Last week on Magic Tonight

Last week I was joined by a very special guest, David Merry. In addition to being a gifted comedian, David brings with him an impressive collection of severed human heads. I know readers of this blog find it difficult to tell when I'm joking. Oh well. Take a look for yourselves:

Magic Tonight continues Sunday nights at the Crimson Lounge in Downtown Toronto. Readers of this blog can use the code reality for a discount on the price of tickets and dinner when booking online.

Stories as tools of deception

There's a wonderful article in the New Yorker by Maria Konnikova (available online free here). A research topic that has been recently in vogue (and thankfully so) is the study of how easily humans are deceived. I've read a substantial amount about the various biases that we are prone to, but this article highlighted something I hadn't really considered before; that facts become more deceptive simply by being arranged in a narrative. The entire article is nicely summed up by this:

As the economist Robert Heilbroner once confided to Bruner, “When an economic theory fails to work easily, we begin telling stories about the Japanese imports.” When a fact is plausible, we still need to test it. When a story is plausible, we often assume it’s true.

The irrationality of humans is not a controversial thing (it's how I earn my living!) I have said before that when most people use the phrase "let's think logically (or rationally) about ______" what they really meant to say was, "let's make a series of educated guesses and stop when we reach a result which is consistent with our intuitions." Irrationality really does seem to hinge on tricking people into stopping thinking too soon.

The upside is it seems that Konnikova has a forthcoming book on the subject which I'll try to read when the opportunity presents itself.

2015 in Duct Tape

In 2012, the director of my one-person show, Lies, Damn Lies & Magic Tricks, James Biss,  had me over at his house for a party and was "encouraging" me to perform for the group. I asked if I could borrow some duct tape and he came back with, of all things, blue duct tape. I knew about grey and about black, but blue was news to me. I used that for my shows in 2012 & 2013 for the blindfold trick. In 2014, one of the bartenders at The Cage (which contains The Crimson Lounge) found a roll of Rainbow Duct shortly before World Pride in Toronto. So now whenever possible, I try to choose the duct tape I use to match the situation I'm in. I think this year I went a little bit overboard.

We used the rainbow roll all through the month of June to celebrate Pride. And for the Andy Kim Christmas Special, we found sparkling silver duct tape.

In case you're curious what all that duct tape is for, here is the trick on Rogers TV:

Magic Tonight continues in 2016. Readers of this blog can use the code reality for a discount on the price of tickets and dinner when purchasing online.

Magic Tonight 2015

As 2015 comes to a close, I flipped back through our photo gallery from Magic Tonight. This year we did 85 shows (at least that's the number we have photos from. We may have skipped a couple.) This would not have been possible without the venues who graciously hosted us - The Crimson Lounge, The Bear and The Franklin House! I also need to thank the performers who appeared for us, in alphabetical order:

Bill Abbott, The Irritatingly Photogenic Keith Brown, Ryan Brown, Michael Close, Joe Culpepper, Matt DiSero, Michael Feldman, Ron Guttman, Ken Margoe, Chris Mayhew, David Merry, Zach Mirza, Bobby Motta, Mysterion, Glenn Ottaway, Paul Pacific, Jason Palter, Jenny Parsons, David Peck, Phil Pivnick, Steve Reynolds, Brian Roberts, Lukas Stark, Rob Testa, Ben Train, Jason Verners, Nicolas Wallace, Chris Westfall, Wes Zaharuk

But most importantly, our thanks to our audiences; the (literally) thousands of people who came out to see us perform. This would not have been possible without your interest and support.

So enjoy a little look back at 2015:

(or watch the slide show on YouTube)

Magic Tonight continues in 2016. Readers of this blog can use the code reality for a discount on the price of tickets and dinner when purchasing online.

Multiple Realities

In my spare moments over the holiday, I've been reading Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe. There, in one of the chapters, he makes the distinction between the external reality and our internal reality. That is, there is a distinction between the world we live in and the information that makes it past our sense perceptions into our brains.

He's quick to stamp out those motivational-quantum-woo-guru impulses which make you want to think that your internal mindset determines your external surroundings. It's a common plot device in children's stories where, "if you only believe with all of your heart" you can manifest changes in the outside world. But it's an important point that what we see is not all there is. [1]

What made me linger on the chapter is the terms he used — internal reality and external reality — precisely mirror the terms used by Arturo de Ascanio[2] when describing the performance of magic tricks. The two terms refer to the different states of knowledge possessed by the audience and the magician.

So, if you were to imagine that you were Mr. Burns, then the external reality might be that you are reaching inside of your pocket to find your pen. The internal reality might be that you are in your pocket to press the button on the remote to release the hounds.

At the centre of most magic is the act of appearing to do one thing while actually doing another. (There is a more difficult way of doing magic which that of doing something while appearing to do nothing at all, which he calls techniques with no external reality.) So magic is excellent practice in multi tasking, since a magician has to simultaneously juggle two different versions of reality; the version the audience sees and what they are actually up to. Those who fail to parse the distinction wind up as lousy magicians.

That's one reason that magic is so difficult to teach to children. They find it difficult to accommodate the second reality. Often when "performing" what they do is explain the secret working of the trick as they go because to them that's just what's happening.

For me, that's one of the reasons magic (not that Harry Potter stuff) is so useful to have around. We need reminding constantly that the world is not guaranteed to be as we reflexively perceive it; that there's more going on than meets the eye.[3]

The book itself is well worth reading. It begins with a very thorough primer that will bring just about anyone up to speed on the developments in physics of the twentieth century, through relativity and quantum mechanics, as well as the discovery of the Big Bang and Inflation. It then goes on to ideas which are not the mainstream consensus of scientists (but he never claims that they are.)

[1] "What you see is all there is" is actually the name of a cognitive bias explored in Thinking Fast and Slow.

[2] Arturo deAscanio, The Structural Conception of Magic, Paginas, 2005

[3] Someone clearly wanted a Transformer for Christmas and didn't get one :(

Last time on Magic Tonight

Our last show of the year for Magic Tonight was a delightfully fun sold out success. Most of the fun was provided by my guests. The ever charming Ben Train decked in Christmas sweater (odd because he's Jewish... oh well) and the ever hysterical Glenn Ottaway (always willing to teach the young people in the audience some new words.)

Magic Tonight continues in 2016. Readers of this blog can use the code reality for a discount on the price of tickets and dinner when purchasing online.