308 - Magical Thinking - Matt Tompkins
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Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 308. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 308.

This is the You Are Not So Smart podcast. My name is David McCraney, and I would like to tell you a story about a horse. In the late 1800s,

In a time of Ferris wheels and boater hats and vaudevillian stage performances, in an era marking the early days of cinema, industrialization, and electricity, a time when the telegraph, the automobile, incandescent lights, and vaccines were changing the world, and the theory of evolution by natural selection was creating a paradigm shift in science and medicine, a German math teacher,

gained international fame, claiming that he had taught a horse to read, spell, tell time, understand a calendar, and yes, add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Music

As the 19th century came to a close, math teacher, phrenologist, and amateur horse trainer Wilhelm von Osten gathered large crowds in Berlin and across Germany with his incredible stallion known as Clever Hans. Crowds gathered so large that Osten, Hans, and those crowds all once appeared in the New York Times.

in a time when a horse act would need to be rather impressive to make it into a newspaper across the ocean. News of clever Hans' incredible, almost human intelligence wowed people far and wide, so much so that Wilhelm von Osten and his horse would go on to change psychology forever, just not in the way he likely intended.

A key element of the Clever Hans demonstration was the fact that Wilhelm von Osten usually used some sort of placard or blackboard, a piece of paper or some other prop like that, with a series of potential answers written on it. For instance, if he asked Clever Hans to answer a math problem, von Osten would show a few wrong answers and a single correct answer on the board and

to Hans and to the crowd. And then von Austin would point at these one at a time until clever Hans clomped his hoof on the ground, indicating that this was his selection. And then everyone would gasp

They would yell, they would applaud. Wilhelm von Osteen would exclaim in delight. Hans would seem pretty pleased with himself. And Alnit would go like this with questions about how to spell certain words, how to divide complex fractions, and problems like, if the eighth day of the month comes on a Tuesday, what is the date of the following Friday? On the board, Wilhelm would offer Wednesday, Thursday,

The 9th, Thursday, the 10th, Friday, the 11th. And as his pointing finger came close to the 11th, Hans would stomp a few times and there it was. Wow! This horse understands language, the calendar, math. Amazing! Austin never charged admission for these demonstrations and the crowds grew large because of this and word got around as he traveled from town to town. And

That's when, unbelievably, the German Board of Education got involved. You see, to put this into some context, around this time, thanks to evolution by natural selection becoming an incredibly popular topic of conversation,

The idea that human intelligence didn't just appear one day but evolved over time from more primitive animalistic origins was a fresh and tantalizing concept. The notion then that maybe the animals all around us like birds and apes and dogs and perhaps also horses were in some way intelligent by degrees comparable to humans

and in ways we had not yet considered, was also a fresh and tantalizing concept. But also, around this time, mesmerism and mentalism and spiritualism had risen in popularity, giving us a surge in acceptance of fortune-telling and seances and paranormal, Ouija boards, automatic writing, hypnotism, psychics, telepathy, and alternative forms of religiosity.

Mary Todd Lincoln even held seances in the White House. And also, this was a time in which professional magicians and escape artists and other masters of stagecraft like Houdini and Howard Thurston and Joseph Dunager had become enormously popular. And as professional deceivers,

They couldn't help but notice the similarities to what they did knowingly and openly as tricks to what many of these so-called mediums and psychics were doing fraudulently and exploitatively. So they used their fame to demonstrate the trickery involved in all of the above when it was used to scam people. So a sort of professional debunking movement was afoot. And

Also, at this time, psychology was entering the scene and becoming a very popular and exciting new science, especially in Germany.

Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, Sigmund Freud in Austria. They too were debunking all manner of mystical and pseudoscientific claims having to do with the mind. They also were adding some pseudoscientific claims, but all that will get worked out later. And one of the ways these people concerned with the art and practice and belief and susceptibility to deception converged

was via the recently identified aspect of the human unconscious known as the ideomotor effect, so named in 1852 by zoologist William Benjamin Carpenter, who, to his credit, tried to name this the carpenter effect, but ideomotor is what caught on.

What is the ideomotor effect? Well, that's when the unconscious mind through involuntary movement of muscles responds to thoughts, expectations or suggestions and does stuff without your conscious awareness. We can move our bodies without conscious intention, without knowing we're doing it. For instance, if you hold a pendulum on a string, it will begin to rotate and sway.

All thanks to unconscious and barely perceptible muscle movements. And there's a form of supposedly communicating with the dead that involves holding a pendulum on a string above words or letters on a board. But as experiments had revealed, the person holding the string was unconsciously moving it. And in so doing, not only deceiving others, but deceiving themselves. Music

Psychologists of the time had found that the unconscious and involuntary aspects of the ideomotor effect explained Ouija boards, dowsing rods, and table turning. During seances, people would sit around a table with their hands placed on the surface of the table, and then they waited for spirits to begin turning the table beneath them. In all these cases, people were unconsciously moving their bodies

in ways that appeared to be directed by something outside of them. Unaware they were the culprits, they instead attributed these sorts of things to the work of ghosts and all manner of otherworldly forces. ♪

psychology, stage magic, spiritualism. It all came together in a new wave of empirical debunking of the paranormal during a time when the world was fascinated with the prospect of animal intelligence, which brings us back to the Hans Commission put together by the German Board of Education.

Psychologist Carl Stumpf was skeptical of clever Hans, mainly because the demonstrations used props and techniques that seemed awfully similar to the sort of thing you'd find in a seance or as part of a stage mesmerism act. So he formed a panel of 13 people, among them a veterinarian, a circus manager, and a zoologist,

and they created a series of experiments to be conducted by another German psychologist, Oskar Funckst. Wilhelm von Osten told the commission he truly believed in his horse, and so he agreed to the experiments. And then in 1907, Funckst and Stumpf performed all those experiments that he had agreed to, and after all of these were complete, they had thoroughly investigated

debunked the wonder that was Clever Hans, thanks to the application of double blind testing. Here's what they did. First, they isolated Clever Hans, no crowd of spectators. Next, they had other people question Hans, not just von Austin. And then they progressively moved the questioners farther and farther away. And then finally, the crucial ingredient was

They sometimes blindfolded the questioner so the person asking the questions could not see the correct answers. And they sometimes used horse blinders so Hans couldn't see their faces or their hands. So what did they find? Well, Hans only gave correct answers when the questioner knew the answer and could see the answer. Moving farther away,

dropped Hans' rate a bit. But once the person asking the questions couldn't see the answers at all, once this person was blindfolded, Hans' accuracy dropped tremendously from 50 out of 56 correct answers to 2 out of 35, all the way down to levels equivalent to random chance.

What Stump's commission had discovered was Hans was reading the facial expressions and body language of the humans and the humans were unknowingly, unconsciously, slightly altering their faces, eyes, bodies, arms, hands, even their breathing as they approached or glanced at or noticed or paid attention to what would be the correct answer in each situation. The crucial finding though was that

The questioners, including Wilhelm von Osten, had no idea they were doing this. All this time, he had been unaware he was influencing clever Hans. He believed he was observing independent agency and intelligence, in much the same way people in other situations were attributing their movements to telepathy or the power of the undead.

And after a year and a half of study, the commission concluded that although Hans wasn't actually reading, spelling, or doing the arithmetic, there was no real hoax involved here. It wasn't a true fraud because it was a case of self-deception more than anything. That self-deception led to the deception of others, sure, but it was self-deception that was driving all of it.

In fact, Hans was so observant that even once all of this was out in the open and understood, Funckst and Stumpf attempted to hide their unconscious cues when they repeated the demonstration as the questioners. And even when they attempted to completely hide any possibility of cueing, Hans picked up on something. If they knew the answer,

Clever Hans could pick up on their almost microscopic changes in movements and breathing and so on in the presence of the correct response versus the incorrect one, no matter how hard they attempted to keep a poker face and a poker body. And this is how Wilhelm von Osteen and Clever Hans changed psychology forever. We now call this the Clever Hans phenomenon. Still to this day,

This is when an animal or person appears to perform a complex task, especially one presumably outside their abilities, but is actually responding to subtle unintentional cues from an observer. And one element of this, which would go on to be the crucial ingredient in so many other experiments, is that when someone is cueing someone else or someone is moving their body in some way that seems

to lead to an outcome that couldn't possibly be coming from themselves, it can very much be coming from themselves. You can be doing something like this unconsciously and unknowingly. And that's what happens in the case of Ouija boards and table turning. You don't need a clever Hans picking up on cues in those situations. You only need yourself. You only need self-deception. And thanks to the knowledge of this effect, double blinding became a vital part

psychological experimentation became an established safeguard in the field. When studying behavior, face-to-face contact between the examiner and the examined must be avoided. And when studying something like facilitated communication, where someone in a coma or otherwise nonverbal is assisted by another person holding their hand and guiding it toward letters on a keyboard,

you must have double blind controls in place. The person doing the facilitating must be unable to see what the other person is seeing during the experiment. When you add controls like that, the astonishing, incredible, unbelievable outcomes, they vanish.

After the commission finished their testing and eventual debunking, Wilhelm von Osten returned to his life as a math teacher. Clever Hans, however, was drafted into the military to serve in World War I, where he would meet his noble end in the year 1916. I love the story of Clever Hans. I love that Wilhelm von Osten wasn't attempting to fool anyone. He truly believed.

He was truly unaware of his unconscious cueing. This is what makes the clever Hans case a landmark moment in scientific skepticism. It demonstrated that even intelligent, honest people can unknowingly deceive themselves and others. A lesson that remains deeply relevant today.

It illustrates our propensity to generate rationalizations and justifications for mysterious and seemingly otherworldly phenomena. And it demonstrates our propensity for magical thinking and the explanations and narratives it can produce.

I also love that it's the story of how magicians and psychologists have had overlapping interests from the very beginning when it comes to magical thinking, especially the sort that leads to deception and self-deception. The commission put together by psychologist Carl Stumpf coincided with the efforts of Harry Houdini, the famed magician who worked to debunk mediums who claimed to speak with dead loved ones for a price.

And he also worked to debunk miracle workers who claim to heal illnesses with their superpowers for a price and fortune tellers and psychics who claim to be able to predict the future and contact lost relatives for a price. And a bevy of other charlatans and con artists who depended on our vulnerability, human vulnerability to magical thinking to deceive the vulnerable and take their money and

Magicians and psychologists have been collaborating ever since the earliest days of psychology, and they've been debunking all manner of magical thinking for more than a hundred years, and they continue to do this to this day. As the world-famous magician, skeptic, and professional debunker James Randi once said, quote, "...magicians are the most honest people in the world. They tell you they're going to fool you, and then they do it." End quote.

Magicians deceive on purpose, knowingly, for a living. Thanks to their expertise and experience, they know how easy it is to fall for what in another context would be considered magic tricks. And they know people can not only fall for these things unknowingly, but perpetuate them unknowingly. Especially when you're vulnerable, especially when you're grieving or desperate for hope and

I understand. I empathize. My heart reaches out. I have compassion for this. And so did they. And that's why the list of magicians who have gone on to become professional debunkers is very long.

Houdini, James Randi, Penn & Teller, Brian Brushwood, Darren Brown, The Amazing Kreskin, Milbourne Christopher, Joseph Dunniger, Martin Dunniger, Martin Gardner, Theodore Anaman, James Marks, Bob Steiner, Richard Wiseman, Ian Rollin, Mark Edward, Danny Corum, Paul Zenon, and that's not all of them.

James Randi even famously offered the $1 million Paranormal Challenge, a $1 million payout to anyone who could demonstrate a supernatural or paranormal ability under scientific testing conditions. And more than a thousand people attempted to earn that million dollars and none were successful. I was reminded of all of this recently when I was invited to speak at the annual conference of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. I joined the stage alongside other guests like

physicist Brian Cox and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and neurologist Steven Novella and the mind reading magician who goes by the stage name Banachek. While there, I met up with Daniel Simons who was also attending and he's one of the psychologists behind the Invisible Gorilla Experiment. He was the very first guest of this podcast, the very first episode. He was there because he loves magic and skepticism and the science of self-deception.

There are a lot of psychologists like that. The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry was once known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. And as a nonprofit, that's what they've done since the 1970s. Quote, promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims. End quote. Simons and others that I met at that conference, they had all noticed that

an excerpt from Carl Sagan's book, The Demon Haunted World, which is all about critical thinking and how the scientific method freed us from a lot of magical thinking. An excerpt from that book was going viral again. That book was published in 1995. And in the excerpt, which you have likely run across by now, it's all over social media, Sagan says he has a foreboding of a time in the near future when, quote,

The people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority. When clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."

In this age of AI and the internet and electric cars and autonomous drones and smartphones and cryptocurrency and instant access to all the knowledge ever created, there's been a resurgence of UFOs and demons and ghost hunting, ESP, cryptozoology, telepathy, faith healing, Reiki, astrology, water memory, remote viewing, tarot, energy healing, horoscopes,

telekinesis, and every other form of magical thinking imaginable. Magical thinking has found new audiences through new technology. And I realized that I was being strongly naive when I had assumed that after more than a hundred years of debunking and appeals to skepticism, appeals to critical thinking, dozens and dozens of books on this topic,

We were done with all this. That was what I was being naive about. I thought we were done with all of this. My assumption that I lived in a future where magical thinking was so easily debunked and had been debunked for so long that it was a thing of the past was, for me, in essence, a pretty clear example of, on my part,

Self-deception. How easy it feels like it ought to be to debunk this stuff is very clearly an illusion. Because as long as these illusory things have been cropping up in society, you've also had people that are very actively debunking them. That is the voice of Matt Tompkins, an Oxford-educated psychologist and a magician who scientifically studies deception,

and self-deception. Currently, my job, the elevator pitch is a fun one. I design and implement fake mind control devices for the Swedish government. More specifically, he is a postdoctoral researcher at Lund University's Choice Blindness Lab, where he is working on a project that involves adapting techniques from mentalism and magic to study how people perceive and misperceive emerging technologies related to neuroscience

And I met psychologist Matt Tompkins through Daniel Simons, who I mentioned earlier. I told Dan I would like to do an episode of the show about magical thinking. And Simons said he knew just the person, a psychologist who not only studies this sort of thing, but who literally wrote the book on it.

In that book, The Spectacle of Illusion, Tompkins investigates the long history of deception by mesmerists, magicians, and fraudulent mystics, and how a thorough understanding of how they manipulate us via our own magical thinking can help us better understand the hardcore science of human perception, memory, belief, and more. And we will get into all of that

In a moment. But my first question for Tompkins was what he thought about the fact that despite all our advancements in technology, despite 100 plus years of scientific debunking, it seems like magical thinking is back again. In fact, it seems like it never went anywhere.

So, I mean, one observation as someone who gets very into both the contemporary echoes and the historical trends of this and hangs out with people in history and media studies quite a bit is that this idea that we're past it

And, oh no, it's back again. That is a recurring motif for every couple of years. Like if you look back on the way things are reported, like probably on a yearly basis, at least if not monthly, there's an article that's like, oh no, astrology is back. We thought it was gone.

Anytime you get any kind of shift in the media landscape, people adapt into it. So now you can get apps for it, right? Like it was a thing when the internet came around, there were websites for it. When TV was around, it was a big thing that it was coming on TV. Before that was radio. Before that it was like print media. Every time you get a shift, you get people adapting to it. You get the same very, or at least very similar patterns of kind of cons, deception and self-deception. Okay. If I'm hearing you correctly, yeah.

Are you saying that this is just part of the human condition? This is just how people work. And it's just, there's always going to be some low simmer background radiation of magical thinking out there. And there's all, and which also means they're going to be somebody there always be con artists and other people who maybe actually believe because of the, and they're in a dynamic where on both sides can be tricking each other.

There'll be people making money off of it. There'll be people trying to gain status and prestige off of it. And there will just be a low simmer up. And no matter what technological things come along, it's just going to be back there all the time. Is this what I'm hearing? I mean, and seek meaning in it. So I agree that the

late-stage capitalism, horror show of it is also a particular thing these days. But yeah, no, I would say, and also an interesting thing for me is this idea that we must surely be past this. This is a great way of starting the con, right? You say, oh, this worked on a primitive people like

10, 15, 20, 30, 100 years ago. But you, as a sophisticated, enlightened member of the year of our Lord 2025, would never fall for such primitive hokum. And then you go into the same thing, and it works because you've reframed it.

After the break, we sit down with psychologist, magician, and expert on deception and self-deception, Matt Tompkins, to discuss his book and his research as a psychologist and the history of the psychology of illusion, misdirection, perception, and magical thinking. All that after this. Music

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And now we return to our program. Welcome back to the You're Not So Smart podcast. My name is David McCraney and our guest in this episode is psychologist and magician Matt Tompkins, an expert on the history of magic and mentalism who wrote a book on all of that titled The Spectacle of Illusion.

He is one of the leaders of the Science of Magic Association, which, yes, is a thing. And he is a scientist who studies perception and deception.

Among other things. So I am an experimental psychologist and a magician. My name's Matt Tompkins. I've got a doctorate in experimental psychology. I did my graduate work at the University of Oxford, and I'm currently speaking to you from the outskirts of Lund University in Sweden.

What do you do over there for Sweden? I work in the choice blindness lab at the university, which is part of the cognitive science department. And my role is to design and implement fake mind control technologies for the Swedish government effectively.

Yes. He is currently conducting research into how people react to a fake mind reading device. One that easily and quickly convinces people that he has genuine psychic abilities, even when he tells them the device is fake and he does not have those abilities. So we're looking at perceptions of technology. And my job is to create like a experimental paradigms where we trick people into thinking we have, uh,

pretty much science fictional technologies that can variously read their thoughts, predict their actions or control their behaviors. And the idea behind it is sort of pitching to folks and ethics and policy. How do you create policies? Because I mean, even something as relatively minor impact is like the generative image tech has had a crazy amount of societal and legal domino effects that they had no idea what the ramifications were going to be.

And if we start talking about more serious stuff like around neurotechnology and AI, it could have much more serious consequences. So you get a lot of people pushing to create regulations around this stuff preemptively, but it leads to a lot of methodological issues.

logistically speaking, because then how do you design policy based on imaginary reactions to imaginary tech, especially given the pretty well-trodden psychological ground of asking people to predict their own behavior in normal circumstances. So imagining interacting with tech that

literally does not exist yet. I mean, you'll get data out of it, but the question of its predictive value is very much up in the air. And I can't make the tech real. That's not my department, but I can make the experience of the tech real. So we bring people into the lab. We get them in a situation where it's effectively, it's a magic show, but we don't tell them that until the end. And then we get them to believe in it. And then we ask them questions about it, get them to do different tasks. And that's the gig currently. Yeah.

Matt Tompkins is adding to our database of evidence and knowledge about the human condition by conducting scientifically monitored magic performances. And when it comes to the power of self-deception, Matt used the term metacognitively impenetrable to describe how actions can be taken by our brains of which we are unaware.

Our behaviors can be directed by elements of our thinking that our self, our subjective conscious person who feels like they are in control, simply cannot access through introspection.

But since we are unaware that we are unaware, we often become unreliable narrators in the stories of ourselves. And much of what we refer to as the mysteries of the paranormal or other forms of magical thinking

It all springs from our motivation to make some kind of sense of what we are experiencing. Yes, it's a question of degrees. Like, so for example, I can't get a Ouija board to work properly, but I can get a dowsing rod and feel like it's dragging me around.

Even though I've studied this stuff, it can still feel like I can still very much get the experiential sensation that the sticks are pulling me in a direction. Yes. And there's no level of introspection that's going to give you that's going to unlock what's happening. Like this requires scientific investigation. You need controls in order to look at what's mechanistically happening.

While we were talking, I told Matt all about how my interest in magic was a real gateway to my interest in psychology and how I've learned over the years how that is true for a lot of scientists who study the mind and people who attend skeptics conventions as well.

And oftentimes those are the same people. For me, it was card tricks. And I shared how I once saw a magician at a restaurant pull off a trick at our table that was so dazzling and confusing that I spent days at home as a kid backwards engineering it until I could pull it off.

And I still perform that card trick for people when I want to show them a card trick, my very best card trick. I once even showed it to two professional magicians in Austin as an attempt to ingratiate myself into the secret society of magicians.

I have a similar kind of thing, that kind of gateway effect usually in early childhood. For me, it was coins. And so I saw a guy do like a sort of a levitation move. I don't know if you- Oh, wow. Yeah, that's cool. That was Matt doing a coin trick. Yes, he had a coin during the interview and he showed me the coin trick. So that was the one that I very vividly remember. I might've been like,

I'm somewhere between eight and 10 years old. And then I got, I think I still have my original copy. This was a birthday gift. The JB Bobo's modern coin magic. Oh, cool.

And cards came after Branch Tap, but that was my starter thing. It was seeing a coin trick at a county fair. Guy was super nice, talked to me a little bit about it, showed me how to do a coin roll. So I sat there practicing that for ages. Then I got that book. And then my brother and I actually...

did like a very janky, because we were like 10 and 12 at the time, like sort of Penn and Teller-inspired double birthday party act that was both of our first like paid jobs. Dan Simons kind of got me into this also. So because when I was studying, I originally was going on like a pre-med biology track.

And was also taking psychology courses on the side. And one of the things, but also on the side, I was working close-up gigs as a magician. That was how I made money.

It was in like an intro course where I started seeing things. And I very vividly remember seeing Dan's selective attention task. Yeah. And that was one of the main things that made me start to realize. And it started getting me into what was still at the time quite a small literature. And then that's how I came across work by Wiseman and Gustav Kuhn was doing some work at the time. Steve Maknik and Susana Martinez-Conde had just published their book.

book, The Slights of Mind. I highly recommend that book, Slights of Mind, by Stephen Maknik and Susanna Martinez-Conda and science writer Sandra Blakeslee. It's all about the neuroscience of how conjuring techniques trick the brain. And that book is more or less what founded neuromagic, which is a whole scientific silo that uses magic as a way to make sense of perception and cognition.

And that segues nicely into the other thing that Matt Tompkins does. He helps run an organization that puts scientists and magicians in the same room, in lots of same rooms.

Here he is talking about that. Ah, okay. So SOMA is short for the Science of Magic Association. So I'm one of the co-founders of that organization. We've been running conferences. It sounds like we just missed you in Vegas. Actually, we were in Vegas in November. I clicked on your website and I was like, these people, first of all, there's a really good heuristic for if you know if a conference is going to be worth going to, if they are good at making conference posters and your conference posters are magnificent. Oh yeah. Kyla Moffitt. Is that who designed the posters?

Yeah. Those posters are great. Like in an age where we still, at least for the next couple of years, you can tell whether or not a human did it. The those, those are awesome. And I looked at what the conference was all about and I was like, Oh damn, this is a conference that I would, would a hundred percent go to. It sounds amazing. And I spent enough time with magicians in my life that like you, you want to go to Las Vegas and go to a convention full of magicians and

doing whatever they're going to be doing. That sounds great. It sounds awesome. Thank you for inventing this thing. I will definitely keep up with it. It sounds super cool. I'm assuming the general public would be astonished to learn that there's so much scientific investigation and magic overlap. Like there's actual Venn, pretty, pretty healthy Venn diagram thing going on. What, like, how can there be enough people to doing this to make a convention for it? What's going on? What are all y'all doing? Yeah.

So it's still like in terms of like broader global scientific trends of relatively small movement, but there's definitely enough of us to hold conferences every couple of years. So the idea is behind the organization is to bring together performers,

people in the magic performance community with researchers to work on collaboration so that the researchers can look into new different kinds of illusory methods to explore different ideas about human cognition. And then optimally, the performers can also take away something to design new tricks and expand their repertoires and different ways of thinking about how they present. So a few of us

are both performers and magicians. So there's myself, Gustav Kuhn has been a really major figure in this. He was one of the co-founders as well. He's got an excellent book called Experiencing the Impossible, which I think is probably one of the best entry points into this. Tony Barnhart, based in Chicago, Alice P. Hales, currently based in Paris, I believe.

So a lot of us have experience both performing and working in psychological research labs, but it's a slightly impractical position. We can't really go to people at universities and like actually hop on a time machine and like start practicing with a magic kid from the age of like eight. Uh,

But what we can do is kind of facilitate connections between people in the performance community and people in the research community. So it's obviously awesome if you get researchers that have been performing for decades, but it's also kind of impractical. And in the absence of that, if you want to have enough people to have a convention, like you said,

The idea is to kind of teach people how to have communications with each other. So it's a little bit like other kinds of interdisciplinary academic work where you get like psychologists working with historians, for example, but a little bit weirder in that we're moving outside of academia.

And there's a lot of overlap between the way, and you've probably experienced this yourself, the way magicians talk and the way they cite sources. There's a lot of parallels between the way academic research operates. But there's also enough differences that it can be a little bit frictiony without some extra facilitation.

Coin magic eventually led Matt to psychology and now he's helping magicians and scientists meet up and compare notes. Oh, and Matt sent me some video of one of his early studies in which, yes, he used coin magic. It's a coin trick that he uses called a bluff vanish in which you trick a person into believing you have made a coin disappear, but you haven't

because the actual trick is you never had a coin in the first place. I'll share some of that video over on the You Are Not So Smart Patreon. And here's Matt talking about that research. Yeah. So this was one of the projects that I worked on as part of my doctoral thesis. So my idea was looking at historical and contemporary approaches to magic. And it comes from actually something that I picked up

doing close-up work, like a misremembered trick out of that Bobo book that I showed you. It's a basis for something called a bluff vanish that magicians use. So obviously with sort of retention of vision and sort of retention vanishes,

Or any kind of thing like the very classic French drop that any kind of clown or children's performer does and teaches often. This idea you hold an object and you pretend to take it from one hand to another. With a bluff vanish, there isn't an object in play. You do a whole thing as a pantomime.

And so pretty much what I did is I set out to kind of like test how that would work in a more kind of controlled setting. And it was an interesting experience. And this is something that I find useful when talking to magicians, because if you look at the trick itself and the one that we used in the experiment,

compared to something you would use in a performance situation, it is terrible. You would not integrate that like it is into a routine. It would be a bad idea. But for testing purposes, it was really useful because it gave us a distribution of responses. And the idea pretty much what we were looking at was, could we get people to give us testimony, like witness reports of objects and scenes where the object didn't actually exist? And what

what we would do is we would use or I would use pantomime. So I would pretend to take something out of a cup. And we do this a couple of times where there were some situations where there were actual objects. We're doing different magical things with them. But on the critical trial, there was no object in the entire video clip. So it was pure pantomime. You make nothing disappear.

And we had about 30% of people that would swear confidently that there was something that the magician had made disappear. About a third of those people, so about 10%, would give us very specific visual details, like a silver coin or a red ball that was held up to the camera and it caught the light. And again, there was nothing there. I asked Matt to show me how to do this coin trick, and he did. And it was...

It's ridiculous how you don't have anything at all. Just introduce that. Just reach your hand in, like, if people know that you do that and they say, oh, could you show us a coin trick? Reach your hand in your pocket, take out nothing, and say, and the other trick with it is you hold the guilty hand real tight. Oh, okay.

And then you can show like in sequence, you're like, oh, it's really gone. They're like, oh, it's behind your thumb. So you give all these false explanations. And by the time you've knocked all of those down, they forget there was like exactly how it started. So it's sort of like a mirror version of Dan and Chris's gorilla. So in the case of the gorilla, you've got a situation where you don't expect something to be in your visual field. So you don't process it.

Here, it's you really expect something ought to be there. And so you effectively hallucinate it. And then you have a false memory to boot. Yeah. So and it's that's a little bit of a weakness of the paradigm. Something I hope to look into in the future is because of the nature of the paradigm, it's unclear from those reports.

if they actually had a genuine perceptual experience in the moment that was like that little mini hallucination, or if they had a false memory of the object. Because you can create those false memories in some situations in labs in like a couple of seconds.

for different kinds of things like boundary extension. But this was kind of fun because it was the first, using the magic, we were able to produce in sciency terms, a naturalistic dynamic scene. So rather than just like Gabor patches or dots bouncing off the sides, we could show how this would work in a much more kind of relatively realistic. These were video clips. We did a couple of live ones as well to show that you could get that kind of

false testimony, be it a false perceptual experience or a false memory experience phenomena just in a couple of seconds, rather than in the more classical approaches where you've got things like misinformation, where you present false verbal feedback. Sometimes you ask the questions like hours, days, weeks later.

we were able to show that you didn't necessarily need all that. It was not necessary to get some of these false reports. Around 32% of your participants reported seeing the thing. That's bonkers. Yeah, you can dial it up a little bit. So one of the things hopefully be published soon is if you

I mean, this isn't rocket science, but if you lie to their faces, that obviously enhances the effect. You just say, watch the coin disappear. And there's no coin. But if you tell them, watch the coin disappear, or if you change the question, so you say, where did, like, did you see where the coin went? They're more likely to tell you stories. But again, in the original paradigm, we tried to strip and reduce all of that down, which made it a worse magic trick, but a better experiment. Yeah.

You write about this in your book. Magic has had... The thing that you're doing at your conference has been a sort of natural alliance that's been around for a minute. Magicians tend to know that they're exploiting certain things that they may not know there are words for them in the psychological literature. And...

Psychologists and other people who study human thinking and perception love seeing a historical example of something like this, whether it's mesmerism or a seance or something. And there's a huge list of people, of magicians who've become famous, who've become world famous. All of these people who could have done whatever they wanted with their massive fame, like they're on The Tonight Show, they're talking to Johnny Carson.

are using it to debunk the paranormal. And let me turn this into a question. What's going on here? What do you think created this natural alliance? So the earliest examples you can see, and this actually goes back to the late 1800s of people trying to integrate sort of magic methods into behavioral research methods. It sort of is related to a

upsurge in what we now call modern spiritualism, which was the kind of religious cultural movement

It's got origin points going way, way back. You can get biblical with it. You can go back farther than that with different kinds of shamanistic practices. But often it's said to have begun in 1848 with like the Fox sisters in Rochester, which if you hang with the skeptical community, this is an old story where it was kids that were hearing noises in their house, just this knocking noises,

And people came, all the family and the neighbors, they searched the houses, couldn't find any source of the noises. Noises kept happening. And eventually the kids worked out kind of a communication system and they started talking to it where, you know, one knock for yes, two knocks for no or something like that.

The Fox sisters, Margaret and Kate, they became enormously famous and made a lot of money. Their older sister, Leah, became their business manager and they held public events that drew in crowds of hundreds. Over time, Leah became estranged from Margaret and Kate and Margaret and Kate developed alcoholism problems.

And that, along with financial disagreements, led Leia to hold a public event at the New York Academy of Music to expose their hoax. She demonstrated they used toe cracking. Yes, they cracked their toes to create the sounds. She did this in a theater where it echoed around the room. And sure enough, it made the sounds people recognized from the demonstrations.

It's worth noting, many believers refused to accept that it was a hoax. They thought that this, this was the hoax. The claims of toe-cracking, that this was the trick. And Leah was either coerced or held a grudge and was trying to defame her sisters and claim through this other thing that they did not have the powers that the believers believed they had.

So spiritualism didn't die after this one huge admission of trickery. It would take years of debunking for it to fade into history. That sort of sparked a massive international movement. There was another moment about a year later where they moved to the city of Rochester and presented in Corinthian Hall for

to a relatively packed crowd of paying audience members where it was the idea that you could come and see for yourself the evidence and judge as you would. Again, don't rely on the experts. Come and see it for yourself. And then depending on who you talk to and your perspective on this, one of two things happen. Either they sort of created a rift and a thinning between the world of the spirit and reality and or a bunch of people realize you could make money doing this. Yeah.

And you see it, again, spreading all around the world. And it was one of the, there's a lot going on anthropologically, culturally there. My particular focus with my research is on fraud and deception and self-deception. So I'm going to kind of keep it to that. But just to be clear, there was a lot more happening there. But one of the really interesting things for my purposes is spiritualism tried to set itself apart from conventional religion by talking about how it was an empirical religion.

So instead of reading stories about different kinds of miracles and having faith that this was a thing that happened, if you wanted to learn about the afterlife, they'd put you in touch with a dead person and you would hear about it. And so it was trying to pick up with kind of the sort of scientific enlightenment values paired with mysticism. And it got the attention of a lot of prominent scientists at the time.

Alfred Russell Wallace, the guy who was with Darwin, kind of co-authored the theory of evolution. He's a really interesting case because if you talk to anybody in his contemporary time about who the evolution guy was, you talk to people today and you say, who's the evolution guy? You usually get Darwin. A lot of people haven't even heard of Wallace.

But at the time, Wallace was the main front man for evolution. Darwin was notoriously kind of reclusive and didn't get involved in the big debates. But Wallace was the one who was out there talking to people and proselytizing it.

But what was interesting is he saw that kind of idea of pushing against these paradigm shifts or pushing for these paradigm shifts. But he saw spiritualism as another paradigm shift in just the way that people were rejecting evolution on religious grounds. He thought that mainstream scientists were falsely rejecting spiritualist claims, which led to some interesting shenanigans in court cases.

But the idea was around this time, you also get sort of the emergence of experimental psychology branching off from like things like the German psychophysicists. This idea that if you're going to be conducting research, you can't just be worried about your instrumentation. You have to be worried about the people that are perceiving the instrumentation.

It's not just having an accurate tool, but reading it accurately. So you need to learn about human perception. And so from this, you start seeing people trying to test the claims around spiritualism ideas and phenomena and mediumship. And so you start to see some of the early experimental research. So one of my favorite cases was 1867. They designed what's effectively one of the earliest studies of eyewitness testimony using magic tricks.

So these were guys based in London. This was an organization called the Society for Psychical Research, which was founded in Cambridge. They're still actually around today. And the idea was these were a group of academics and intellectuals that wanted to empirically test some of the claims. Again, this was all over the world. There were just hundreds and hundreds, thousands of testimonials of

seemingly impossible stuff that violated all of our known physical laws because they moved rapidly on from the knocking to things like app ports, which were objects disappearing and reappearing around the room or different kinds of voice communication where the medium would speak in the voice of the spirit or direct writing where they would be materialized messages, kind of a biblical book of Daniel callback and material

You're hearing that a lot of this sounds a lot like magic tricks. Yeah. In terms of the way people describe magic tricks. And so this was the constant controversy from the very beginning, is that people were saying that they were having these personal experiences, that they were witnessing these things. And one of the arguments was there's so many of these people making all of these kind of corresponding claims. Surely not all of them are either fraudulent or delusional.

And then you had other people on the more skeptical side of things that were arguing, well, if you look at something like a magic trick, you can get an audience full of people that say, yeah, he definitely floated. There's no other explanation. First thing they tried to do is they tried to hire magicians. John Angelo Lewis and magicians will know him as Professor Hoffman.

There was a researcher, really fascinating, interesting career, Eleanor Sidgwick, who was one of the people at Cambridge who was heavily involved with the SPR in the early days. And so she was one of the more skeptical people who was talking about the problems of fraud. And so one of the things that she did is she contacted Lewis and tried to get him to go to different seances where he could witness it and look at it through the eyes of a professional performer who knows a lot of the different methods.

The issue with that, which happened in other cases other than Lewis, was that when the medium knew that there was a magician, you would get this and you see this throughout history where they would say, oh, it's we're getting a bad energy. My powers are not working today. And you would get what was called at the time like a blank seance.

And for believers, this can sometimes be taken as evidence that it is real, because if it's a trick, they could obviously reproduce it on command. What a wild, what a wild. This is actually something I integrate into our current experiments with the mind control machines is because I'm cheating, they can be perfect every time.

but to make it seem more believable, we make them a little bit inaccurate as we calibrate them to make it seem more like a real experience. But anyway, so that, that was a bust. See, I hate every, every con artist that's hearing this is like, what a great trick to put in your bag. Like,

The blank seance trick. Look, hey, if this was a trick, I wouldn't sometimes not be able to do this. Well, you saw this, like, this is one of the reasons why, because you were talking about James Randi and Johnny Carson, right? Like that whole thing with Uri Geller. That didn't destroy Uri's career. No. I mean, he's still going. Yeah.

Because the justification was that, sure, you can reproduce these phenomena with magic tricks. But if he was using magic tricks, surely he would have been able to do it. But he can't do it, which indicates that maybe there's something else going on other than magic tricks. That's amazing. It's a bit of a mess. And sometimes like a medium or a psychic or a tarot reader or whatever, they truly do believe what they're doing because there's a... In my experience, mostly they do. Yeah.

um having hung out with a lot of these groups and just talking to people because again i used to attend a lot of like uh spiritualist churches in london when i was living there and uh and i wouldn't go like undercover but i also wouldn't be like hello i'm matt i studied deception i would usually sit in a room and they would have platform work they would call it where you

Rather than booking a private sitting with the medium, you paid like, I don't know, like five or something. You'd sit in a room with 30, 60 people and they would sort of call out different people from the audience and do little mini readings for them, which as a performer looked a lot like different kinds of cold reading. Cold reading is a technique by which you give the illusion of knowing specific details about a person without any prior knowledge. You start reading.

with vague statements, big general vague statements like I'm seeing grass, you're outside, you're playing somewhere you often went as a child. And the other person will often be amazed. They'll say, yes, there was a place like that. And they'll start providing details and you'll work on top of those details.

Or even if there wasn't a place like that, you can easily say something like, no, wait, not grass. It's something else though. And the other person will then fill in the details that you need. But those high probability guesses, they usually work right away without any need for correction. And when the person fills in those details, you make it seem as though you saw all that from the beginning, which people generally don't notice.

Cold reading works in part thanks to the Forer effect, so named for psychologist Bertram Forer, who studied this with experiments in the 1940s.

He demonstrated that people will perceive vague general statements as highly personal and accurate. And with just a little bit of nudging, they will believe general claims are personally meaningful, like laser focused into their life, personally meaningful. He gave participants the exact same horoscopish descriptions of their personalities. Like you have a strong desire for success or you,

you tend to be both social and introverted. And people were astonished. These descriptions were so accurate. They felt whatever questions he had asked before this, they seem to have resulted in a precise personality profile and skilled cold readers. They use this to their advantage and then adjust their statements in real time based on both verbal and nonverbal feedback, creating the appearance of

of supernatural insight. Okay, so yes, back to the Society for Psychical Research. Founded in 1882 at Cambridge University, the first formal scientific organization formed to, quote, conduct organized scholarly research into human experiences that challenge contemporary scientific models. So they've got Professor Hoffman in the seance room. The mediums say the spirits aren't with them.

This is frustrating because it's sort of an impasse in terms of an intellectual argument. Because on one hand, you have the proponents of the phenomena that are saying, like, this is actually proof that it's a legitimate thing, because why would they fail if it was a trick? And then you have people saying, well, they're failing because they don't want to be caught by someone who would actually be able to detect the methods in the way that people that are not trained in the methods are usually incapable of.

And the solution that they came up with is similar to the way I conduct my own work these days. It's very much a direct inspiration to the way I design my experiments, is rather than trying to use like real or purportedly real mediums, they faked their own set of seances. So they had a couple of the guys that trained up in magic trick methods, one particular dude, a man named Samuel John Davey.

And he learned specifically this kind of slate writing science technique, which was that you would get messages appearing on little chalkboards, which were common everyday objects at the time, sort of like a Victorian iPad. And the idea was you would ask questions to the spirits and then you would hold the slates in some way where it would seemingly be impossible that anyone could physically write on them.

And then messages would appear with varying degrees of specificity in answer to your question. And again, this was a huge thing with the religious and scientific communities at the time. Lots and lots of testimony on how incredible this was. But there are lots of ways of faking it.

And they learned a few of those ways of faking it and they would hold seances. And the idea was they wouldn't tell people it was definitely real, but they also wouldn't say, hey, come to this magic show where we're definitely going to fake it. So it was kind of a, I was going to say a blank slate, but too much of a pun. There's no such thing as too much of a pun. So they had people invited to go see what they didn't know was really a show. They presented it as kind of an experiment.

And they didn't charge people, which was the usual practice. Usually you would pay money for these kinds of experiences. But the price of admission instead was everyone who came to see him had to write them a letter detailing everything they could remember in as much detail as possible from the events that they'd witnessed.

So then they had a scripted performance, which they choreographed. There was a little bit of jazz going on when they would react to different specific situations in the audience. But for the most part, it was a choreographed thing. They had specific methods that they used to create these effects.

And they knew what the methods were because they set them up. And then you had the testimonies from witnesses who would describe what they remembered happening. And you get to see some really beautifully described early examples of what we would now call inattentional blindness, just like Dan and Chris popularized with the gorilla video. Also, reconstructive memory. This was a really controversial aspect of it.

where you would have people that would witness this and they would include like events and situations that had not happened and also physically could not happen using the methods that they knew they were using. And the question was sort of the big punchline was that you can have people who are like honest, sober, healthy, intelligent observers

that can be radically off with their attempted honest testimonies, which was considered and is still considered somewhat controversial. Like science has come a long way with this with folks like Elizabeth Loftus,

But still today, there's this big push, this kind of metacognitive illusion of the way we perceive the world around us and this difference between how it feels like our minds work in terms of recording things that happen and how they actually work. And magic is a really great way at getting to the gap between those things. Magical thinking as a category.

Encompasses many cognitive predilections, many mental predispositions, and many innate behavioral responses. It's how magicians are able to make a living as stage performers. They can bet on the very predictable responses of audience after audience after audience. The comes standard with every brain reaction to certain perceptual stimuli is

That's what they know. That's what they understand. And that's what they incorporate into their stagecraft. As Carl Sagan once said, quote, in our tenure on this planet, we've accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage, end quote. It's so very true. Biases, fallacies, heuristics, primates, social behaviors, and along with all of that, magical thinking.

superstitions and supernatural events, paranormal entities, the belief that some people can read thoughts or predict the future or move objects with their minds or sense the location of deep pools of water using a special piece of wood, all these things. Lucky charms, unlucky numbers, ritualistic behaviors thought to influence the causality of things which are wholly and totally impossible.

Magical thinking is most likely a relic of our evolutionary past, a vestige of the early hominid brain struggling to detect and then impose order on a chaotic world, an unforgiving wilderness, in a place where seeing agency and rustling leaves could mean the difference between life and death. A false positive was often a trivial error, but a false negative could be fatal. Magical thinking and superstition

These are ancient impulses encoded in human cognition. You can't help it. The human brain, marvelous, flawed, endlessly inventive. It evolved for survival, not for truth, for speed, not for accuracy. That's why we invented the scientific method to add a few more steps to our thinking before reaching conclusions or creating policies or writing laws.

As Carl Sagan also said of our tenure on this planet, quote, we've also acquired compassion for others, love for our children, a desire to learn from history and experience and a great soaring passionate intelligence, the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity. End quote. We can and do fall prey to all manner of illusions and

Even when we believe we are immune. Even when we believe we are smarter than all that. And as the history of psychology has shown, when controlled experiments are conducted, when double blinding and peer review and rigorous testing is applied, the illusions created via magical thinking collapse. They vanish.

For magicians like Harry Houdini and James Randi, magical thinking was a vulnerability of human cognition and perception that enabled charlatans and frauds to fleece the sick and exploit the grieving. And as psychology joined magicians in their systematic debunking, we discovered when it comes to the supernatural, the paranormal or the extrasensory, that

It turns out most of the unexplained and that which is often referred to as the unexplainable is in fact explainable. And in the case of something like facilitated communication, Reiki, acupuncture, chiropractic medicine, homeopathy, faith healing, and so on, the people involved in these thoroughly debunked practices are often not knowingly deceiving anyone. Often

Their intentions are good. Their hearts are big. Their compassion is great. It very often is not malice, but a form of self-deception. And as the history of human cognition has shown, self-deception is the most potent kind of deception there is. That is it for this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast. For links to everything we talked about, head to youarenotsosmart.com.

Check the show notes right there inside your podcast player. Matt Tompkins' book is The Spectacle of Illusion. And my book is How Minds Change, which you can find anywhere they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks. Details are at davidmcraney.com. And I'll have links to all of that in the show notes as well, right there in your podcast player.

On my homepage, you can find a roundtable video with a group of persuasion experts featured in the book, and you can read a sample chapter, download a discussion guide, sign up for a newsletter, read reviews, and more. For all the past episodes of this podcast, go to Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Audible, Spotify, or youarenotsosmart.com.

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