one of the weirder facts of being human: Every experience we have in the world—everything we can see and hear and taste and feel, and everything we remember about it afterward—is in some ways virtual.” That is, our picture of reality is created in our cognitive interpretation of reality—the way in which we sort through bristling fields of ambient data to understand what’s happening to us. As Kuhn puts it, “magic happens to us all the time—our whole experience is a massive illusion, we’re just not aware of it.”4
Well, some of us—namely, we magicians—are aware. “Magicians,” Kuhn says, “are trying to find loopholes in cognition, and they’re trying to exploit those loopholes to create their illusions.”5 Vaulting from the fourth century BC to 1962 and the transformation of Brylcreem reality into greasy kid stuff reality, the magician says perception is reality, adding to that formulation the clause or might as well be. For the Platonic philosopher, nothing but reality will do. For the magician, perception is where the action is. Plato’s Platonic version of reality may or may not exist. No one knows for sure, because the only way out of the cave is to imagine a realm outside of the cave. In other words, Plato’s reality exists only in the mind when the mind is, by an act of will, isolated from the senses, those portals to the unreal (and therefore, for the philosopher, valueless) shadow realm. But the magician’s reality is perception—or might as well be—because perception is all we really know.
Another “forget reality” example. In the drawing below, a simple question: not counting the arrows, which line is longer?
Answer: both are exactly the same. This is the famous Müller-Lyer illusion referenced in Daniel Kahneman’s fascinating book, Thinking Fast and Slow. In his comprehensive work, Kahneman details dual parts of our mind, our system of perception, which he calls System I, the “faster” part of our brain that by necessity gathers information almost instantly, and System II, the “slower” and more powerful part of our mind that puts logic and reasoning to work. As we’ll see below, great magicians operate inside both these systems, but at their best, they have an innate and almost Darwinian advantage in affecting and even temporarily controlling both.6
In a similar vein, John McLaughlin gives his graduate students an image from an illusion contest held at McGill University in 2007. It is the so-called Leaning Tower illusion.7 Even though the two towers in the photographs are the same, the one seems to lean more than the other, and the eyes and brain are incapable of seeing the reality. The creators of the illusion explain that the brain insists on seeing the two sides as part of the same visual scene. The point for students in a course on intelligence and foreign policy is to always be skeptical of what they perceive as reality or truth. McLaughlin urges them to ask questions that challenge conventional wisdom.
Placebos—Cups and Balls
Placebo is a Latin verb form that requires a pronoun and two verbs to translate into English as “I shall please.” That makes placebo more than a magic word. It is a magic spell. Doubtless, physicians in ancient times were familiar with the “placebo effect”—the way an inert pill or tincture or sham surgical operation or therapeutic procedure, or even a judiciously administered lie, can cause suffering patients to report amelioration of their condition or even experience clinically demonstrable improvement. The term placebo was not defined in any medical text, however, until it appeared in the 1811 edition of Lexicon Medicum, a medical dictionary published in 1717 by the English apothecary John Quincy, which was both plagiarized and expanded by Robert Hooper, a London physician. Hooper viewed placebos in much the same way as the Platonic philosopher viewed shadows—as a fraud to be scorned, calling the placebo a medicine “adapted more to please than to benefit the patient.” It was not until December 4, 1920, in an article for the distinguished British medical journal The Lancet, that the physician T. C. Graves described the “placebo effect” in more positive terms, as producing “a real psychotherapeutic effect.”
Modern research shows that not only do 30 to 50 percent of placebos have a positive effect, but that the placebo effect may account for half of the efficacy of “real”—physiologically active—drugs. That is, drugs tend to work about 50 percent more effectively when the prescribing physician tells a patient that she will feel better by taking the medication.8 Rather more astoundingly, placebos appear to be becoming continually more effective, especially in the United States. The reason for this improvement is unclear, but some researchers believe it may be due to saturation advertising of prescription drugs, especially in the U.S., and perhaps also due to the demeanor of the personnel who administer the placebos. Friendly medical personnel tend to be associated with more positive placebo effects.9 Eric Mead, a magician and theorist, cites studies suggesting that the better-looking the placebo is, the better it works. White pills work, but smaller white pills work better. Better still are smaller blue pills with a logo stamp on them. Capsules are generally more effective than pills, and colored capsules work better than plain capsules. The higher the indicated “dosage,” the more effective the inert placebo is. But the biggest placebo effect of all is produced by injection.
The mere presence of a physician has a placebo effect, for good or ill. A white lab coat confers authority and authority confers confidence, but most people are also familiar with the “white coat syndrome,” whereby the presence of the physician’s lab coat measurably raises a patient’s blood pressure. As the playwright George Bernard Shaw observed, “All professions are conspiracies against the laity.”
The exterior of a capsule reveals nothing about the chemical composition of the powder or crystals inside it, let alone the physiological or therapeutic effect of the substance. Likewise, the shadows on the cave wall convey little or nothing of the substance of the objects that cast the shadows. Nevertheless, the senses and the mind work together to create a reality known as perception. They don’t start from scratch each time we see a capsule or a shadow. For better or worse, we come to every encounter prepared.
Penn & Teller, the renowned magic/comedy team, started performing together in 1975 as magical buskers on Philadelphia street corners and at Renaissance festivals. After one gig, they stopped to eat at a New Jersey diner. Raymond Joseph Teller—that is his full original name—sat at the table practicing Cups and Balls, a close-up magic trick at least as old as the conjurers of ancient Rome and a routine that is performed all over the world. It is a series of vanishes and transpositions. In one common version of the illusion, three balls are placed on top of three inverted cups. The magician picks up one ball, vanishing it “into thin air,” only to see it reappear beneath the cup. Experienced magicians will work numerous variations on the pattern, with multiple balls appearing under one cup or with small balls turning into one or more big balls or—as Penn & Teller sometimes do it—the balls becoming several potatoes or objects or pieces of fruit. That evening in the Jersey diner, Teller had no props, so he used what was at hand, wadded-up napkins and clear water glasses. In a traditional performance, opaque cups are used. With clear glasses, anyone watching could follow the wadded napkins as Teller palmed them and moved then from cup to cup. Common sense dictates this would make the illusion impossible. But no. The illusion persisted. As Teller explained later, “The eye could see the moves, but the mind could not comprehend them. Giving the trick away gave nothing away, because you still couldn’t grasp it.” Today, Penn & Teller perform the illusion on stage, using clear glasses. It never gets old because the reality—the source of the illusion—is not in the props, but in the structure and physiology of the human brain.
We create the reality our brains prepare us for. Most of the time and in most situations, this preparation is useful. There are three opaque cups on a table. You have placed your house keys under the middle cup. You leave the room. You return an hour later. You need your keys—fast. Your memory, together with your life experience (reminding you that inanimate objects don’t move by themselves), prompts you to lift the middle cup instead of wasting time by looking under all three. You lift that cup, retrieve your keys, and are on your way. But if those keys had been placed by a skilled magician well
