How magic works: Magicians share 6 psychological secrets they use to trick us
The exploits of any paranormal detective — from Sherlock Holmes to Scooby-Doo — will tell you that the mysterious and the magical always have an explanation grounded in science. (Take the Victorian era preoccupation with ghosts, for example. Carbon monoxide emitted from gas lamps could bring about hallucinations — causing many to believe that rendezvouses with spirits were a normal occurrence.)
As a health reporter, I’m a sucker for a spooky good show that uses science to trick our senses — like "The Parlour of Deceptions" by Daniel Roy, a magician in New York City who also has a degree in neurobiology from the University of Pennsylvania. With Halloween ripe for entertainment that creates the illusion of something mystical, I reached out to Roy — as well as other psychology experts — and asked how magicians are able to use psychological principles to fool an audience.
Here’s what they said.
Magicians take advantage of your bad memory
The science:
Humans are “cognitive misers,” according to Anthony Barnhart, who’s both a professional magician and an associate professor of psychology at Carthage College. “We prefer to behave and think in ways that reduce energy consumption by our brain, so we take a lot of shortcuts.”
Psychologists refer to this as the “peak-end rule”: People tend to prioritize remembering the peaks (i.e., the most exciting bits) and endings of events and experiences, and not so much what happened at the very beginning or in between. Magicians take advantage of this and try to alter our memory to a version that they want us to “remember.”
How it works in a magic trick:
“Toward the end of a trick, magicians will often recap what happened in the trick,” Roy explains. “Sometimes I'm just doing that to make sure everyone is on the same page, and we all remember what happened earlier. But sometimes, I'm switching around the order of events. Or I'm forgetting to mention a little detail. Or I'm putting in an extra detail that wasn't there. I'm trying to get you to come away from the trick with a different memory of what happened.”
Dr. Jonathan Chen, who’s both a magician and an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University, says magic acts will often conclude with a “big finish.”
“Perhaps the magician produces a live animal seemingly out of nowhere, or a deck of playing cards that all change into a different color,” Chen tells Yahoo Life. “This dramatic ending sticks in our minds, while we don't even notice ‘offbeat’ moments where nothing specifically interesting or relevant appears to be happening. This causes us to forget that the magician had walked off stage for a moment to put away a prop (and gave them the moment needed to secretly load the live animal in their jacket).”
They're not entirely honest
The science:
Let’s say a friend asks you if you like their outfit (an outfit that you do, in fact, hate). Not wanting to hurt their feelings but also not wanting to give an honest answer, you might reply with: “Wow! You are just so creative.” Are they creative? Yes. Does that mean you like their outfit? No — but they interpret the remark as you condoning it.
Psychologists call this “paltering,” or the art of deceiving by saying things that are true but intentionally misleading. It’s often attributed to politicians, but we’re all guilty of doing it — including magicians.
“[During a show,] I’m mixing lies and truths and half-truths together, so you're not quite sure where I'm being honest and where I'm not,” Roy says.
How it works in a magic trick:
“It’s rare that a magician straight-up lies to you,” Barnhart says. “Instead, they encourage you to lie to yourself through your assumptions.”
Chen says a magician doesn't just depend on accidental lapses in memory or judgment; they also take advantage of the fact that our imperfect memories are prone to reasonable (but false) assumptions.
“Did the magician really show us that all of the cards in the deck were normal,” Chen says, “or did they only show a handful and our memories failed us with the assumption that we saw all of them?”
They misdirect your attention
The science:
Neuroscientists say attention is like a spotlight — you can’t focus on all the stimuli coming at you all at once, so your brain prioritizes certain things.
“If I were to say, ‘What are you feeling with your left toe right now?’ You were not thinking about the sensation in your left toe until I said it,” Roy explains. “That's because your brain filters out most of the sensory input most of the time — because it would be totally overwhelming if all physical sensations were felt and you paid attention to it all the time.”
Magicians know that our attention is, as Roy puts it, “a limited resource” — and they use that to their advantage by getting the “spotlight” to focus on what they want.
How it works in a magic trick:
Roy explains: “If I can get someone to pay attention to Thing A over there, then perhaps Thing B over here — which is happening in their peripheral vision, but they're just not paying attention to it because they don't think it’s important at that moment — is a way of doing some of the sneaky sleight of hand or whatnot without people noticing it.”
They exploit your 'inattentional blindness'
The science:
Have you ever been talking on the phone while driving, and even though you’re using hands-free mode and have a full view of the road, you fail to notice an obstacle right in front of you? That’s called inattentional blindness — a psychological phenomenon where you're looking directly at something, but you don't perceive it because your attention is focused elsewhere.
“This is actually a very common phenomenon that likely happens to us on a daily basis,” Laurence Chan, a clinical psychologist who teaches at Columbia University, tells Yahoo Life. “This goes against the assumption that we are always seeing as well as processing what is in front of us just because our eyes are open and we are looking at it.”
Chen says one classic example is the Invisible Gorilla study, in which participants were told to closely watch and count how often people passed basketballs to each other in a video; the participants were so engrossed in their task that they completely missed the fact that a man in a gorilla outfit walked through the scene.
How it works in a magic trick:
“Attention and your visual field do not necessarily totally overlap,” Roy explains. “Your eyes can be focused on something, but you can fail to perceive it because your attention is misdirected by some other means. That could be laughter, that could be some instruction being given to you, that could be any number of things distracting you at that moment.”
Chen adds: “If a magician asks you your name or whether you are right- or left-handed, it is very likely that this is a brief misdirection where your attention is instinctively driven toward responding to a social cue to look someone in the eye and respond back to them with a specific answer. This half-second is often enough to produce the inattentional blindness that allows the magician to get away with a sneaky move in their other hand.”
They manipulate your perception
The science:
When a magician starts performing, you usually have no idea what’s going to happen or how an act is supposed to end. This makes for a more entertaining performance for the audience and also gives the magician an “out” or ability to spin the trick in a different direction if something goes wrong — and you’re never the wiser that they had to resort to their “backup plan.”
But it also means that the magician can more easily control where the spectators’ attention is focused so that once the trick is completed, it’s harder to deconstruct how it all worked.
“I’m telling you, either explicitly or implicitly, what is important at any given time,” Roy says. “And because you don’t know the ending of the trick yet, you can’t work backward and figure out what you really should have been paying attention to.”
How it works in a magic trick:
“I might emphasize something like, ‘I want you to take this pen and write your name on the card. Make sure you write in really big letters so everyone can see, make sure the ink doesn’t rub off the card and show it to everyone here so they can see that it’s your signature,’” Roy says.
“Ostensibly, maybe I’m saying that because the card is going to show up somewhere else. But perhaps, while all that song and dance about showing the card around is happening, perhaps I’m doing some sleight of hand,” he adds. “Or perhaps I’m manipulating another prop. So there are often many reasons that I’m doing something, and I’m only emphasizing or telling you some of those reasons.”
They layer on psychological tricks
The science:
Most importantly, Roy says successful deceptions don’t just rely on one ruse; they use lots of tactics rooted in psychology and other skills to make the “magic” happen.
How it works in a magic trick:
“You sort of layer these things on top of each other,” Roy says. “And I think that's something that people don't often realize about magic: It's not like there's just one secret, usually. There's many different layers that are between the audience's experience of the trick and then how the trick actually works.”