I’ve performed magic and mentalism for many years. Not “everything” is deception.
There are several routines that are purely based on mnemonics. Some of Brown’s best routines involve the legit use of mnemonics.
Not only that, but the establishment of some effects involve memory in other ways, including what we might think of as “memory inversion.”
But alas, these matters are perhaps best saved for those interested in spending their decades poring through the literature and running their own performative experiences. Many interesting revelations about the nature of memory await those who do.
As for The Einstein Factor, an interesting task for someone, someday, would be to create a history that charts many of these ideas as far back in time as possible. Much of it is old wine in new bottles – which is not necessarily a bad thing. New teachers will always emerge and put their spin on things. It would just be interesting to chart the lineage a little more closely than Wenger did (though he does discuss some of the origins for various ideas).
I knew a magician would come along and do a “bait and switch” with this statement. Below is a hopefully entertaining analysis of this linguistical magic.
I read your statement as “every trick he does involves deception”. But when you take it to mean “every trick he does is about deception and nothing else”, you only need to find something that some tricks are also about in order to disprove that statement.
So I could have said “charisma and storytelling are very important for some magic acts”. Even though this technically disproves your statement (given that I have switched the intended meaning of your statement with an extreme interpretation), it would have been too obvious that those other elements are not really replacing the deception; so the bait and switch would not have worked.
Metivier has a more clever response:
I’ve performed magic and mentalism for many years. Not “everything” is deception.
There are several routines that are purely based on mnemonics. Some of Brown’s best routines involve the legit use of mnemonics.
The “not everything is deception” is very similar to my 2nd interpretation of your statement. So he is setting the bar low for himself. His next sentence is a beauty:
There are several routines that are purely based on mnemonics
He is replacing your statement with an opposite sounding statement. Notice how the word “purely” creates a paradox. He has translated your “everything he does is based on deception” as “everything is deception”. So that would imply that the statement “several routines are based on mnemonics” means "everything (in several acts) is mnemonics. So why would he have to add the word “purely”? Put in another way: if his sentence required the added “purely” for it to mean “everything is …”, so would this have been the case for your sentence. And to conclude, even with the added “purely” his statement still can be interpreted in a way that leaves room for deception, in the sense that it is an important part of those acts, but the basis is (purely) mnemonics; the difference between “important part” and “basis” is highly subjective, so even if we choose this one possible interpretation we still have some wiggle room.
The last part of Metivier’s quote is also interesting:
Some of Brown’s best routines involve the legit use of mnemonics.
Since Metivier is reacting to your “everything he does is based on deception” statement, it looks like he is suggesting that you have denied that Brown has used any kind of mnemonics in his routine, which in my view is not true. The word “legit” is used in a similar way as “purely” as it is highly suggestive. It could mean something as the opposite of fake mnemonics, but we already know that Brown uses mnemonics from Metivier’s previous sentence, so this pushes as in the direction of translating the word “legit” as “very impressive” and by doing that he is very close to suggesting that Brown has done memory feats such memorizing complete books without actually saying that.
Discussing is not “reacting” in any special sense beyond sharing experiences and doing some intellectual noodling over the meaning of the word “everything.”
And I remain profoundly grateful that we live in a utopia that allows for so much dialectic over the minutia of what individual words possibly mean.
… Penn was thinking out loud what the greatest magic act in the world would look like from the perspective of the magician. He said that there would likely be a great contrast between what the audience perceives and what is actually going on behind the scenes so to speak. There would be no actual “magic” behind the scenes, in which the word magic refers to a very beautiful trick that makes the magic act possible, like some clever technical innovation. In contrast the whole act would likely rely on a little misdirection over here, some subtle suggestions over there, some simple techniques, etcetera.
So when I read your response, it struck me as somewhat of a perfect storm that a magician is reacting to a topic about magic and tries to nuance the idea that magic is (all) about deception using rhetorical magic that in my view much resembles that of the magic used in the above described greatest magic act of the world.
In order to explain Penn’s hypothetical greatest magic act in the world you can’t just simply point at one case of misdirection or some critical suggestion, you have to take a helicopter view and explain the act as a whole of interconnected magical elements. That is what I have tried to do in my analysis of your response.
I hope you can appreciate the risk that I’m taking as for you to discredit me as a wannabee magic analyst, all you have to do is point at one mistake I have made in my analysis.
I have experimented with photo reading (I gave it some time and effort) but had no indication that it worked.
It seemed easy to do… so what the heck I thought I would try it. Not impressed.
I think i was doing it right.
I would love to hear a success story other than Paul Scheele … who seems a little bit obsessed… in outer space?? (not the kindest thing I have written today)
You have told us that magicians use mnemonics, but you have kept it a secret how exactly they are using it. You have also told us that they use memory inversion without telling us what that is. So I am going to guess what it is and I am going to demonstrate a magic act that uses a possible example of it. I have done this trick successfully in front of a small audience. The act is basically a hybrid between “the matchsticks box is full and magically becomes empty trick” and an alternative to “the cups and balls trick”.
Props used in act
So we begin
Make sure that prop 1. is in place. This prop is used to make a rattling sound that tells the audience that we are dealing with a full matchstick box. You show prop 2. (side a up) unopened first and then you open it to show that it is full and then you close it again.
Because some members of the audience may feel that there is something suspicious about the shown matchstick box, we inverse their memory, that is we adjust their memory after the fact so to speak by shaking the box and the sound of the matchsticks (the hidden ones) will alter their memory so that they don’t even remember seeing anything suspicious.
For the next part that resembles “the cups and ball trick” we must flop prop 2. so that side b ends up on top. We do this by moving the matchstick box from our left hand to our right hand and flopping it halfway. We disguise the flop after it has been done (so another memory inversion) by keeping the box moving in a circular motion. After that we shake it and once again to make the rattling sound to reassure our audience that we are still dealing with a full box of matchsticks.
The matchstick box is placed in the middle of the table. The two empty boxes (prop 3.) are first shown to be empty and then closed and finally placed on both sides of the other matchstick box.
Now we move them around slowly just like cups in “the cups and balls act”. We have to act that we do something special when moving even though everybody must be able to keep their eyes on the matchstick box that was in the middle (prop 2.) We then ask someone from the audience to point at the full box of matchsticks and then show that chosen box to be empty instead by opening it.
And at last we come to the prestige (=highlight) of the act; all boxes are shown to be empty.
Final words on psychology used
If we were to show the box of matchsticks (prop 2.) to be empty right after the flop frrom side a to side b, some people may see the connection between the two events. The 2nd part of the act, namely the alternative to “the cups and balls trick”, not only allows for time to fade the memory of the flop, it also gives te audience an alternative moment (the moving around of the boxes) in which something of a deceptive nature might have taken place. In the end their attention is so much diverted that they don’t have a clue as to what has really happened.
In this case, we’re talking more about the mentalism side of magic – and, of course, in the utopia of dialectic of nuances, all kinds of people love to noodle over whether magic and mentalism are the same or different.
In this case, I may have been a bit loose with my own distinctions… or maybe I wasn’t given how Derren Brown has taught and performed in both realms. Penn and Teller less so. If memory serves, Penn in particular has professed a particular dislike for mentalism, but I might be wrong about that.
I’m new to the forum. I was wondering if anyone has had any success with photoreading?
Back to the OP, one thing I find interesting about “photoreading” is that it’s such a dated metaphor. Yet it keeps coming up. Why wouldn’t we want Webb Space Telescope Reading? Or World Wide Web-Remote-Radar-Reading?
There’s something very telling about the fact that this goofy “photoreading” term hasn’t gotten an update with a more contemporary-sounding name. Not that I’m encouraging anyone to start flogging one!
