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The mind is an easy thing to fool
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Location: Blogs Sly Comments |
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| Posted by: Emory Schley |
9/21/2007 4:54 AM |
Close-up magic is, I think, a fairly new phenomenon in our society. I suppose the original close-up magic tricks were the hundreds, perhaps thousands of card tricks that have been invented by clever, but devious minds. When you look into the inner workings of some card tricks and learn their secrets, it seems almost impossible that some of them can be thought of as anything mysterious when seen by an observer, but the mind can be awed by the simplest of ruses, at times.
Here is a trick that long baffled me, even though I knew exactly how it worked. It sounds so simple, and it truly is, but your mind keeps searching for some highly complicated sequence to help make sense of it all, when it’s just simplicity itself at work here: Sort a deck of cards into its various suits, then arrange each suit in numerical order, then stack the suits together. The observer, of course, is unaware of this preparation. Hand him the deck and tell him to cut the cards exactly 13 times. You can throw in some mumbo-jumbo about there being exactly 13 cards in each suit if you like, but that’s just smoke and mirrors – misdirection as magicians call it. After the observer has cut the cards exactly 13 times, you pick up the deck, then start turning over the cards one by one, and to the amazement of the observer, they all come out in their exact numerical sequence, AND sorted by suits.
I’m almost ashamed to admit that this trick totally baffled me, and I just couldn’t understand how the cards maintained their correct order even after being cut 13 times! My mind rebelled against the logic of such things. I used to think I might someday write a computer program tracing out the location of each card throughout the process so that I could understand it better, but fortunately a lack of time prevented me from actually doing it.
One day, it finally occurred to me, DUH, that an insight into what was going on here could be had just by preparing the deck, then turning it face up before starting the 13 cuts. I quickly discovered the 13 cuts were merely a ruse, actually ANY number of cuts were possible and the trick would still work. In fact, the whole idea was so simplistic, it probably shouldn’t even be considered a trick at all. But take a simple principle, add a little “smoke and mirrors, (13 cuts exactly)” a little showmanship, and voila!, an instant mystery!
This little deception makes quite an impression on others. Try it, and you’ll see! |
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Re: The mind is an easy thing to fool |
By bawble on
9/24/2007 6:33 AM |
| And so? The cut-deck was exchanged for another pre-set one? So, have you seen two guys currently on tv that do street magic? On is Chris Angel and I can't think of the other guy but he is a young black man. Both are pretty good. |
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