Mystery

by Jonah Lehrer

  Rouven’s encore, however, was different. For his last trick, the magician came out alone, his only prop a large wooden jigsaw puzzle, enclosed within a frame. Mohan sat up straight in his seat—he wasn’t expecting the finale to be an illusion he’d never before seen. Rouven began with a grandiose introduction: “I’d like to tell you a story about life. About what defines life. About ourselves.” He then explained the metaphor of the wooden puzzle: “Just as this wooden frame encloses all the pieces of this puzzle of life, we all store our defining elements perfectly inside us, leaving no space for anything else.”

  Rouven lifted the frame off the puzzle, handing it to a volunteer from the audience, and began describing some of his most cherished memories: a first kiss, his first bicycle ride, the first time he invented his own magic trick. As he recalled these events, Rouven picked up pieces of the puzzle, holding them in his hands. Each piece, he said, represented one of these memories.

  The best illusions build slowly; their languid pace heightens the anticipation. For the first few minutes of Rouven’s encore, as he spouted clichés about life, the audience didn’t even know what the trick might be.

  Once the puzzle was disassembled, Rouven began to put it back together. He turned to the audience and flashed a wry smile, a signal that they should pay close attention to what happened next. He pulled an extra puzzle piece from a small black bag. This wooden block had never been part of the original puzzle. He looked at his fully assembled puzzle, a seamless rectangle, and placed the extra piece beside it; the new block stuck out beyond the perfect rectangle. Rouven started moving the pieces around, a blur of motion. After ten seconds, the rectangle was remade, only now it also included the extra piece. Rouven paused for a beat, making sure the audience had time to appreciate the trick: he had incorporated an additional wooden block into the puzzle.

  Rouven looked satisfied, pleased with himself. “But never, ever, take things for granted,” he warned, before removing an even bigger wooden block from the black bag. Once again, he placed this large extra piece beside the completed puzzle. Once again, it stuck out awkwardly from the rectangle. Once again, Rouven stacked the pieces in his hands before sliding them around like a two-dimensional Rubik’s Cube. Once again, he incorporated the extra piece into the perfect and seamless rectangle.

  The audience assumes Rouven has simply expanded the size of the puzzle; it’s a cleverly designed trick, but there’s no magic. Rouven lets the audience enjoy their assumption for a few seconds as he prattles on about the journey of life. Then, just when they think they’ve seen the trick, Rouven summons back the volunteer holding the puzzle frame. There’s no way the frame could still fit, since they’ve just watched Rouven add two large additional pieces.

  You can probably guess what happens next: Rouven carefully slides the wooden frame right over the puzzle pieces—it fits perfectly.

  “What immediately appealed to me about the trick was the simplicity of it,” Mohan says. “It was hard to imagine where the magic was hidden, since there was so little to the trick, just some wood pieces and a frame.”

  The next day, as Mohan and Ravi drove across the Mojave Desert, their road-trip conversation centered on alternative solutions to the trick. The obvious suspect was the frame. Perhaps it was expandable? But they both knew the volunteer from the audience had been holding it the entire time. Unless she was a confederate, or Rouven expanded the frame while placing it over the puzzle, they didn’t see how it could explain the trick. The other possibility was that the original puzzle had some slack; some hidden space might have been around the edges, which is why Rouven could add two more pieces and still make it fit. But they were also skeptical of this explanation, since those extra pieces were quite large. “Ravi and I just kept talking about it,” Mohan remembers. “Turning it over in our heads, trying to figure out how Rouven pulled it off.”

  This is how magic works—it draws us in with mystery, creating a performance we can’t explain. A puzzle expands but still fits within the frame; a woman is sawed in half but stays whole; the Statue of Liberty vanishes from view. It’s the ultimate prediction error, since magic plays with our most basic assumptions about how the world is supposed to work. As the magician Mike Close once said, a good illusion “gives you the gift of a stone in your shoe.”

  The magic trick is the model for the second kind of mystery hook, which is the subject of this chapter. If the mystery box is all about hiding information, the magician creates mystery by hiding his technique. It’s not the outcome that’s uncertain—it’s the process, the means of production. He shows us what’s inside the box. We just have no idea how it got there.

  You can see the source of this fascination in the brain. A recent study by German neuroscientists showed people short videos of magic tricks while lying inside an fMRI machine.4 In one clip, the magician pours a glass of water into a mug. After waving his hand above the mug, he empties the mug onto the table: the liquid is now an ice cube. In another trick, an orange tossed into the air suddenly becomes an apple. There were vanishing coins, transposed cards, bouncing eggs, and floating balls.

  To help distinguish the neural changes induced by the magic, and not just by the physical movements of the performer, the scientists also showed the clips to a trained magician. There were two important findings. The first was the activation of brain areas associated with cognitive conflict and error detection, such as the anterior insula and frontal gyrus. These are core parts of what neuroscientists sometimes refer to as the “Oh, shit!” circuit, those wires that help us process twists we didn’t expect and coins that disappear into thin air.5

  But the best magic isn’t just about showing us moves that violate our predictions. According to the fMRI data, magic also triggers persistent activation in the caudate nucleus, a brain region that plays a key role in the dopamine system. This area appears to make magic more than an intellectual exercise, transforming the trickery and deceit into a feeling of wonder. Because the magician didn’t show a spike in caudate activity, the scientists speculate that this brain area is reserved for the awe of amateurs, those inexplicable moments when the liquid becomes ice, or the rabbit disappears into the hat.6 For the professional, there was no marvel: he knew what was happening since he had made it happen before.

  The simultaneous activation of the “Oh, shit!” circuit and the caudate helps explain the spellbinding nature of a magic performance. We see an obvious error—the world isn’t supposed to work like this—but we don’t suppress the dissonance. Instead, we lean into it, focusing intensely on the mystery.7 “At the center of the magical experience lies a cognitive conflict, and the stronger the conflict, the stronger the experience of magic,” writes the neuroscientist Gustav Kuhn. “Magic is the experience of wonder that results from perceiving an apparently impossible event.”8 The mystery is not a whodunit. It’s a how-the-hell-did-he-do-it?

  But this raises a larger question: Why is magic so hard to decipher? Why can’t we detect its techniques, especially since most illusions rely on a short list of secrets? The main reason for our failure is the bias of functional fixedness, which is the tendency to assume that familiar objects can only be used in familiar ways.9 A hat is for wearing on the head—it can’t contain a hidden compartment for a rabbit. Coffins don’t have trapdoors and shoes don’t have magnets. When it comes to these everyday objects, we struggle to imagine alternate uses and strange variations.

  Magicians make a living by exploiting this blind spot.I Charles Morritt, one of the greatest magicians of the late nineteenth century, began his career with a mind-reading act. While Morritt wandered amid the audience, asking people to show him the contents of their pockets and purses, his blindfolded sister sat on the stage, guessing what he was looking at. Previous magicians had relied on an obvious code—the performer in the crowd would use his banter to give away the answer—but Morritt and his sibling stripped away all the extra conversation.

  How, then, did his sister know what Morritt was seeing? Aft
er choosing an object from the audience, Morritt would make a discrete noise, such as clicking his boot on the floor. The magician and his sister would then start counting in synchrony, before Morritt stopped the count with another acoustic cue. Perhaps he’d cough or say “Thank you” to the owner of the object. Based on the amount of time that unfolded between these two sounds, his sister would know exactly what he was holding. Four seconds might be a wallet, while twelve seconds could refer to a silver watch. The routine had no margin for error: a single errant beat could turn a necklace into a pack of cigarettes. What made the trick possible was the bias of functional fixedness: the audience couldn’t imagine that the silence was actually the cipher.

  Morritt’s most celebrated trick was a vanishing. The performance began with an assistant in a clown costume, holding the reins of a gray donkey named Solomon. The clown pulled Solomon into a raised wooden crate—the donkey was trained to resist, if only to get some easy laughs—before the clown closed the doors, locking the animal inside. (Morritt used a raised crate and fabric hoop to make sure we knew there was no trapdoor.) After a few seconds, Morritt then pulled the doors open, revealing an empty interior. The donkey had disappeared.

  Solomon was still there, just briefly hidden. Once the donkey was locked inside, men beneath the stage pulled on ropes, opening a trapezoidal box at the back of the crate. (Jim Steinmeyer, a famed inventor of illusions, figured out how Morritt vanished the donkey.) But this wasn’t an ordinary box—it’s exterior walls were covered in precisely angled mirrors that reflected back empty space. The trained donkey would then step inside, happily eating the food scattered on the floor.

  It’s another trick whose power depends on functional fixedness. We use mirrors to see reflections. They show us things. They show us ourselves. Morritt’s genius reversed this function. Once the trick is revealed, it’s fairly obvious. But it never occurs to us that mirrors can have multiple uses, and that a shiny surface can also hide a farm animal. Our fixed thinking keeps us from imagining the answer. The result is an impossible deception, and a precursor to the grand stunt magic of performers such as Harry Houdini and David Copperfield.II

  Interestingly, young children are largely immune to functional fixedness.10 When five-year-olds are given an everyday item, they’re far more likely to consider alternative uses. This can also make young children a difficult audience for magicians. Because they aren’t blinded by their assumptions about hats and mirrors, they are far harder to impress.

  The key to escaping functional fixedness is to return to that childish state of mind. We have to remember that even the most ordinary things can contain the unknown. Mirrors reflect, but they can also vanish. A box is not just a box. It can also be a shelf. It can also contain a secret compartment. Magic depends on a failure of imagination. It creates a mystery out of our inability to see the possibilities that are everywhere.

  Mohan knew all this. As an amateur magician, he was well aware of our human frailties, those mental tendencies that magicians turn against us. But he still couldn’t make sense of Rouven’s encore. “The simplicity of the parts is what makes the trick so interesting,” Mohan says. “It’s ultimately just a bunch of wooden blocks. Is there anything less mysterious than that?” But Mohan also knew that, in the hands of a talented magician, even a wooden block can have multiple functions. “Ravi and I didn’t solve it in the car leaving Las Vegas. But I knew then that I wasn’t going to stop until I figured it out.” When Mohan returned to Toronto, he began asking his magician friends for hypotheses. He researched other puzzle tricks in search of relevant principles. But nothing helped; Mohan was stumped. “On the one hand, you know that Rouven didn’t find a way to break the laws of geometry. But there’s always that moment when you can’t figure it out, that you think, ‘Well, maybe…’ ” The best magic doesn’t just show us the impossible—it almost persuades us to believe in it.

  But just as Mohan was on the verge of giving up, he had an idea. “I remember thinking, ‘That would be really clever if he did it like that. Really clever.’ ”

  The Realism Trick

  Every magic trick is a psychological experiment performed in real time. It’s a mental contest between the performer and the audience, a high-wire act in which the magician must hide the mechanics of his or her art. We can see the cards but not the sly fingers; the disappearance but not the mirror; the levitation but not the wires. The magician has to sell us a lie even when we know we’re being lied to.

  In this sense, magic is an extreme version of other art forms, which must also obscure their tricks to keep our attention. (As the philosopher Theodor Adorno put it, “Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”)12 Consider filmmaking. We demand immersive movies, which means that for two or so hours we are willing to suspend our disbelief. (That’s not a famous actor in a plastic costume—it’s Iron Man!) However, if a special effect appears fake, or an actor isn’t convincing, the cinematic magic disappears, and we suddenly realize we are staring at a flat screen in a dark room full of strangers. It’s like seeing the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. The spell is fragile.

  Or look at painting. The psychologist Stephen Kaplan has argued that one of the best predictors of whether people find a picture aesthetically pleasing is its ability to conjure a sense of mystery.13 How do painters do this? One reliable method is to inspire questions about how the art was created. Traditionally, this was done through verisimilitude, creating art that imitated the look of real life. Even if the subject of the painting was straightforward—the Virgin Mother, a still life of fruit, a portrait of a nobleman—we didn’t understand how the human hand could create such an accurate representation. In this sense, the painter relies on the same motive for attention as the magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. We keep looking because we can’t figure it out. The canvas refuses to give up its secrets.

  One of the first examples of such trickery comes from the Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi, who stood outside the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence sometime around 1412.14 Brunelleschi was there to perform an astonishing magic act with his paintbrush. He began by marking a central point for the scene on his canvas. Then, he created a grid of receding lines, all of which connected to this central point. These lines became the spatial grid for the painting. For the sky, Brunelleschi cut out a piece of shiny silver, a mirror to the shifting clouds and light.

  To perform the illusion, Brunelleschi drilled a small hole into the central point of the painting. He instructed the viewer to reverse the painted panel, so he was looking through the peephole at the real baptistery. Brunelleschi then gave the viewer a small mirror for his other hand and told him to raise it into view—he was now gazing at a reflection of Brunelleschi’s painted scene. Here’s the mysterious part: the representation of the baptistery was interchangeable with its reality. The world had been faked, and the audience hooked.

  How did Brunelleschi pull it off? The accuracy of his scene depended on the invention of perspective, that grid of lines emanating from a central point. Brunelleschi had almost certainly seen imperfect examples of perspective in ancient Roman paintings; Pliny the Elder referred to the technique as “slanting images.” But a profound philosophical shift that transformed Renaissance art also influenced Brunelleschi. For the first time since ancient Rome, artists were painting for human audiences, competing for their favor and attention. (The primary function of art was no longer religious.) The central vanishing point is predicated on this mortal perspective; it is a trick designed to deceive those fallible minds staring at the canvas. (As John Berger observes in Ways of Seeing, the convention of perspective “centres everything on the eye of the beholder.… The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God.”)15 Brunelleschi’s magic trick, in this sense, was just an extension of humanism, a visual illusion that showed what magic was possible when man performed for man.

  But here’s the catch about verisimilitude: you can always
get more real. Over time, viewers came to take linear perspective for granted. The wonder wore off, so the aesthetic trick became the equivalent of the woman being sawed in half—a performance that no longer impressed, even if we didn’t know exactly how it was done. Painters had to develop new tricks for their trade, making works of art whose making we couldn’t explain.

  In January 1999, the artist David Hockney was at an exhibit of paintings and drawings by French neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres at the National Gallery. As the crowds gathered around Ingres’s famous painted portraits, Hockney went to a side room full of sketches. At first glance, the drawings seemed insubstantial, wispy, just charcoal pencil on scratch paper. But they astonished Hockney. “Over the years I have drawn many portraits and I know how much time it takes to draw the way Ingres did,” Hockney would remember.16 These weren’t impressionistic sketches: they had an “uncannily accurate” quality, full of perfectly rendered lines and subtle shading. And yet, Ingres made them look easy, completing most of them in an afternoon. After Hockney left the exhibition, Ingres’s drawing method became an obsession for Hockney. He was determined to learn the secrets of Ingres’s technique.

  Hockney began his investigation with a close study of Ingres’s pencil marks, enlarging the details with a Xerox machine. “One morning, studying the blowups, I found myself thinking, ‘Wait, I’ve seen that line before,’ ” Hockney told Lawrence Weschler. “ ‘Where have I seen that line?’ And suddenly I realized, ‘That’s Andy Warhol’s line.’ ”17

  It was an unexpected epiphany. Hockney knew that Warhol had relied on a slide projector for many of his drawings, tracing the projected image directly onto paper. This “cheat” created some obvious tells, such as a seamless flow between the lines that describe the subject and its shadow. (When one draws freehand, the shadows are usually done separately, after the form is defined.) But Hockney realized that many of Ingres’s drawings contained the same characteristics as Warhol’s tracings. “All drawn lines have a speed that can usually be deduced: they have a beginning and an end,” Hockney writes. After studying Ingres’s lines, Hockney came to believe that their obvious speed meant Ingres was tracing, like Warhol.