, because I don't really like pears. I've got abracadabra. My husband not only listens to me, but agrees with everything I say. Clearly he doesn't. Ruthie? I'd like to turn my children into spider plants until they're 18. Spider plants are low

maintenance and just need water and don't answer back. There's a level of negativity. A lot of people in the audience tonight, family life has not worked out for them. There's some more for you. Vivian says of which magic trick would she most like to be able to perform or why? To transform myself into a new particle so Brian can discover me for himself.

I love it when people use the joke sheet for flirting. And is there a phone number? There's directions to the row and the seat. Turn water into wine because drinks can only get better. Magically reverse entropy so that things can only get better. The ability to breathe underwater indefinitely because things can only get wetter. The ability to breathe underwater indefinitely because things can only get wetter.

Thank you very much to our panel, Gustav Kuhn, Laura London, Richard Wiseman and Alan Davis. Anyway, in the next thrilling episode, I'm very pleased. We are going to be dealing with something that always puts a big smile on Brian's face, and that is we will be dealing with the potential for all life on Earth to be destroyed. Does make you happy, that, doesn't it?

Not entirely fair. Actually, to be fair, that is not. Well, one, it's a lie, because you always have a big smile on your face. It's very much your angle. But also, two, it's not really the thing that makes you happiest. Any regular listeners know the thing that really makes Brian happy is imagining the end of all life in the universe,

as well as the loss of all structure and form. And so it's nothing more than an inactive sea of particles. You love a heat death, don't you? I love a heat death. He loves a heat death. Who's up for a heat death? I love a heat death. He loves a heat death. Who's up for a heat death? I love it. Thanks very much.

Bye-bye. Thank you. Till now, nice again. Hi, I'm Kiri Pritchard-McLean. I'm the host of Best Medicine from BBC Radio 4, Till now nice again. A load of top comedians, doctors, scientists and inventors try to convince me what's the best medicine every episode by showcasing anything from micro-robotic surgery, Victorian clockwork surgical sores, world-first life-saving heart operations

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