by Derren Brown
Until a single medium or psychic shows under controlled conditions (and that naturally means conditions agreed by the scientist and the psychic) that they are doing something paranormal – at which point I shall squeal with delight and devote myself energetically to such studies – I shall work on the sensible assumption that the rational explanations for supernatural phenomena are probably the correct ones. Given that, here is a list of some quirks of our nature that are far more fascinating in their implications and deceptive simplicity than the purported paranormal phenomena they can explain.
Useful and fascinating facts Less useful and fascinating phenomena which they explain
We pay more attention to things that confirm our existing beliefs than those that don’t. Misjudged lucky streaks in gambling.
Deciding that someone, or God, must love/hate us when they don’t.
Seeing evidence of supernatural design in nature.
Spiralling depression.
When we are desperate, we will grasp at anything. A booming industry of alternative remedies that aren’t tested and don’t do any particular good.
Stage mediums.
Health and diet fads.
We do our best to make patterns, especially human patterns, out of randomness. Hearing ghosts talk on tape.
Bible codes.
Satanic messages hidden in music.
Mistaking shadows for a burglar at night (but not vice versa).
Divining images in vegetable cross-sections.
Roulette systems for gamblers.
Thinking we’re psychic when a friend rings just after we’ve thought about them.
We like to think we are more in control of random events than we are. Using good-luck charms.
Walking around ladders to engineer good luck.
We are more likely to believe ideas that represent themselves vividly to us. Being taken in by media scare stories.
We are scared by the unknown, and hate to lose those we love. Believing in an afterlife rather than accepting our mortality.
If we’re asked a question, we will look into the eyes of the questioner. The success of a magician’s simple trick.
Sometimes during REM sleep, our eyes open and our brains wake up, but we remain paralysed, and prone to hallucinations. We think we have been visited by a ghost.
We think we have been abducted by aliens.
Certain frequencies, caused by fans, rumbling motors or wind through a window, can make our eyeballs vibrate in our sockets and make brief dark patches appear in our peripheral vision. Dark shapes in the corner of our eye that disappear when we try to look at them, and are taken to be ghosts.
We think we’re far more unusual than we are. Astrological and psychic readings that seem to tell us all about ourselves (but which could apply to anyone).
The cards returned and controlled to their required positions at the top, I picked up the deck from the table and asked Joel, ‘Do you believe that the spirits know what your card is?’
The question was of course ludicrous, but asked seriously, it moved him to look me in the eye as he considered what tone to take with his answer. That sustained moment of eye contact, and the knowledge that the others at the table would also be looking at him, enjoying his mildly amusing micro-predicament, was my cue (see table above) to swiftly rearrange the deck with another ‘pass’, under the guise of a playful riffle from hand to hand. He opted for the safer answer of ‘No, I don’t think so . . .’ and the others chuckled as the minor discomfort caused by the question was relieved with a response.
Inviting him to pay particular attention, I placed the deck on my outstretched left palm. With only partly feigned concentration, and a subtle tensing of my arm, I allowed the top half of the deck above the now central chosen cards to slide eerily forward, as if guided by some spirit hand. (A bending of the top half of the deck during the pass allowed for this movement to occur.) I removed the seemingly possessed top half and showed Joel that our unearthly companions had indeed cut the deck at his card, displaying its face, and he was suitably impressed. The strange movement of the deck had caused him to lean right forward; the reveal of his card, which I now saw was the Jack of Hearts, was his signal to react with surrender and delight, then to relax back into his seat. Naturally his friends’ eyes followed him, before the three remembered that other cards were to follow and leant forward again in anticipation.
‘What was your card?’ I asked Benedict, placing the Jack of Hearts face-down before them.
‘The Ten of Diamonds.’
I showed my palm empty, placed it flat over Joel’s card on the table, and rubbed it gently. I lifted my arm, displayed my bare hand again, then asked Benedict to turn the card over. It had become his Ten of Diamonds.
Benedict paused for a second, looking at the card, then raised his eyebrows as he looked away to something else – his wine glass – letting out a high-pitched ‘hmmm!’ of surprise.
I knew the change of the card was a strong moment. The finding of the Jack through the ghostly separation of the deck was light-hearted and curious, but the transformation of the first card to the second was magical. Knowing that they would fool themselves very convincingly, it meant that they were now being rewarded for their involvement, and hopefully would shed the lingering fear of the trick, or the magician, being an embarrassment. They – Benedict and Joel at least – were now involved.
Trivial as it may be by any other measure, this moment, seemingly impossible and fairly observed, would have created for Joel, Benedict and Charlotte a sudden intensifying of reality, a sense of being entirely in that moment. Their internal representations of the immediate world would have momentarily become brighter, more colourful, and more vivid. Searching for explanation, they could not afford to miss a thing; suddenly they were mentally replaying my act of rubbing the card, desperately trying to backtrack to find a solution. This is our response to bewilderment: taking the lifeless memory of the immediate past, to which we realise we have not paid enough attention, and rapidly scanning it, enlarging it and zooming in and out, searching for something we may have missed. This bewilderment is placed into an entertaining frame by a magician, so that while we are offered the experience of finding ourselves confronted with an impossibility, we are also spared the panic usually caused by our environment suddenly appearing to conspire against us. If the footstool before me now were to suddenly change into a fish tank, I should feel only alarm: to doubt my own senses without the promise of perceptual reconciliation from a tuxedoed magus would engender only rising dread and frightened confusion.*
This moment of reconsidering reality is valuable: we light up our present by reappraising our immediate past. Perhaps this enlivens us because it nudges at some unconscious primal threat response. If we have misjudged reality in relation to this pack of cards, perhaps we have also overlooked something lurking, sabre-toothed and predatory. So we widen our eyes and heighten our senses and try not to miss a thing.
Because it is a likely presumption that we have been holding a mistaken belief about our environment (that the card was what we thought it was; that the footstool was a footstool and not already a fish tank), we find ourselves picking through our memory of the event looking for those beliefs that maybe won’t hold up on reflection. Did we see the card first? If he switched the cards under his hand, where might the first card be? Was the hand really empty afterwards? It is rather like Descartes’ barrel of apples.
René Descartes’ great work Meditations was concerned with the theory of knowledge, and an attempt to ascertain what you could know for sure to be true. Which is an interesting question to concern yourself with, considering that you have no way of knowing that you’re not currently just a brain kept alive in a vat, wired up to a machine run by a mischievous demon, being fed electrical impulses that create the illusion of, for example, having a body, being seated in a room reading a book written by a guy on television (televisions, guys appearing on them and rooms to contain you also do not exist of
course; the experience of all these things has been invented by our cackling sprite controlling your every thought and feeling). Descartes’ famous conclusion, when all else is stripped away, is that the very fact that you are thinking at all means that at least you exist in one form or another. The demon may trick you about what you are doing and all sorts of other things, but the one thing he cannot trick you about is your existence. You may not exist in the form you imagine, but you can assume that you are a thinking thing and therefore must exist. This is encapsulated in his famous ‘Cogito ergo sum’, which is generally translated as ‘I think, therefore I am’.†
Descartes’ process of deciding what could be known to be real, as opposed to illusion, was to go through every belief he held and cast the bad ones out, like bad apples. In order to ensure that you have only good apples in your barrel, you are required to tip them all out then check each one in turn before returning it to the barrel or discarding it. With this approach he aimed to discern possible illusion from reality. The Cartesian apples approach is, for this reason, the most sensible way of trying to work out a magic trick. By tipping out all your beliefs that have led to this sudden collision, they can be examined individually:
I believe it is impossible for a card to change like that on the table.
Perhaps – but could it not also be a mechanical card that, as it is rubbed, allows hidden pips to slide across and replace the design previously seen? Unlikely, but possible. If this were true, it would be highly unlikely that the card could be examined afterwards. Was it shown fairly?
I believe the card definitely re-emerged from under his hand transformed into the Ten of Diamonds.
Most likely, but could it be that the card hadn’t changed at all, and some obfuscation or skill could have simply made it appear to have been different?
The magician’s hand was definitely empty before and after rubbing the card.
Possibly he has some way of showing a hand empty and still concealing a card, but this seems less likely than a simple exchange at an opportune moment when our guard was down, prior to the moment of directed attention (the rubbing on the table).
I believe that it was the Jack of Hearts when his hand covered it.
Ah! The whole illusion depends upon this, for if the face-down card had been secretly exchanged before it was rubbed, the trick would be solved. Are we merely presuming that Joel’s Jack of Hearts, just produced from the deck a moment before, was the same card rubbed on the table? Was there a moment when it could have been switched? Were we off-guard?
After this process is complete, memory is the only enemy, and a good magician will have planted seeds through deceptive language and little ‘convincers’ to ensure that the path his audience’s memory takes is predetermined – well-greased and safely steered away from moments and places where the method took place. Here, the magician performing close up or theatrically without television cameras has a huge advantage over the TV conjuror: manipulating the memory of modern television viewers is largely redundant in an age when they can rewind or watch online, correct their first false impressions, and even examine the performance frame by frame.
For a second time I transformed the card by covering it and rubbing it against the table. Upon removing my hand, the card had changed again, this time to the Two of Hearts, and Charlotte squealed to have her card seemingly identified, located and mysteriously introduced in one moment. She brought her hand briefly to her mouth as she let an ‘Oh!’ escape, looking at Benedict first, then Joel, to share her amazement. Only Joel returned a look of delight, enjoying her reaction.
I have worked for years as a magician, and rarely do I experience the pleasure of being surprised by a good trick. When those lovely moments do occur, I am transported back to watching The Paul Daniels Magic Show on my parents’ portable black-and-white television, upstairs in their bedroom, while downstairs on the big TV they watched something like Juliet Bravo or The Gentle Touch or another show for parents whose very theme tune would cause a sudden rising of distaste that I still, at thirty-eight, feel instantaneously upon hearing: a faint nostalgic repulsion triggered by a sense of alienation caused in turn by a private grown-up world of entertainment that held no appeal for me as a child. I still have the same reaction to hearing the theme tune for Ski Sunday or Crown Court or any other show from my childhood that I would hate, and hate because it meant Mum would put on her glasses and be absorbed for long hours while I – off school ill, reaching the end of summer holidays, or otherwise kicking around the house – found myself jaded and fidgety. But Daniels was a fantastic treat: I enjoyed the Bunco Booth as much as I was fascinated by his displays of Extra-Sensory Deception. The delight of watching his show during childhood has stored in me a sense-memory pleasantly roused when I am shocked and mystified by a beautifully performed piece of magic. Plenty of times I watch a trick and do not know the method – this is not as rare among magicians as you might think – but to be transported, to care about it: this is the exceptional prize. The last time it happened was when I was watching Teller produce coins from a fish tank during the Penn & Teller show at the Rio, Vegas. Conjuring at its best has an aesthetic quality generally lacking in mind-reading performances. A handful of coins plucked from clear water is beautiful; a man on stage convincingly plucking thoughts from someone’s mind may be baffling or even frightening but there is not that sting of touching exquisiteness that comes from a perfect visual moment.
Yet the pleasure Charlotte had taken in a card transformation – which had I seen it myself would have probably left me unaffected – may have been every bit as beautiful to her as Teller’s reworking of The Miser’s Dream was for me. Equally, and far more interestingly, in that moment of surprise and delight, when all else was forgotten and the change of the card entirely occupied her mind, Charlotte’s experience may have been just as surprising and delightful as any other moment she may encounter in life. The trivial nature of the variables (a playing card changing during a magic trick) is irrelevant: the experience does not limit itself to the lowest rung on the ladder of enchantment purely because the moment in question is so unimportant.
For example, I find it very hard to leave my apartment without a frantic search for pens. Enjoying the use of quality fountain pens and expensive instruments of scripture as I do, I have a small collection of such items at home. Pens, by their nature, are carried around in pockets, placed on tables and clipped to the back covers of books and pads; thus my enthusiasm for these objects grew alongside my frustration at how easily I would lose them. To remedy this, I decided to buy two sets of pens – a set to remain indoors, and a set from which I could select one to take out with me. Those that accompany me to meetings and restaurants and so on tend to be my favourites, and those of which I am feeling less fond remain in designated spaces and holders near my writing desk or library chair at home. Or sometimes vice versa. Either way, I had imagined that this two-sets ploy would make it easier to keep track of pens: I would never need to search for a pen on leaving for the day, for it would always be in my jacket by the door or in the little pen-box close by in the hallway. This has turned out not to be true. The moment one has two pens, one need never keep track of either. If a pen has been absorbed into the upholstered cleavage of a matronly sofa, it will not be looked for with any urgency when another pen is available to replace it. Soon, it is entirely forgotten; and when remembered, it is too late to recall the details of where it might have been lost. Equally, with a larger number of pens, it is harder to keep track of where they all are, whether all the correct outdoor pens are in the hallway box or jacket pockets as they should be, as opposed to illegally residing in desk drawers or on the floor, having rolled in the latter case under cabinets. I have attempted to stick to a rigorous system of removing pens from pockets and placing them into this convenient little hallway box upon my return, but I must look again at this routine, for it clearly fails, and jackets have a habit of moving deeper into the apartment as changing weather or whimsy sug
gests alternative outdoor sheathing.
Having spent the money on the pens, I am angry when I cannot find, for example, my new mock turtle-shell* Visconti this morning. The anger is composed of various factors, which perfectly combine to form a raging fury directed both at myself and everything in the world around me:
The pen isn’t where it should be
That’s fine; there are a couple of other places where it might understandably be without recourse to annoyance. Shall I just grab a biro and take it with me? No, no, I have committed myself to the aesthetic of having finer pens and paid through the nose for them, so I shall make a point of finding the desired instrument before leaving. Anger when not found: 25% – weary, familiar frustration.
Go through coat pockets
Not easy: I have a lot of coats and the cupboard in which they hang is also used for storing a mop along with some other long batons and thin poles left over from work done in the flat. These swing and poke among the coats and make the futile job of searching for pens (in pockets of garments I haven’t worn recently but feel obliged to look through) even more irritating. Anger when not found: 70% – genuine annoyance: why does this always happen, why does the pen system not work, etc.
Fucking cleaner
Once it’s established that the pen is not to be found, there is the automatic response of blaming my (blameless) housekeeper for moving it, tidying it away, or otherwise upsetting my delicate system, which I have never remembered to explain to her. So now I embark on hunting through a search of locations where she may have stashed it, placing myself, like an eighties homicide detective, into the mind of a proud and talkative Ecuadorian, thinking and feeling as her, letting my instincts guide me. Anger when not found: 90% – she always hides stuff, I must talk to her, now I’m late.
Where’s my brown jacket?