Poker Chip Magic Trick Revealed
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Many of us spend our childhoods wondering how magic tricks work, and as adults, it doesn't get much clearer. We might theoretically understand that it's all sleight of hand, but magicians — or at least the good ones — fool us into seeing the impossible despite our best efforts. It helps if you're willing to be swayed, of course, but magicians are masters of the art of manipulation. For a brief moment, they can make you believe that they really did saw a woman in half or make the entire Statue of Liberty disappear.
Needless to say, magic is a fascinating subject for psychologists, and a study recently published in the journal Frontiers of Psychology uncovered something fascinating about why magic seems so, well, magical. According to the Washington Post, researchers from Oxford University showed more than 400 participants a series of videos depicting one of the researchers, who happened to be a semiprofessional musician, performing different actions. Some videos showed everyday tricks — wearing a poker chip as a monocle, or eating a crayon — but in others, the researcher carried out a more traditional magic trick.
The next trick is like a sponge bowl routine but done with poker chips and two cards. The two cards are crossed on the table and the poker chips disappear one at a time to appear under the cards. In the final trick, three chips are carried in a handkerchief. The handkerchief is opened and spread on a table to reveal the chips. The poker chips.
- Not just a poker demonstration, but a real magical experience for the spectator. The spectator only THINKS of a hand he wants and then can STOP the magician at five different cards. No chance that the magician would know which hand to deal or to force. The five chosen cards are exactly the hand he was thinking of.
- The Poker Test 2.0, by Erik Casey, is an updated version of his original Poker Test trick. It includes a new and versatile gimmick that is leagues above the original Poker Test gimmick that allows for more routines to be done besides the signature effect.
Here's the catch: In one of the videos, the researcher didn't perform any tricks at all. He pantomimed the act of making an object disappear, but his hands were actually empty the whole time. But that didn't stop some people from seeing an object anyway; researchers found that when participants were asked to describe the video afterward, 32 percent reported seeing him make an object disappear.
Appropriately, the trick is named the Phantom Vanish Illusion, and while it probably wouldn't be a hit during a real magic show, it still speaks volumes about how easy it is to manipulate people's senses of reality. As the magician-cum-researcher, Matthew Tompkins, explained, the trick works through the use of something called priming — when people are put in a certain frame of mind, they're quicker to make associations. When someone sees the word 'yellow,' for example, they're faster to recognize 'banana,' and as the Oxford study demonstrated, the same principle applies to magic tricks.
'We think what may be happening is that people are effectively confusing their expectations with a true sensory experience. ... This expectation is so vivid that it can actually be mistaken for a real object,' Tompkins said, according to Science Daily.
This is hardly the first study to make you question your grasp of reality — eyewitness accounts are notoriously subject to suggestion, and research has shown that it's dependent on everything from your imagination to the language you grew up speaking. In a 2012 study, researchers even found that the wording of a magic trick can lead you to choose different cards.
But knowing how magic works doesn't make the tricks any less fun to experience — or if it does, you're probably not much fun at parties. And now, for my final trick, I'll make your lunch hour disappear.
Images: Diogo Oliveira / EyeEm/EyeEm/Getty Images;Giphy (2)
There is a well-traveled card trick and mind-reading illusion that keeps popping up online, both in the form of a viral video and in the form of a PowerPoint presentation purporting to be the work of master stage magician David Copperfield (though the trick almost certainly is not).
The illusion can be startling until you figure out how it works—at which point you may find yourself wondering how anyone could possibly fall for such a simple, obvious deception.
The Illusion
The trick begins with the announcement that the video (or PowerPoint presentation) will read your mind. Don't believe it? First, take a look at these six cards. Now pick one—and only one—and remember it. Concentrate on the card you have selected. Now, prepare for that card to vanish. The six-card layout disappears and is replaced by a five-card layout. Conspicuously missing from the set is the card you have chosen. Voila!It's gone!
How the Trick Works
This is one of the simplest yet most effective mind reading illusions ever devised. How does it work?
Poker Chip Magic Trick Revealed 3
Take another look—a careful look—at the 'before' and 'after' card layouts, and it will become clear. Do you see it?
Poker Chip Magic Trick Revealed
The difference, aside from the fact that there's one fewer card in the second layout, is that none of the cards in the second layout are the same as in the first. Not only did your chosen card disappear—all of the original cards disappeared and were replaced with similar but completely different cards. In other words, this card trick is just that—a trick. No matter which card you select from the first set, the computer will 'read your mind' and make it disappear.
Misdirection
Like most magic tricks, this one depends on misdirection, which is a form of deception. The audience is focused on one thing, which distracts it from something else.
There are two kinds of misdirection: the first method, which is time sensitive, encourages the audience to look away for a brief moment so that the magic trick or sleight of hand can be accomplished without detection. This is the case in numerous card tricks and other feats of so-called 'magic.'
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The second approach consists of reframing the audience's perception and has nothing to do with the senses. Instead, the minds of the audience are distracted into thinking that focusing on an unimportant object is responsible for the resulting magic, when in fact this actually has no impact on the effect at all.
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That's precisely the case with this trick. Because we've been instructed to focus our attention and memory on one card—and one card only—most of us fail to absorb any details about the other five. When the entire set is replaced by a different one that looks approximately the same, we accept it as exactly the same. Abracadabra! (The giveaway with this trick is that the entire set of cards disappears before being replaced by the second set. If the trick were really magic—that is, if the computer could really read your mind—then only the card you chose would disappear.)