How Magicians Use Spectator Memory Against Them – Magic Tricks Tips

Learn magic tricks that use a spectators memory against them with a playing card

By Paul Knight

Magicians can easily use memory techniques that will influence how spectators describe the magic tricks that are shown to them.

Often as magicians we forget to perform through the eyes of a layman. Magicians fully understand the route their magic tricks take from beginning to end. However, the spectators will often miss details that happen between the beginning and the end of the magic trick. This is human nature and the way our minds are designed to work. The brain will form a shape to events that happen, and the contents within become an assumption.

The Primacy and Recency Effect in your Magic Tricks.

For many years, Psychologists have understand that subjects in experiments will best remember events that happened at the start and at the end of a particular event.
Remembering the first part of an event or experience is called The Primacy Effect. It’s one of the reasons why first impressions are hard to change.

The last or most recent parts of an event are also remembered well by test subjects (The Recency Effect).

The middle of an event is often forgotten, or can easily be overshadowed by events that happened at the beginning or at the end of an event.

This is one of the reasons why your opener magic tricks and closer Magic tricks are so important. They are the magic tricks your act will most often be judged on.

The start and finish are important.

The human brain is amazing. It’s easy to think that we simply observe information and use the data to understand the world around us. However, our minds also apply their own filters and processing to the information it receives.

Can you read this sentence:

‘I cnduo’t bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg.’

Oxford university conducted an experiment and came to the conclusion that so long as the first letter and the last letter of a word are in the right places the brain can very quickly reorder the letters in between and compose the word it is intended to be, creating an assumption. It is the brain fooling itself.
Often, when you perform your magic tricks, spectators may approach you afterwards and retell the events of the magic trick that they believe they have witnessed. You will notice that many of the events within the magic tricks you performed, never happened.
Magicians can learn magic tricks that use the spectators memory to their benefit.

Using a Playing Card

Let’s use this approach with magic tricks that use a playing card.

The card through window magic trick is an excellent example. Often spectators will approach you later on after the trick, sometimes on the same day, sometimes days later and convinced themselves that there was no playing card on the outside of the window before, and that they signed the card. They never looked at the window before the trick, and they never signed the playing card until after the playing card was found on the window. They are filling in events that never happened to sell the story.

Card to wallet magic trick tricks are also a good example of a spectators faulty memory of events. At the beginning of the magic trick a playing card is selected and signed and then lost in the deck of playing cards. At the end of the magic trick, it is found in the magicians wallet within a zippered compartment. If you put a few practically self working red herrings in between the start, and after the magic trick that solidifying things that didn’t actually happen, the spectators will solidly believe a different course of events has happened.

The spectator believes that the playing card may be his selection, but when he looks at the playing card, it states ‘look in the card case’. In the card case is a playing card that reads ‘not here, look in the pocket’. In your pocket, you could have a playing card that reads ‘not here either, look inside the zipper compartment of the wallet’. Then the spectator unzips the wallet and finds their signed playing card.

When recounted afterwards, the spectators often say that the playing card was in the wallet. The playing card transported to the card case, then into the magicians pocket and finally back to the zippered compartment of the wallet they were holding from the beginning. This is a moment to monopolise the situation. Notice that they are already creating moments within the magic tricks that never occurred. Magicians can strengthen this with a white lie or two!

Here are a few simple lines you could use when you do card magic tricks. The lines may help enhance the magic tricks after the event. Using specific language within the magic tricks paint a more impossible and impressive memory for the spectators.

“Yes, and I never even touched the deck of cards.”

“You could have thought of any playing card!”

“You signed your playing card before we even began.”

“You held the deck of cards from the very beginning.”

“And you thoroughly shuffled the deck of cards!”

Spectators will sometimes remember the premise set at the beginning of your magic tricks and the finale. The start and end. As magicians, we can aim to learn magic tricks that use this psychology to our benefit. Our job as magicians are to leave our audiences with magical memories, and the responsibility is on us to create that memory. If the audience willingly show they want to fill in the gaps with their own images, is it wrong that we should expand on this within our magic tricks? An innocent white lie or two is not a bad thing.

Communicate Effort – Don’t Make Magic Tricks Look Easy

by Merchant of Magic 2 Comments

Should the effort to learn magic tricks be greater than the effort to perform them? If you find that you sometimes don’t get reactions to your magic tricks that you think they deserved, it could be that you are not communicating how much effort your magic takes to accomplish. Don’t make magic tricks look easy…

It’s normal to want to appear as skilled as possible to your audience. Often you may be claiming skills that you don’t really possess. This urge to demonstrate how effortlessly you can perform your magic tricks could work against you. Making your skills look trivial.

Magic is an unusual performance art because much of the most impressive detail, by its nature, needs to be hidden from the audience. Spectators don’t understand how easy or hard it is for you to perform a magic trick. How can they, as you hide the true method from them. Unless you give them some indication of a magic tricks difficulty, they can only judge it from how quickly or apparently easily you accomplished the trick.

The Speed of Your Magic Tricks is Not an Indication of Their Difficulty.

How fast you perform your magic tricks doesn’t always suggest how skilled you are. A quick series of cuts and shuffles looks impressive, and to other magicians, who understand just how hard the techniques are to master, it can amaze them. Spectators can often react quite differently. Fast can signal easy, to an audience. By slowing down sections of your card magic tricks or coin manipulation, you may find that you impress your spectators much more. Experience with the speed of your manipulation, you may be very surprised by the results.

Learn Magic Tricks That Draw Attention to the effort.

Even if, a flourish our move you perform is easy, try drawing more attention to is, by making it look much harder. Build this into the stories you present your magic tricks within.

Show that you need to concentrate. Pause as you prepare to do something impossible. Fake a false start, or even fail at your first attempt. Let the audience think they are seeing something special, something you have worked to perfect for many years. By communicating the effort, you will be adding value to the feats you are performing for their entertainment.

Learn Magic Tricks that Make the Audience Care.

Showing effort engages your spectators and makes them care about your magic tricks. They identify with the performer. Everyone has something they wish they could do. We all have unfulfilled dreams. People relate to other peoples challenges and their hard work to overcome them. That’s why reality TV shows are so successful. People want to see others overcome their challenges. We all want to see David fight Goliath.

What Would it be Like if you Could do Magic?

The effort you display doesn’t have to be over the mechanics of your sleight of hand. It’s doesn’t even have to be natural. Imagine you actually do perform magic. How would it be done? Maybe through countless hours of memorising spells? Perhaps rituals needed to take place first? Could you learn magic tricks that communicate this, that require you to reciting a spell silently under your breath? If you do a bill switch, could you be reciting something quietly to yourself at the moment the bill changes? Perhaps you need set some objects into a specific pattern around your performing area, for the magic to work? Anything that shows that the magic that is about to happen is special helps communicate effort.

What Price do You Have to Pay and How Can You Express that?

Maybe your powers come from amazing mental abilities? Do you need to build up concentration before doing something amazing? Maybe you have close close your eyes in thought, to prepare yourself for what needs to be done? You could have to pay a cost for the magic. It may drain you mentally to perform a trick. Think about ways to show spectators that you are paying for the powers you show them.

Pause and Fail.

Before performing the magic, take a moment to pause and gather your thoughts. Perhaps you could do a false start, and have to begin again. If it really is impossibly hard to do the magic you will show them, then you don’t need to succeed the first time you try.

Show Tension.

At a critical point, just as you make the magic happen, could you show tension in your body? As your hand hovers over coins, to make them move, does your hand shake a little through the effort? Tension can demonstrate effort, without you having to draw attention to it.

Learn Magic Tricks Using the Too Perfect Theory.

The too perfect theory suggests that it may be better to get a magic trick slightly wrong. The small flaw makes the magic look more believable.

For example: If you were to perform a full deck colour change, it may look better to have one card fail to change. If you draw a prediction, maybe you get it slightly wrong, but so close that it looks like you ‘almost had it’. You can see how strong this sort of ‘almost right’ result can be, by watching Derren Brown in action. Derren’s creative team are experts in the too perfect theory.

Don’t Overdo it – It’s a Fine Line.

Be careful not to overdo it. You want your show of effort to be subtle, otherwise it can look terribly fake. When you learn magic tricks be careful in rehearsal, to make your acting believable is very important. If in doubt, remember that less is more. Ham it up too much and your audience will see through it and the results will be terrible. Care to learn a little acting is just as important at your time to learn magic tricks.

Do This:

Choose your favourite magic trick and identify the moments when the magic or amazing skills happen.

Video yourself performing. Pay close attention to how much effort you seem to be applying.

Ask yourself it if you communicate great skill in those moments, or just that the method it easy if you know the secret.

Introduce a few ‘effort signals’ into the presentation, and audience test the results.
This kind of practice and act development will set your magic far above the level of most magicians. We are confident that you will be astonished by the results a little effort to do this can give you.

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What is a Magicians Out? – How to Use an Out When Magic Tricks Go Wrong

by Merchant of Magic Leave a Comment

Have you ever had to use a magicians out? Think about what you would do if one of your magic tricks went wrong.

I say ‘if’… but really it’s ‘when’. It will happen to you. It doesn’t matter how much you practice, how much rehearsal you do, sooner or later, your magic trick will go wrong. Magic tricks have a nasty habit of going wrong, right in the middle of a performance. Let’s look at how we can be prepared for the worst.

The paradox of live magic.

Magic is performed in the real world. It’s live and unpredictable. That’s part of the appeal. People enjoy watching live shows of skill, wondering if it will all go wrong. With magic, they try to work out how the magic trick is performed and to discover the magicians secrets. However, deep down they hope this doesn’t happen. When a magic trick goes wrong in a live performance, the spectators experience an anti-climax, they also feel embarrassed. Magicians face an unusual situation where people try to catch them out, but hope that they fail to do so.

Why magic tricks go wrong.

Magic on TV is edited, re-shot and arranged, so everything is controlled and ‘approved’ before it airs. In real life, there are no safety nets like this. Your magic tricks are happening live, with all the unexpected variables that real life throws into the mix:

Props fail
Angles are wrong for the location
The spectators reverse engineer the magic secret
You flash a move
Someone interrupts you
One of the spectators has seen the magic trick before

There are 1001 different reasons that magic tricks can fail. It’s not always your fault, but there is something you can do about it to make sure you are ready.

Use a magicians out.

A ‘magicians out’ is an escape route within a magic trick. It may be a new ending, a change in the presentation or even a switch of sleight of hand moves, to recover a situation that is not going well for the magician.

For example: If a magician failed to locate one of the spectators playing cards, and produced an incorrect card, that would seem like the magic trick had failed. However, the magician keeps his cool and tells the spectator to insert the playing card back into the deck at any point they wish. When the spectator does so, the deck is spread, and the chosen card is now found right next to the card the spectator just cut into the deck. The spectator found their own playing card themselves, all done by magic!

The spectator thinks that the trick was supposed to end like this It was fun being ‘suckered’ into thinking the magic trick had gone wrong, when it hadn’t. In reality, the trick failed, but the magician used a magicians out, to bring the trick to a satisfactory ending that looked like it was the intended climax of the magic trick.

When you learn magic tricks, it’s important to identify the ‘danger points’. Throughout each magic trick, there are specific moments when errors are more likely to happen. Props are engaged, a sleight of hand move needs to be done, misdirection is required, or a spectator must act in a specific way. The danger points tend to be constant in each trick, and that is your biggest weapon to fight them.

Do This:

Identify the danger points in the magic tricks that you have already practiced. For each moment, think about a possible ‘magicians out’ you could use to change the magic trick in mid flow.

Learn magic tricks that can be used as universal outs for any trick. Magic Tricks like the Invisible deck or brainwave deck are perfect ‘universal magicians outs’ for most card magic tricks. Study and master a few card magic forces, so at any time you can use them to create impromptu outs.

Many mentalism and mind magic tricks make an excellent universal magicians out. A close up magic trick can easily divert into a prediction or mind reading trick if needed.

Think how you could create a ‘specific magicians out’ for situations when a universal magicians out would not work well. Having back ups of your most important props. For example; if you use Loops, wear two instead of one, so you can recover easily in the middle of a performance)

Taking the time to go through your act and work on magicians outs for each danger point, will result in you being much more relaxed when you perform your magic. Being relaxed will translate as being a professional magician to your spectators, it’s a win – win situation.