The Art Of Honest Deception pt. 1

i thought this was an interesting article

~*~ FuelGirl ~*~

John Mulholland, the well-known magician, was displaying his fascinating mastery of sleight of hand before an audience of college professors and students. He picked up a coin with his left hand, placed it in his right, then opened his hand slowly. The coin had vanished. Suddenly a book flew through the air, narrowly missing the performer's head. An embarrassed professor arose from his seat and quickly apologized.

A similar experience is described by Milbourne Christopher, another wielder of the wand. He was performing before a social gathering in Philadelphia, and he asked a reserved, dignified lady to assist him by selecting a playing card. "I changed the card in her hand from the king of hearts to the three of spades without touching it," Christopher relates. "She looked up, exasperated. Then she gave me a terrific shove, toppling me over a small table and onto the floor. Afterward she was most apologetic."

This instinctive and violent reaction to being fooled occurred because the spectators did not understand, and therefore could not enjoy, the principles in the art of honest deception. Since all deception employs the same basic methods, you should know what they are. Not only will your pleasure in witnessing magical performances be increased, but you will be able to guard against dishonest attempts to fool you.

Let us analyze what happened when the professor was baffled. With a perfectly natural move, the magician apparently picked up the coin with his right hand. Actually the coin remained in his left hand, dropping down into the palm from the extended fingers. His eyes and directed attention followed the moving, closed right hand, while his unobserved left hand slipped the coin into his coat pocket. Then, when the performer slowly opened his right hand, the coin had apparently vanished, and his left hand was empty also.

The coin did not vanish because the hand is quicker than the eye. The hand is slicker, not quicker, than the vision of spectators. Magic is successful because it is nine-tenths simple distraction. Your attention is cleverly misdirected. It is your own brain that deceives you.

You do not see with your eyes alone, but with your brain and mind, which sorts out the confusion of outlines and colors, and forms them into definite, understandable images. Because the mind has so very much to do with what is being observed, deception is made possible.

Your mind is a censor. If you see two men--one twenty feet away from you and the other forty--your eyes tell you, falsely, that one man is only half the height of the other. Your intellect, however, corrects this erroneous impression. The mind, on the other hand, has the habit of building up familiar objects and individuals on the basis of a fleeting glance or a vague impression. If you happen to see a friend, for example, passing through a doorway, you may actually see only a familiar hat or ear or shoulder. But your mind fills out the incomplete picture, and you say to yourself: "That's Mr. Smith!" Usually you are right, but sometimes you are wrong.

As a result of this mental habit details are not observed. Most men cannot tell you whether the numbers on their watches are Roman or Arabic, whether all twelve numbers are present, or whether the manufacturer's name is in view. Unimportant matters, despite clear observation, are not registered in the consciousness.

We see what we expect to see, and it is difficult to recognize anything we are not prepared to encounter. If we ran across a polar bear in a field near Chicago, we would likely recognize it as a large white boulder--until it moved or we got close to it. But if we knew a bear had escaped from a circus and we were searching for it, we might at first identify a rock as a bear.

A magician tosses an orange into the air. Three times the orange rises and falls, each toss being made with the identical motions of the performer's body and hands. The fourth time we see the orange rise--and vanish. Actually, the orange never left his empty right hand the fourth time, but the repetition of his preceding movements had deceived us. We observed what we had expected to see--and were fooled

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