The Great Debate: DECEPTION - A Night Of Magic And Illumination (OFFICIAL) - (Part 1/2)

hello thanks for coming to another origins great debate this time the origins of deception it's going to be a an interesting evening I promise you and the deception is an amazing thing in a way because as a scientist I'm particularly interested deception because one of my heroes richard fineman the physicists used to say the easiest person to deceive is yourself as a scientist you constantly have to keep asking yourself if your results are significant and he used to go up to people all the time and he'd say to them you won't believe what happened to me today you just won't believe what happened to me they'd say what he'd say absolutely nothing okay because every time something happens to you you think it's significant whether it is or not and that notion that we're we can so easily deceive ourselves even if we're scientists is the origin of the paradox that we're going to try and discuss tonight in different ways and in fact the paradox is described very well by one of our panelists Robert rivers who who's written a book about deception and I want to read it to you because I think it not the whole book but this quote at the heart of our mental lives there seemed to be a striking contradiction we seek out information and then act to destroy it on the one hand our sense organs have evolved to give us a marvelously detailed and accurate view of the outside world together our sensory systems are organized to give us a detailed and accurate view of reality exactly as we would expect if truth from the outside world helps us to navigate it more effectively but once this information arrives in our brains it is often distorted and biased to our conscious Minds we deny the truth to ourselves we project onto others traits that are in fact true of ourselves and then attack them we repress painful memories create completely false ones rationalize amoral behave your act repeatedly to boost positive self opinion and show it a suite of ego defense mechanisms why and that's one of the first things we're going to discuss tonight and oh by the way I know that I might as well get this done just so you can it's it's it says words down under words Down Under I got the t-shirt when I was speaking at a literary festival in New Zealand and the interesting thing is in New Zealand when you wear this it's actually right-side up and now I actually say this because to some people I've told it they believe me and that's the first reason I think we deceive others because it's so much fun and so we are tonight going to talk about first why well for actually first how we deceive and then why we deceive and then what the consequences of deception are and we're going to begin with the best deceivers in the world magicians their whole their whole livelihood depends upon deception now there are charlatans like John Edwards or Uri Geller or people like that who pretend they're doing magic but the best magicians let you know right up front that they're deceiving you and they still do their magic and we have two of the best magicians in the world tonight for that and so we want to begin first with Jamie and Swiss and then with Joshua Jay good evening I have been asked as my deception to show you a card trick but rather than do that I want to make it interesting so I want to show you a card trick in Reverse thought you guys would be more impressed since we're since we're going to go back in time for this let's isolate my watch I'll place it first under care of the handkerchief and then next inside the glass where you can watch it the whole time now every deck of cards you've ever opened comes the same way from the factory they come like this in what they call new deck order that's ace two three four five and so on of clubs ace through King of Hearts ace through King of Spades ace through King of Diamonds that's new deck order and every card trick you've ever seen starts the same way the cards are shuffled that's the first step the second step if we've got the second step here enumerated the second step is you pick a card and we'll have somebody in the audience pick a card in a moment the third step is I find the card and the last step is the crowd goes wild so if we were to do that in Reverse what would it look like that's the part where you guys go out yeah ASU we don't get along just fine next comes the part of course where I find your card which is of course ridiculous since you haven't even picked one yet I'll place it there and now I need some help second row on the end what's your name sir give her a round of applause welcome up to the stage as quick as you can come up this way right there's the stairs stairs behind you yeah yeah I didn't get your name what was your name Nick ladies gentlemen Nick nice to meet you you will be the eyes and ears of the audience as I riffle through the cards like this you call stop can you see a car and I won't look but can we show the camera so I guess I will laugh it's not fair not used to that you got it everybody got it you got it Nick now is the part where we shuffle but I'm going to let Nick shuffle the card so take the cards and mix them like this in your hands yeah that's good not just it yeah I just come in some cuts that's fine excellent now we did the trick backwards to see how it worked Nick here's what I'd like you to do go through the cards but over your shoulders of the camera can see them and you can see them as well take out the one you picked you're gonna have to look so you can see them as well there yeah no no it's okay it's okay it doesn't matter I've seen it before so it's good yeah go through them take out what was it your card three is that right three of clubs take it out sure uh oh no three of clubs there and apparently Nick and I are the only ones impressed by that you can have a seat thank you so much Nick for helping his card isn't gone his card has gone back in time ladies and gentlemen you see I didn't need to find his card because I already found his car the three of clubs very nicely done Nick you see we're starting to move back in time the reason I know we're moving back in time is because I'm now wearing the watch I took off three minutes ago but to go okay but let's go all the way back in time you see Nick shuffle this deck up really well you I don't know if you saw I was shuffling there's reds black score cards spot cards it's a big mix now totally chaos to go all the way back to the beginning before the trick started would look a little something like this ladies and gentlemen that's the ace two three four five six seven all the clubs all the hearts all the spades all the diamonds the trick never happened thank you I okay good well that's just the beginning I think I want to call it the whole panel if they know if they can come out and we'll just walk them all so those of you have been here before kind of familiar maybe with the format that we're going to do but each of our panelists is going to make a little presentation and then we'll do something interesting to carry you out before information intermission and then after intermission we're going to have a little discussion on stage and then we'll open up the floor for the microphones and the discussion until someone asks a stupid question and then we'll stop and then and then we'll thank all of you and then there also is a book signing at the end but we actually are going to go right to Joshua Joshua as you can tell as a wonderful young magician in fact this year he was a name magician of the year and he's performed on Good Morning America at the day show he he's been doing magic for 21 years and he's the age of my daughter I just discovered and there's still an eligible bachelor he wanted me to let the women in the audience know and so Joshua the floor is yours thank you ah all right um I wanted to begin by placing my mic sorry I wanted to begin by making a bold statement magic and deception are an essential part of our consciousness but magic is different than other art forms and disciplines literature theatre visual arts are all predicated on the revelation of truth magic is different magic is predicated on deception it's a lie right and if you ever want to make a magician really upset tell them you think magic is just for kids but in the next five minutes or show what I'd like to prove to you is that magic is just for kids but it's for the kid in each of us now my fellow panelists tonight are going to talk about deception in negative ways I would assume and different ways that we deceive ourselves and deceive others but I'm going to talk about the positive kind of deception the willing suspension of disbelief so I'll use deception in a way synonymous with illusion astonishment magic and all deception requires a suspension of disbelief when you watch a magic show you know it isn't real and that's exactly what makes it interesting you know that from a few moments ago I can't make a watch actually appear around my wrist or a deck that he shuffled go back in order but together we create that illusion and then there's a deception if you thought what I was doing was real a few minutes ago that wouldn't be a magic trick that would be religion teller of Penn & Teller said it very beautifully he said magic is the difference between what we see and what we know and I love that a magic oviya obviously requires a willing suspension of disbelief and you do this all the time most commonly at the movies right you know the characters are just actors the places are just sets but we willingly suspend our disbelief because we like the way it makes us feel it transports us into the story and for me one of the early examples of this was watching the play Peter Pan you know that great scene in Wendy's bedroom when Peter just flies right for a hundred years that's been astonishing kids yet we can see the wire right I mean Peters often played by a grown woman but we suspend our disbelief because we like the way it makes us feel it makes us feel like children now eh Gombrich the art critic called this the beholder share he said an art piece of art doesn't exist unless there's somebody there to view it the same is true of magic if I were performing in this auditorium by myself what is that that's nothing it's only when you're here to be deceived that together we create that illusion Plato said all that deceives may also enchant and that's true right we like the way surprise endings and movies make us feel or magic makes us feel it's contagious we want to feel it again and again because it makes us feel like kids now here's where it gets really interesting every field has theories and theorists and my world magic is no different and there's one theorist this guy named Paul Harris this 1970s hippyish type guy he posed a theory that turned our world on its head and made most magicians rethink their own craft and I'm really not supposed to share these kinds of things with you but because it's very on point I'm going to share it with you now he called it the theory of astonishment and it goes like this think back to the last time you were totally astonished could be a surprise ending to a movie a magic trick you saw a beautiful sunset how did that make you feel before your rational mind took over before you started analyzing what you saw before words filled your head how did it feel it feels childlike right it's this weird feeling that ah moment he called this in his theory the virgin gasp was never what I thought of when I thought of virgin gasp but I think you get the idea of what he's talking about this moment this astonishment according to his theory is our primordial base inborn instinct that were born with and only after knowledge and experience are layered on top of it do we distance ourselves from it it's interesting the Zen philosophers in Japan called the State of Mind motion creative experts call this the zone this is where all the best ideas come from because it's unbounded and as a magician it's my job to try and tap into that moment and suspend it for as long as I can now when people watch magic it kills me but they always say the same thing oh that's really neat I wish my kids could see that it's as if they're a shame to be deceived and astonished and they think magic is just for kids but as it turns out this is a very telling admission magic is just for kids and the proof is in the pudding you know the hardest group to fool is harder than scientists engineers other magicians kids think of it this way when adults go through life they file all their experiences and little file folders in their head and when they see something they don't understand they want a retrofitted into one of those file folders when they can't they're fooled that's when the illusion occurs kids don't have big file folders so they see for example a woman floating in the middle of the stage and they think Wow cool maybe it's I don't know a huge magnet that we can't see and an adult says oh that's silly they don't make magnets that powerful oh don't they yeah a magician takes a ball and puts it in his hand and it disappears and a kid thinks really creatively how maybe it was never there to begin with it just looked like it was adult says now if I saw it it had to be there kids are very hard to fool now people ask me are you ever fooled as a magician and the truth is I'm astonished all the time but not in the ways that you might think you know what's more amazing to me than any magic trick in the last four or five years that I've seen the app Shazam you know that half map is freaking amazing you hold up your phone to a song playing and within three seconds it tells you the song the lyrics the singer that's an amazing magic trick if you think about it and before my rational mind takes over and I started thinking about how that came about I'm amazed I'm astonished I feel like a kid again Freud talked about this Freud said quote the struggle of maturity is to regain the seriousness of a child at play I love that to me what Freud is saying that is we move through life we struggle to regain our childhood inclination toward magic or astonishment or deception now before I go I want to tell you one last thing and that is this as we move through life gaining experience and knowledge every day let's not forget our childhood sense of self it's the magician's role to remind us that behind and before our words is a very important state of mind a primal state of mind and that's astonishment it's a place of unbounded creativity and potential so how do we tap into it here's one way allow yourself to be astonished every day let the little things amaze you be curious of course be curious and ask questions but let apps like Shazam sweep you off your feet ignore the wires on Peter Pan and as an adult don't be ashamed to enjoy the magic show live in astonishment thank that sauce well now the next two speakers of not only friends of mine but distinguished neuroscientists susana Martinez Conde and Steven Mack Nick both work at our own Barrow Neurological Institute where they work on visual systems Susanna is a director of visual neuroscience laboratory and Steven is director of the behavioral neurophysiology laboratory the interesting thing here is we're continuing in the procession of understanding how deception works and that involves looking at the brain and their ideal to talk about that but the thing that makes it particularly appropriate is that both Susanna and Steven have worked with magicians to try and understand precisely how deception works in that regard and they've written a wonderful book called slice of mind and and so they're here to talk about the neurophysiology if you wish of deception and Susanna we'll begin thank you tonight I would like to tell you about neural deception and what you see that it happens in your brain in terms of the wiring that allows us to see illusion rather than the truth and to deceive ourselves and others I'd like to start by defining illusion and I'm going to define it very simply as a subjective perception that doesn't match the real world and we have illusions in all the senses we have not only perceptual illusions but cognitive illusions as well but if we're talking about a visual illusion we can see something that is not there or fail to see something that is there or more generally see something different from what is there now what we understand as illusion is a large discrepancy between reality and perception but we have small discrepancies or smaller discrepancies all the time in fact most of what we perceive is illusory at least partly in illusions as neuroscientists they were interested in them because they allow us to understand what the brain is doing all the time when we construct our experience of the world let me show you an example you're going to see an illusion is actually the first illusion ever documented Aristotle first described it 2,000 years ago but the version that you're going to see was developed by a magician his name was Jerry Andrews and he called it the Tri zonal space warp I'd like you to look at the very center of this pattern and you need to stare at the center and keep your eyes fixed for about a minute or so because we need to adapt our motion sensitive neurons we have three regions of visual space that are rotating in different directions and the neurons of your visual system are adapting they're getting tired of these particular directions of motion which means that the neurons that are sensitive to the opposite directions of motion are getting less tired they're going to be responding more keep looking at the center don't look away yet but when I ask you to look away I would like you to do then is look at the face of the person that is sitting next to you and you should see something interesting let's try it out right now thank you this we call this we call this a motion after the fact and there's something that I forgot to mention and it's important for a third of the people who experience the solution it never completely goes away all right so we experience solutions and more generally deception because our brain is limited we think of our brain as a very complex machine and it is a very complex machine but it is limited it's limited in size it's limited in the numbers of mirrors it's limited in the connections that these neurons make with each other so we have to take shortcuts we have to fill in blanks we have to conform and seek structure and order fit things into molds then we also improve narratives all the time to ourselves and to others and these are just three of the mechanisms by which our brain allows us and makes it more likely that we're going to deceive and self deceive so let's talk about filling in blanks we're going to do a little exercise and we're going to fill in the blind spot of our retina this is the place where the optic nerve leaves your eye to carry visual information to the brain and we don't have any photoreceptors any photo detecting noodles right there so there is actually a big hole right almost in the middle of your visual field so let's find it I'd like you to explain your arms it's important that you keep your elbow straight and actually touch your thumbs to each other not like in the picture is not exactly correct is very view touch both thumbs elbows straight and now you're going to close your right eye and look at your right finger while paying attention to your left finger tip so write a close look at the top of your right finger pay attention to your left finger and the left finger the tip should disappear okay you can wiggle your left finger a little bit to find it that your blind spot but keep keep keep making your your fingertip disappearing disappeared and notice that you can see what's behind the fingertip now how is that possible well let me tell you this may disappoint you but you don't have x-ray vision what's happening is that your brain is taking the information the colors the textures the brightness is surrounding that hole in your visual field and using them to reconstruct what should be there now the algorithm isn't smart enough to reconcile your finger but it's still it does a pretty good job and we'll fill in blanks all the time not only the visual system but cognitively and in the other senses as well I'm going to show you another case in which we fill in blanks this is an illusion that was developed by Gordini and gamba raining and we have three Packman here this is a version of the classical can it's a triangle but we don't only see a triangle but we actually see a pyramid and it switches between a triangle and a pyramid but in fact we only have three pac-man and three patches of gray and with this very limited information our brain puts together a person that is much more complex by filling in these blanks in our perception what about seeking and conforming to a structure our brain constantly tries to make sense of the world and it seeks to impose order such as here this is reorganised healing great illusion what I'd like you to do is stare at the very center will you first you can see there's a pattern that looks regular in the middle but what the outside is disorganized it's random let's make it completely organized just by using the capabilities of your visual system stare at the very center choose one intersection and keep your eyes as still as you can try to minimize all of your eye movements and your visual system is going to take the order from the center and impose this structure in the surrounding areas the next solution also shows you how the visual system conforms to structure the solution was developed by Rove a liar under colleagues and it's Basin after images and after image is what you experience when you look for instance at a bright light and then you look at a blank wall and you see a shadow that's enough to image and this is what you're seeing here now here we can see several flashes of geometrical figures the only real colors are happening when we see the six point star those are real colors but the other colors that you see are just made up by your visual system but the interesting thing here is that the colors even though they have to remit always stays the same we see different colors and we see that the colors fit these frames that are actually empty so your brain is taking this whole color after image information and it's making it fit inside of these rather artificial frames I want to talk about that one last mechanism by which our brain is leading us to deception and in this particular case not only deception of a self but of others and through the improvement of narratives this is a relatively new paradigm in cognitive sciences called choice blindness and what it means is that we're basically blind to the results of our own choices the experimenters that came up with this idea they had subjects in the laboratory choose between two pictures they asked them which face is the most attractive of the tool and the subjects would choose one of the faces but then the experimenters actually did a magic trick and they switch the two faces so that when they asked the subjects to pick up the face or the photograph that they had just chosen in fact they got a different one now what happened here surprisingly is that in a large percentage of the cases people didn't realize that they had to Singh debate they were given the face that they had not actually chosen but not only that but here this is the most interesting part and the part that has to do the most with with deception after they picked up the wrong card the experimenters asked will tell me why did you choose the picture in particular and not the other one and here the subjects confabulated they started making up all sorts of reasons you can see you can see a selection here these are the the comments of a few subjects so so you have the two faces of the women now remember the face that they're explaining why they chose the face rather than the other one this is always the wrong choice is the choice that they hadn't made she's radiant I would have approached her a bar I like earrings they notice that the one that I actually chose didn't have earrings she looks like an aunt of mine I said and she seems nicer wrong it's all a lie it's all a lie she looks very hot in this picture just a nice shape of the face and the chin I thought you had more personality blah blah blah all made up I don't know well at least this person is honest and they can't even regret it why did the chooser she's very masculine I don't like her but but but still they're coming up with all of these reasons to deceive themselves and others basically improving a narrative improving the narrative of their own experience and what this tells us is that when we analyze our own actions our own choices we take a third-person approach it is really no different when we see somebody do something that we don't really understand we try to come up with reasons what maybe that person has a bad day or maybe who knows whatever happened we do the same thing with our own actions with our own choices why did I do this well I don't know maybe it's because and that's how we try again to make sense to organize to fill in blanks to improve the narrative of our life and because of these brain limitations we end app with a situation of deception and self-deception thank you very much even thank you so Susannah was telling us about visual illusions she was telling us about also cognitive illusions in the sense of choice blindness what I'm going to talk to you about is specifically about magic now Suzanne and I we started studying magicians because we realized that magicians were the world's artists of attention and awareness they manipulate our attention like magnet manipulates a compass and they we realized also at the same time that they did this so well they did a certainly better than scientists and we needed to learn what they were doing for us to take these techniques back to the laboratory and increase the rate of discovery in cognitive neuroscience that was the idea so when we started working with them such as such as Jamie and and Joshua we were very quickly learned that we were absolutely right the intuition was correct and so I want to tell you a little bit about what we've learned from editions about our brains about deception so here is a magician named Apollo Robbins the gentleman thief and he's going to do a very a very standard trick here take a look he's got a coin in his he's got a coin here in his left hand so and here we go and the look okay so so how did that happen how did that coin disappear what was happening in your brain when that happened this is fundamental to how we see and it's fundamental to how we think so we decided to take a closer look at that let's think about what's actually happening here we have light coming off of Apollo it's entering your eye being focused by the optics of your eye onto the Guv your retina the retinas transducing these signals into electrical signals that travel through the visual system to the back of the brain where the primary visual cortex lies and the signals from the retina are patterned into a map of the visual world and you can actually see the activity in the map matches that visual world that we call it retinotopic mapping and in this case it maps to apollo robinson specifically to where we were paying attention on Apollo Robbins body right here at this hand so this is a very important clue to what the brain is doing to help you actually experienced this trick of the coin disappearing we'll get to that in a second so now the real question is how can these circuits in the brain these inanimate neurons that are interconnected into a network that somehow becomes animate how can this possibly happen I mean let's think about who you are okay what you are is a bunch of electrochemical signals in the neurons in your brain these neurons somehow get information from the sensory systems as we shown from the eyes and from the ears and from the skin from all of the sensory systems it takes that information and it builds a simulation of the world for you it uses mixes it with the cognitive things that you know your memories your causal functions in your brain that that that's a which one one thing comes before the other and it puts it all together and it builds a simulation of the world which is the only thing that you have ever interacted with in your entire life right I'm not saying that the real world isn't out there it is but you've never lived there right you've never even been there for a visit you've only ever been in these circuits in your own brain and that's the only thing you will ever be in in the future so this gives you a hint as to how the magician's can manipulate our minds because they they have very good access to the very sparse information that we have to create the simulation of the world okay so this is going to be a model of how attention specifically works in the magic trick we showed you before so here we have I'm showing you three neurons here but in fact these represent hundreds of thousands of neurons now in that map I showed you you can imagine this neuron here being focused on the hand that was stole the coin okay now in the primary visual cortex one of the things that we've discovered Suzanne and I with our colleagues at suny and UConn was that these neurons here are actually motion Direction selective in the primary visual cortex and what happens is these neurons are activated to the sweeping of the hand during the steel of the coin during motion in the visuals what happens when these neurons are activated since that's the focus of the attention of the erver these blue neurons are actually activated as well by the cognitive attention system and that causes inhibition the surrounding okay let's take a look at what that looks like so we have here activation of the central neurons due to motion of the also simultaneously we're paying attention to that area so we suppress everything else which gives us this spotlight and suppresses everything else so what's happening is magicians are actually playing a form of mental jujitsu on you okay they're getting you to pay attention to a specific point in visual space inside your mind and your attentional systems then suppress everything else including where the coin actually is okay so this is exactly one of the mechanisms underlying misdirection in magic okay so we've got the the light coming off of Apollo it's going into the eyes the the retinas transduces into electrochemical signals it travels through the optic nerves back through the brain to the primary visual cortex where it forms an image of Apollo Robbins and we see that where we're paying attention is this hand and because we're paying attention to this hand it suppresses everything else okay so that's the fundamental neural mechanism of this kind of misdirection so what does this mean for us in our in our real lives and and about deception in the world well let's take the story of these two young women there is you students there they're in one of the apartment dorms and they're they're sharing a kitchen here and this young woman in green is talking to her friend blue about her boyfriend problems again for the seventh time this week now what's interesting here is this woman in blue he's very polite she's very she's paying attention she's attentive to the young woman in green she's looking at her in the face she's nodding it at the appropriate points of time here but we all know that she's actually paying attention right here just like most of you have been doing for the last couple of minutes since I put this slide up so what's interesting here is that we can do this at all so let's let's let's recap here so put your thumbs out in front of you about arm's length it's okay everybody you'll look like a nerd but that's okay think of Lawrence's shirt and it'll be okay so fixate on your thumbnail okay your thumbnail is about one degree of visual angle in your in your in your eye that means if you had 360 thumbs would make a circle all the way around your head okay now while you're looking at that thumbnail it turns out that in your visual system the only thing you can actually see is your thumbnail itself everything else you're basically legally blind okay so let me say that again you can only see one square degree of a vision in your entire one thousand square square degrees of visual field you only see the one square degree in the very center everywhere else you're legally blind so what that means is what she's doing is she's actually looking at her friend here but she's paying attention to visual garbage she knows this chocolate cake is there presumably she saw there before when she actually looked at it and but she's still paying attention there so why would we ever want to do that humans seem to have developed the ability to dissociate where they pay attention in space from the only place in the space they can see and and and so this is a form of deception certainly it's a form of interpersonal communication where people have gotten evolved the ability to look at one thing to make people think look at looking and paying attention to one thing when in fact they're paying attention somewhere else so we think that this is a very interesting point in terms of how magic works but also in terms of how our interpersonal deceptions help us in our interpersonal relationships so thank you very much for your patience thank you very much now we're going to move from the sort of how to the why and the perfect person I introduced that is slowly making his way back up to the stage we're very excited to have Robert rivers here in fact in some sense the idea of having a an event on deception occurred because we were we were able to get Robert to come here he has been essentially a leader in fact almost created the modern field of evolutionary psychology in the 1970s even as a graduate student at Harvard began work on what's called reciprocal altruism that changed the field and I was impressed that actually Steve Pinker who many of you know has been here a number of times said of Robert that he's one of history's greatest thinkers in the analysis of behavior and emotion and more recently Robert has turned to the idea of self-deception and and trying to understand exactly why and what the benefits and pitfalls of that are and so Robert I turn the floor over to you okay thank you thank you so what is self-deception self-deception is keeping the truth from your conscious mind that is counterintuitive you'd think you would want the truth to be always in your conscious mind to link up with whatever the powers of consciousness are a problem we still don't terribly well understand so it's counterintuitive if I take ten dollars from you you lose ten and I gain ten if you don't notice it but what's the benefit of me taking ten dollars out of this pocket and sticking in that pocket this has been a problem in human thought for a long time for many years I've thought there was a simple solution that self-deception evolved the better to deceive others so if I'm lying to you now about something you actually care about better yet you know me you're close at hand you can pay attention to any of the subtle cues of conscious deception but if I'm unaware I'm lying then I'll not show those signs and my voice will be surrounded with the sincerity and so on that we associate with honesty to give you just one cue one that works fairly well is a tendency when we lie for our voice to rise at least slightly especially when we come to the key word and that's because we're a little bit nervous about getting detected which will reverse the benefit-cost situation and tensing up the diaphragm and along here tends to raise our voice I'll give you one absurd example in my own life several years ago a woman was denying something I was not accusing her of namely having a homosexual relationship with another woman so she says you think I'm there with sherry and her voice shot up on the key word because she lost it and I said to myself well I did have a hypothesis and now I have slightly more evidence now what I want to concentrate today is just a small part of this whole area and that is what's the relationship between intelligence somehow defined and measured and self-deception all right this is a very important result summarized as follows the smarter your child is the more they lied so here's the experiment the child is sitting in a in a seat there's a box behind the child of the child can't see the experimenter comes in opens a box stick something in it closes it and says do not peek I'm going to leave the room for a couple of minutes do not peek then they go around of course peek in on the child through one-way mirror most children peek then they come back and they say did you peek most children lie but the key is that the brighter they are these are four year old children that have been given a little cognitive test and the brighter they are them well if they're in the top category why is this going on huh will you allow me to run this thing please a hundred percent of the children lie if you have a relatively slow child only 65% of the children lie all right to st. whoops I should be flashing it here well now you're leaving out something brothers well they left out something that should be in there namely the same thing as true of monkeys and apes adults that is if you look at deceptive acts in nature and they did a vast careful study of all the field studies and scored what they call tactical deception that's where you see deception and you see that what its payoff is their intended payoff is and they found that the larger the neocortex of the animal as SS brain but you can use the entire brain corrected for body size the more often they lied in nature so you lie more as a child in humans you lie more as an adult in in humans now we don't know about self-deception that's much more difficult to measure but I'll give you one little fact that ought to give you cause we in general have a tendency to put ourselves in the top half of a favorable category so eighty percent of high school seniors will say they're in the top half for leadership ability it's not possible but but you cannot beat academics 94% of professors in the u.s. regard themselves as being in the top half of the distribution and I plead guilty because I can be tied down to a bed in a backward of Phoenix General Hospital and I still think I'm doing better than half my colleagues and that's not just a comment on my colleagues all right now here's another interesting experiment that relates to a sense of power and how this affects our intelligence okay there are two ways you can write an e on your forehead you can write an other focused e so that you all can see it it's backwards to me or as this somewhat well do you be okay thank you somewhat more malevolent looking organism here is writing us a self focus e so as you look through it he sees an e but you don't now in actual fact most people all right that's the monkey slide they got backwards I don't know how they pull that trick but this is a su anything's possible all right now most people in fact right on other-directed e but it depends on their sense of power so psychologists have these little tricks that they will apply to you that creates a temporary state in you and then they measure the effect of the temporary state so they can make you feel more powerful or they can make you feel powerless it's partly getting to you right about a situation where you felt powerful how do you feel blah blah blah and then you get to pass out the MMS to the group the powerless describe a situation where they had no power and all they're allowed to do is write down how many M&Ms they hope to get okay these little Prime's just act for a short period of time but long enough to produce an interesting effect namely those were the low-power they only write is self focused ie about twelve percent of the time but if they're made to feel powerful it's three times as often now before I go on with the rest of the karlitz you've got to love social scientists why in sweet Jesus name do they make this graph three dimensional you've got to run along here and run down here you got to run all the way here and then run down here so I think the general rule must be the less content in the discipline the more the presentation but there are other there are other correlates of this power manipulation that are perhaps even more interesting those that are made to feel powerful recognize human faces less well this is where just flash in one second anger sad etc less well than the powerless they remember faces less well and they have a harder time taking someone else's viewpoint in a simulated situation the people that are powerless have got to pay attention to these kind of variables now what's worse if it's a powerful man because although both sexes tend to be over confident it's more a male disease in a female disease so an overconfident male is both sorry a powerful male is both overconfident and ignorant that's a bad combination you know and and the fact that he was known to be very bright did not guard him from self-deception it just made the self-deception all the words okay now let me show you if if I good let me show you the last little relationship here that I think you'll enjoy and this is work was done in Georgia on a1 heterosexual man what's an a1 heterosexual man he's only had heterosexual experiences he's never had a homosexual fantasy or even a homosexual thought or so he says you then you then divide them through some little paper pencil test into those that are relatively upset about male homosexuality or men or relatively relaxed okay you know I would be very distressed of my my son's high school math teach you were gay or you know if I see two men holding hands I get outraged okay or your relax now comes the fun part they show them dirty movies but they take the they take the trouble to attach a places-- McGrath to the base of each man's forgive me dick because I don't like the word I it may be a personal problem with me but word penis is unattractive so anyway so now they've so now they've got an objective measure of the man's arousal all right so first they show them six minutes of a pornographic movie man and woman making love the dick grows admirably continues to in in fact it looks like there's still a little bit of tumescence left over for the seventh minute now there's no difference between the two god of categories of man the homophobic and non homophobic so i won't tell you which is which now we're going to watch two women making love and you see there's a nice start off but for certain reasons we won't go into a tapers off to this again there's no significant difference now I think you're gonna guess what's down here here's two men getting it on here are the non homophobic man they show a slight and as it turns out statistically insignificant increase in tumescence here are the homophobic man starting to rise taking off here continuing to rise how they get halfway they get 2/3 of the way up to sing two women together now when you ask each of these men in each of these conditions in five out of six condition the men correctly state their tumescence and their level of arousal is highly correlated with them the only one that doesn't is this character down here so so there's a seems to be a kind of a denial of what's in you a projection onto others and then an attack on it Freud had a particularly find unappealing in yourself and then attack it in others now in this country this is a monthly occurrence a preacher or a politician who's taken a strong stand against homosexuality gets outed whether it's in a men's room in a Minneapolis Airport or whether it's in a megachurch in Georgia all right so in short well you can't summarize a little short thing like this but I'll just summarize it by saying it's self-deception is a general feature of our life from our most intimate relations to our international relations it's something that we can all be involved in in studying all different fields arts biography so forth doesn't have to be evolutionary biology and we can also do it just personally in our own lives right so it's something we can all partake on the logic is simple and the results apply generally and I think I'll just end with Groucho Marx who had a beautiful quote that encapsulate some of the contradiction of this and here's what Groucho said the key to life is honesty and fair play if you can fake those you've got it make well uh we'll segue to as we move towards it I've got that I've got the liquor yeah don't worry I got it um yeah we've got to follow that Carol we'll move next to Cal Tavros and we're going to move more from we've been moving from the brain to the self to society and the interesting thing about about Carol who's a social psychologist is she's emphasized the fact that the brain it's not just the brain all you ever hear about is the brain as she said but in fact it's society as well and society and culture affect the brain in some sense as much as the brain affects society and culture and so we want to move towards that and and Carol has been as written on in particular the idea of dissonance cognitive dissonance and has pointed out that when when when dissonance is when when you perceive yourself in a sense that when when something deeply affects your concept of yourself and it disagrees will that happens say for example you came here and you gave the technician slides in the wrong order and I think you get the point Carroll mistakes were made but not by me is what this theme is Lawrence thank you and actually I'm quite honored to be included in this group as a social psychologist because many people think that you know if you claim you're doing psychological science that that's an oxymoron anyway and my job as a social psychologist is to explain that actually yes social psychologists do do research and we are scientists in our own way in Los Angeles where I live people think a social psychologist is a therapist who hangs out in a lot of bars and so I'm always trying to explain what exactly it is that we do and of course I do share the admiration in our society for the research from neuroscience look what we've learned tonight on this panel and the findings from evolutionary psychology but as Lawrence said with a kind of caution because I'm worried that biological reductionism has become so extreme that nowadays people think you know really to show you're doing science you've got to be studying the brain there were two researchers actually did a cute study of this they gave the same lecture to two different audiences but one audience heard the lecture with a brain scans you know fMRI is and so forth and the other did not and everybody thought that the lecture with the brain was more scientific so now I don't go anywhere without my brain I just want to reassure you that you will be hearing about some science this evening okay no brain now I also want to say that I'm really impressed by the research we've had from evolutionary psychology I think it's tremendously important and an important humility correction for us all the fact that basic personality traits like extraversion can be found in the octopus certainly should give us pause as a species but also as a social psychologist I've been interested in how our theories of evolution have changed evolved dare I say over the decades when I was in graduate school in the days before there were any women's bathrooms on the floor of the US Senate it was so long ago that PMS had not been invented theories of evolution were primarily designed to explain to us why men had the power and you know there were theories of selfishness and competition and of course the Darwinian view of sexuality hmm which is what I call the king and I approach to sexuality those of you who remember this musical you know the King sings a woman must be like a flower with honey for just one man the men must be like the honeybee and gather all he can no one in those days were interviewing the Queen okay and I must tell you that in my ensuing decades of studying the study of sex differences I have to tell you that is the one difference that has been most reliable and unchanging in all of these years men really really love that theory more than women do okay so as women though enter these fields of evolution and biology and in the trail of the brilliant and wonderful Robert rivers we've learned that not only is female promiscuity a part of human behavior but so are such overlooked virtues as cooperation altruism and empathy now what does this have to do with self-deception I think this today when all of us on this weary fighting planet are so worried about the state of our lives about the state of our planet we resonate to the evidence that we aren't so sapiens after all look at how many books look at how much research has come out showing that we are irrational emotional foolish and self-deluding which we are but if evolution gave us self-deception it also gave a self-awareness if it gave us gullibility it also gave us skepticism it gave us greediness it also gave us fairness a sense of fair play it gave us the ability to invent spam and the ability to invent science so to me as a social psychologist the interesting question is not just what half evolution wrought but what are the social and cultural conditions that allow us or require us to shape our capacities in one direction or another my topic here is cognitive dissonance which indeed is one of the key mechanisms of self-deception and it's a good example of the benefits and disadvantages of evolution in this respect because although it does seem to be hardwired we can learn to correct for it in the same way that understanding the optical illusions that we've seen gives us insight and the ability to control for them dissonance is indeed the discomfort we feel when two cognitions contradict each other John Stuart who is using this term all the time on his show describes describes the process as two rats fighting in a bag okay and that's exactly right smoking is bad for me versus I'm a heavy smoker they don't live well in the bag dissonance is as uncomfortable as hunger and like hunger we're motivated to reduce it smokers have to quit or they have to justify smoking self justification is what allows us to sleep at night comfortable in the choices that we've made we make a decision as Suzanna said and then we find an explanation for it we justify it despots do this they justify the thousands of people they have murdered in their regimes they sleep just fine at night the need to reduce dissonance however is most powerful when we are confronted with evidence that we have done something inconsistent with our own view of ourselves and as Robert pointed out since our view of ourselves is that we all live in Lake Wobegon and we are brighter kinder cuter smarter and more ethical than everybody else we are really motivated to maintain that view of ourselves there was a very cute study done at two fundamentalist Christian colleges in America where the great majority of students thought they were humbler than average I do love that study okay so um face now with this evidence somebody says you've just done something really stupid Carol you know look you've done this foolish thing or this incompetent thing or this unethical thing or this fattening thing now we have a choice we can say oh thank you so much for giving me this evidence showing me that my lifelong philosophy of child rearing is wrong and that my belief in vaccines causing autism is wrong and oh thank you for pointing out that I've just behaved like an idiot I'm so grateful to you or we don't we dismiss the evidence we tell the other person to go and get lost thank you very much for your observations but you're really an idiot so is your data and you can you know what you can do with your data what we do in short is we discredit the evidence to maintain our view of ourselves as being good kind ethical and fair now this kind of self justification is self-deception but it's not the same thing as intentionally lying to others to get off the hot seat when we're caught doing something we know is wrong the insidious thing about dissonance reduction is that it is largely an unconscious mechanism that allows us to lie to ourselves to preserve our opinion of ourselves that's why the implications of this theory of this research are so important because they show that our problems don't arise from bad people doing bad things they arise from all of us good people bad people whatever that generic term means from people who justify the bad things they do in order to preserve their belief that they're good people okay that's why this kind of self-deception can be so dangerous now how do people come to do those foolish bad unethical things in the first place it works like this or slide this is from an actual study of children let's imagine we have two students at the top of a pyramid there are a millimeter apart in their attitudes toward cheating they think it's not a good thing to do but look at there are worse crimes in the world and it's not a good thing it's not a horrible thing it's just the thing I would never do it myself but you know it's it's not so bad now they're taking a final exam this exam is crucial for their grade in the course they're going to either get into graduate school or not their whole lives depend on this exam and they freeze on an important question they freeze they haven't a clue what the answer is they know they're going to go down with this exam and now the student next to them the one with the beautiful handwriting makes her answer apparent do you cheat or don't you cheat on an impulse one cheats one looks at her answers and scribs from them and the other says you don't know I'm not going to do that one gives up the grade for integrity the other gives up integrity for the grade next slide now no no nope you went too far backward okay now here's the point the minute the minute you make a step off that pyramid the minute you take some behavioral change cheat or don't cheat now you must justify the action you took in order to reduce dissonance that is to keep your behavior consonant with your attitudes you can't change the behavior so you shift the attitude the one who cheated will now justify that action by saying you know cheating really isn't such a big deal everybody cheats everybody here cheats it's in it's a normal thing and besides this in another language it would be we would be calling it cooperation and besides which also I need to do this for my career but the one who resisted the temptation to cheat will justify that action by deciding that cheating is far more immoral than he originally thought in fact this is not a victimless crime cheating is disgraceful people who cheat should be expelled we must make an example of them within a week they will have slid down this pyramid of self justification and dissonance reduction to be as far apart in their ideas about cheating as you can imagine and they will now think they have always felt that way about cheating one wants to hang up cheaters by their ankles and get them out of this school and the other is dismissing it as not being important now here then is my message about self-deception all of us will be on the top of that pyramid frequently in our lives with a choice to make stay in a troubled relationship or get out admit your part in that family quarrel or keep blaming your brother-in-law begin an extramarital affair or not have a little schmoo de Lin the men's room of the airport with that guy you've always wanted to know what that was like or not believe that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or not which ever choice we make we will justify it to keep our attitudes and our behavior in harmony and this is the key we will then start looking only for information that supports our decision that we were right and we will ignore forget minimize and trivialize any information that is dissonant that suggests that we were wrong that process of action self justification and further action along that slippery slope increases our commitment to the first decision which might only have been a small impulse how do you corrupt an innocent man you just get him to take one small step off the pyramid and self-justification and self-deception will do the rest cognitive dissonance and the self-deception it creates may be built into our mental wiring but how we think about our mistakes how we take action to correct them if we do is not that is learned that is up to what our culture encourages or punishes many people in our culture learn and can learn that opening owning up to mistakes being open to discrepant dissonant information that's the fundamental of science leads to other ideas better ideas and it preserves relationships I have yet to find anybody who is really upset when you say to them honey I've thought about this a long time and you know I was wrong and you were right so my last word on this is an appreciation of the evolutionary benefits of dissonance and self-deception is no justification for not working to override them when we need to and to protect ourselves from the people who won't or can't thank okay I can hear me can you hear me good we're going to well from Carol having gone through in some sense an issue we'll deal with later which is how to how to deal with deception we're going to go we're going to come full circle and come back to Jamie and Swiss who is as you can tell a remarkable magician but more than that in fact Jamie has been producer of a number of magic shows the longest-running off-broadway magic show in New York for 15 years Monday night magic but he's also been writing and lecturing about magic for a long time and about in fact the issue of deception and in that regard he's also been very active in the skeptic community and he's now in fact a fellow of the James Randi foundation and he helps administer what many of you may have heard is the million dollar prize which has been offered to anyone who can demonstrate paranormal ability under mutually agreed-upon tech's conditions and of course no one's won that prize because I should before he begins I'll just say the New Yorker magazine declared that he is widely thought of to have one of the most masterly sleight of hand techniques in the world today and we'll see what is sleight of mouth technique is so Jamie thank you lord thank you thanks I'd like to be I'd like to begin by addressing I'll be in very briefly the first two questions that were on the agenda today one why is deception such an integral part of the human condition and to what evolutionary purpose could it possibly serve so I'll be it briefly these pants make my ass look fat that concludes the portion of my addressing the first two questions on the agenda moving on I'm a professional magician and I would like to talk to you today about how magicians deceive you now all magicians know that magic a successful magic illusion occurs only in the minds of the spectator as a magician friend and colleague of mine Peter Samuelson so elegantly puts it I can't really do magic I can only help you to see it but to manipulate the mind of another person requires that one is able to imagine that mind and in the worlds of philosophy and psychology this is known as theory of mind and theory of mind in its most basic description is the ability to attribute mental states to others beliefs intense desires and more in order to better understand how those beliefs cause action in others and a subset or related concept the theory of mind is the notion of empathy which is the emotional component it's the ability to share the feelings of others the emotional aspect of theory of mine I found a quote where Robert rivers has said that empathy is a very important part of deceit and I agree and I've just said that to emphasize one must construct a theory of mind and awareness of the existence of minds outside our own and humans can begin to do this at a surprisingly young age what's interesting about this partly to me as a magician is that in order to try and establish or identify the development of theory of mind we use the ability to deceive we investigate the ability to deceive because the ability to create deception as well as to understand the notion of false belief and others are requisites to a concept of mind so while it was long believed that children did not master the technique of lying until the age of four or so more recently behavioral studies indicate that infants can begin to exhibit deceptive behavior as early as six months and one recent study revealed that quote infants quickly learned that using tactics such as fake crying and pretend laughing could win them attention and that by eight months more difficult deceptions became apparent is concealing forbidden activities or trying to distract parents's attention eight months or is it typically colorful headline from the UK's Globe and Mail putted sneaky babies learn to lie before they learn to talk now although magicians use deception we do so in a context that is both authentic and indeed ethical by invoking the word magic or conjuring magicians establish a clear moral contract with the audience in the worlds of a world-famous American musician at the turn of the 20th century Carl Germain he said that quote conjuring is the only absolutely honest profession the conjurer promises to deceive and does see if I didn't tell you first I began advertising of politics and my website by the way is honest lawyer karim so there but while magicians use deception in service to and art to artistic goals creating the experience of mystery for our audiences in other context deception can be used to take advantage to turn audiences into victims for example in the world of the professional con man now i can tell you that the con artist takes his victim on a kind of controlled psychological tour when for example he suckers a mark a victim with three-card monte or shell game street scams and so-called short cons that are been around for centuries but still continue to find a ready supply of fresh victims around the world every day and you know the word con in con game actually assured for confidence because it speaks to the requirement of the con man to gain the victims confidence yes and eventually in knowing and controlling what the mark will think what he will feel and ultimately what he will do so to create a perfect and effective performance the con artist and the magician alike must engage the audience's emotions and not just for their intellect not just their intellect or else magic is reduced to a mere puzzle not an experience of mystery and intellectual experience instead of an emotional and aesthetic one and so whether for good or for ill empathy is a necessity now I'm going to use a coin for a moment here to demonstrate just give you a brief glimpse into how hard we work to try and fool you because we don't get to use lying as a method we're honest liars and we've told you that we're lying and that changes a lot of things so here's something that your grandfather did terribly but can be done beautifully to make a coin disappear it's what you saw Apollo Robbins do before it's called the French drop it's a basic technique of sleight of hand one of the first things we learned and make a coin or a knob small object disappear and there's a lot of steps involved in this because it's a very unnatural way of doing this now when your grandfather did this he probably appointed the other hand like this and clenched his hand and you know it's some desperate attempt to fool you and and it probably worked because you're five but when I teach this technique to my adult students I actually begin with the position of the feet because this is what magicians call a false transfer will be pretending to transfer the coin from one hand to the other it's a very unnatural event it's not something that actually occurs in real life very often and so in order to try and convince you of that we have to try and transfer everything else but the coin to try and convince you so we begin by transferring weights I begin with the weight here with that knee locked and then as I do the sleight I'm going to transfer the weight from one to the other you don't see that consciously but you will register it I transfer tension there's tension in this hand the wrist is locked this hand is relaxed and apparently empty and as I appear to transfer the coin I've now transferred the tension I've added it to this hand subtracted from this hand which is apparently relaxed and empty now and I've transferred my focus with my eyes in my head focusing on the coin here and then on the coin here I'm transferring everything but the coin and to give you even a further little window into this you might think if I was going to make a coin disappear I might rely on something called palming right whatever that is well even that's that's misleading it's a misleading term because it doesn't really have anything to do with the palm palming is a jargon term for magicians that means a concealment and we have many many concealments in the hand so there might be high finger palm low finger palm thumb palm front finger finger a back palm first finger grip fourth finger grip deep center back clip and sometimes in order to make that coin disappear in my just amount to balancing the coin on the back of the hand I mean whoo so okay so but you see the method many people think that the thing that separates magicians from the rest of you is that we know the method this is silly the method the mechanical method of the French drop is this that's it you lift the thumb the coin falls down that's the method but by itself this does nothing without the mister what magicians call misdirection which relates to all of the psychology and the naturalness and the movement the timing and all of this stuff that goes together to create a deception and when you put it all together it can look like that but the important thing is never point now it's been said that sleight of hand like I just showed you there is lying with the hands and you remember the start when I said that I was done addressing the subject of the soap social and psychological benefits of deception I lied because in considering the cost of deception one must ask how is it that we are all so readily deceived indeed for anyone who wants to try to protect themselves and others from being deceived whether by con men or phony psychics or professional casino cheats all subjects of professional and personal interest to me the single most important lesson I have today to offer you is this everyone can be fooled anyone can be fooled and blaming the victims stupidity is often a seriously mistaken and inappropriate explanation rather one must often credit the conman like the magician the conman has developed and refined his principles of deceptions over centuries taking advantage of his practical expertise in human psychology the same kind of practical expertise that Susana and Steven are trying to tease out and study in a scientific manner today but what is it in our psychological makeup that renders us all so de siiva belong to point out there's a conventional trope about people supposedly wanting to be deceived well I think this is nonsense rather there are aspects of the way our brain has evolved that can as a side-effect lead us to be deceived safely by magicians dangerously by advertisers and politicians all but fatally by conman and sociopaths but that is that in or in order to be a social animal you have to be able to trust others it makes sense to want to believe people we have evolved to disbelieve the notion that people can look us in the eye and lie very hard for us to process that because the alternative in ever-vigilant extreme of caution and protectiveness is contrary to being an effective social animal a human animal that is constantly weary relentlessly OnGuard quick to protect itself against any risk of deception would be a very untrusting being and that's not a being that will find it easy to develop constructive relationships and function well socially with its peers and colleagues family and society to do these things we must be willing to trust and indeed to trust is in our very nature and despite the associated risks now the main protections we have against deceivers is our built-in in-group out-group programming which kicks in at a very early age in mammals soon as we've learned to recognize immediate family and friends but that's a generalized kind of hope for the best protection that evolution has given us it doesn't account for individuals who are willing to operate maliciously within the group it doesn't protect you from Bernie Madoff who ruthlessly relied upon in group status to manipulate his victims and his Carol recently pointed out to me our psychology is pre-wired to protect us from the times when we will inevitably be fooled which typically produces dissonance how can I even so stupid in which we immediately strive to reduce I wasn't stupid let me mortgage my house and give the guy another 100 grand which people actually did with Madoff so I confess I think it's foolish to talk about people's desire to be deceived just as any of us can be fooled all of us engage in self-deception as well but ultimately it's for a higher purpose for the benefits that delivers us in dealing with ourselves other people and the inherent dissonance of this world nobody wants to be fooled except that the magic show we're being fooled is not the same as being a fool but fool we all shall be and it cannot happen without empathy or without trust and the ability to trust even when the cost means being occasionally victimized is central and essential in human life in society so sure try not to be fooled but don't be too hard on yourself when it happens thanks before we do anything else I want to thank the panel for and now what since you're all now experts on deception we thought we'd end this segment before we go into the intermission with a chance for you to be deceived one more time so I'm going to ask Jamie to stay on stage and the rest of us will go off and Jamie will take us out to the intermission so thank you sir so I'd like to leave you with a vivid demonstration of the role that empathy plays in magic you know from the very start in magic magicians use empathy most people get involved in magic at the age of seven eight nine ten and by the age of eight I had practice mirrors on my table right that I practice it and those mirrors represented the eyes and minds that I was trying to fool they were windows into an alien consciousness which I was trying to create an illusion for that I could not experience myself so I'm going to give you sort of a crack at that I'm going to offer you an a unique piece of magic in which all of you will be able to see the workings and exorcise your own empathic abilities and I believe that the more empathy that you have the more you will enjoy the result now I asked I approached someone earlier didn't make any pre-arrangements other than to simply ask if it's Kim right is that right if you were willing to help me are you willing to give me a help book would you come up and it's Kim would you give our warm welcome thank you for so much for joining me and let's go this way and although I did ask you quickly briefly before if you were willing to help other than that you have no idea what's going on we haven't pre-arranged anything or anything like that now you and I are going to collaborate here and create demonstrate a unique kind of magic the kind of magic that I can accomplish when I deprive you of one of your senses now it will not be your sense of humor we need that and there'll be no permanent damage I promise okay and it's not my intention to embarrass you in any way at all I really think you're going to have a unique experience and a memorable and magical one okay so the sense I'm going to deprive you of Kym is your sense of sight and I don't want to blindfold you because from time to time I need you to open your eyes and you'll see what's going on yes so if but but when I do ask you to keep your eyes closed I'll ask you to really kind of concentrate on that if you open your eyes sort of accidentally or blink or something you'll just see it at the wrong time and you lose the sense of the illusion fair enough so I thought we'd begin with a little test close your eyes please darken they're in it it actually makes a lot of this magic stuff a little easier from what I've heard I'm going to come back to you right here now okay and open your eyes and has anything changed yes and that is I have a hanger-on good that's good that's good because if you didn't notice it means I'm doing magic for the visually impaired no one's impressed I actually grew up in Brooklyn we used to call this a car antenna now I've dated myself could you come just a little closer to me thank you very much that's good and now if you would be so kind as to extend your hand straight out to me like this almost together just like that and I'm just going to just a little bit lower I'm just going to run my hands down your arms obviously you can feel that you can see that you know exactly where my hands are and I'm going to do that one more time in a moment I'd like you to close your eyes now this is no longer a test and keep them closed until I explicitly ask you to open your eyes I'll count off later and ask you to open them once again one more time I'll rub my hands down your arms and as a matter of fact just to make us a little more secure would you turn your hands up and grab me by the wrists please firmest firmly from beneath hold tight a little blood must flow but now don't let go but do give me a little flex keep your hands close but do give me a little room to flex so I can reach up take the hanger from over my head and I will tap you with that you can feel that yes okay and so now in a moment I will count the three and at that moment on the count of three and only on the count of three you can open your eyes as you and the entire audience will see the solid hanger pass through your arm ready one two three that's a little strange huh yes it is okay all right all right it's supposed to be uh now with that can you figure out any way to get that off without letting go of me that would be the magic part so you can let go now you can let go and take a look why you have it while you have it make sure it's solid right it doesn't come apart there's no breaks no gaps no holes little hole in there but that doesn't count and here's the idea the first time there you had control over my hands always good idea the second time we'll start by giving you control over the hanger so we try with your right hand and just grasp the hanger just like that that's perfect and now I'll ask you to close your eyes again all right keep them close until I ask you to open them and while you have a grip on it you have a grip on the hanger right reach out with your left hand and just wrap it over your other around your other hand that's good and now in a moment I'm going to ask you to release the hanger to me but only open enough enough to let the hanger out and then immediately reclass up your hands so that the circle of your arm remains on arms remains unbroken yes so just leave release the hanger to me yes thank you okay wow you weren't taking any chances that's good that's good okay so you can feel the hang on outside there okay now once again I'm going to count to three and on the count of three and only then you can open your eyes as you and the entire audience will see the solid hanger pass through your arm here we go one two three did you all see it pass through our arm a little stranger than the first one yes okay so now let's see what we can do I'll tell you what face front if you would and this time I'll give you control the first time you have control of my hands the second time you have control over the hanger this time I'm going to give you control over the close circle that we're going to try and pass the hang on to so if you would be so kind as to put your right hand on top of your head just like this jelly bean or I've dated myself okay and now face front and close your eyes alright keep them closed until I ask you now it's funny can people in your situation they often come up to me after the show and they say you know I don't know exactly how you did that Jamie but I think it seated and it's true I do cheap but honest only a little and so here's the now now is there any way you can think of I could possibly get this solid hanger into the circle of your arm right now any way you could think of me doing that like a chop off your head or cut off your arm but I did promise there would be no permanent damage so those are excluded from the protocol so now once again I'm going to you can feel the hanger outside I'm going to count the three and on the number three you can open your eyes as you and everyone else sees a solid hanger pass through you're on one two three oh baby Yeah right keep your hand up there keep your hand up there okay see that okay now just for the record okay now face front cuz I don't want to hurt you if I hurt y'all marry ya okay now the truth of the matter is we did not prearranged any of this and you're not just going along with this for the ride you actually don't know how it works right I mean it's like it's over your head I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry there will be an apology in the times in the morning okay so here we go one last time one last time close your eyes face front keep your hand up there keep your eyes closed extend your left hand all arm all the way out to the left if you would matter of fact put your left hand on your hip okay and you can feel a hangar here in your arm okay and now I'm going to tap you three times very slowly and on the count of three you can open your eyes and witness the miracle one two two and a half and three and that's amazing and that's empathy he's great I posed it'd be fun right hey it's Ted yeah nice hand so magicians fall in love with mad because I said about the age of seven and ten and then we spent our lives trying to create illusions for the experience of illusions for others the experience of mystery for others and the better we get it creating that unless we are able to experience ourselves until we get to the point where most of the time we're only experiencing magic precariously through the eyes and the mind of our audience and so I hope you enjoyed I hope you all enjoyed having the opportunity to see how that work but is but even if you had a good experience doing that I hope you did I think Kim had an even better experience she had a unique experience of mystery and with knowledge comes a burden yes and a small burden is although not insignificant is the burden of helping to preserve Kim's sense of mystery tonight because there is no honor or heroism in ripping it away from her so I would not I would not be in a hurry to do that but more significantly there is this is that the fact that she had a unique experience that now with the burden of knowledge now and forever will always been denied to the rest of you so the next time you think you want to know how a magic trick is done just remember that opportunity is now denied you and hey you know I'm truly sorry about that but hell I emphasize you

Channel: ShirleyFilms

Views: 63,054

Rating: 4.8736176 out of 5

Keywords: Lawrence Krauss, Jamy Ian Swiss, Joshua Jay, Magic, Trick, Magician, Deception, ASU, Gammage, Arizona State University, Susana Martinez-Conde, Rovert Trivers, Carol Tavris, Origins, Great Debate, 2012, 2013

Id: ZUduQ2aqQ50

Length: 97min 48sec (5868 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 30 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/SumSo]

Is there a subreddit for stuff like this? Well worth the watch for anyone

Edit: /r/lectures - there really should be more active users there, must be a lot of interesting stuff posted all the time