Buying Time

It's been a busy couple of weeks, and I've neglected this blog terribly. I have a couple of posts in the works, but also have bigger fish to fry, this week. In lieu of anything meaningful or new, I'm going to buy myself some more time by posting this video from my recent performance at the Phoenix Clean Stand-Up Comedy Showcase. Let's see if I can improvise some way in which what you're about to see is related to psychology...ummm...I got it:

Most magic tricks rely on the fact that people have built up a lifetime of experiences, drastically biasing the way they interact with the world. Magicians want you to make assumptions about what you're watching, as it distracts you from the true method. Once you have realized that your assumptions are false, it's too late for you to go back. Watch how I lead you down a garden path and then pull the rug out from under you. There. How was that?

Friday Magic Showcase: Juan Mayoral

Among stage magicians, none has been more influential on my stage magic philosophy than Juan Mayoral. Mayoral was a performer at my very first magic convention, and his act was far different from the other acts I saw. He employed technology in a way that others were not. His magic could be described as "artful," a term rarely used to describe magic. He was theatrical and moving. I was immediately infatuated with his style. Years later, Juan continues to create new and amazing magical effects using the latest technologies. I hope you enjoy Juan Mayoral.

Follow-Up: Sweden's Got Talent

Magician Charlie Caper has won "Talang 2009" (aka "Sweden's Got Talent").

Friday Magic Showcase: Rudy Coby

If you live near Minneapolis, MN, you should head on over to the Galaxy Theater at Valleyfair and check out their newest attraction: Rudy Coby. Known for his character, Labman, Coby has a style that's hard to describe. He's part cartoon character, part mad scientist. His show is original in every way. Coby had two well-received television specials in the mid-90's. For the past six year, he's been working with Marilyn Manson, designing illusions for Manson's touring show. Here's some classic Rudy Coby:

Magic & Technology Workshop

The most recent issue of Nature contains a short article about a workshop that happened last month in Lima, Peru, hosted by Medialab Prado. "Interactivos? Lima '09" brought together engineers and artists with the hope of generating new illusions based on the most modern technologies, and the finished products did not disappoint. The installations produced during the meeting included a magic wand that could change the shape of a person's shadow, a box that transformed a person's arm into the leg of a lion, and a telekinetic spoon that was moved by a hidden theremin (fast-forward to the 3:50 mark in the following video to see a demo of the spoon in action).


This conference was appropriate, as magicians have always been among the first to learn about and exploit new technologies. Famously, Robert-Houdin, the oft-labeled "father of modern magic," used electromagnetism even before scientists had developed applications for it. He used it in an illusion called the "Light and Heavy Chest." From magicexhibit.org:

He invited a spectator on stage to lift the small wooden box he said he kept to store his money. His volunteer always did this easily. Then the magician commanded the box to stay where it was, so it could not be stolen. No matter how hard the volunteer tried after that, he couldn't move it.

Hidden inside the wooden chest was a metal plate, and an electromagnet sat under the stage. When his assistant turned on the magnet, the strong attraction made it impossible to move the chest. Robert-Houdin wrote in his autobiography that at this time "the phenomena of electromagnetism were wholly unknown to the general public. I took very good care not to enlighten my audience as to this marvel of science."

It's even rumored that Robert-Houdin used this effect to prevent a war in Algeria.

Sweden's Got Talent

Although I've been unable to find much more information about this, iTricks is reporting that there are two magic acts in the finale of "Sweden's Got Talent." Who knew that magic was so big in Sweden?! I think I'll just go ahead and take credit for the popularity of magic in Sweden. When I was in there in 2001, I performed for the American ambassador to Sweden...I'm sure it caught on just after my visit. Anyway, the first act in the finals is Brynolf & Ljung. Here they are performing a pretty innovative set:


The other act is a man named Charlie Caper. Here he is doing some equally creative (and arguably, more original) magic:


I think I'm rooting for the second guy...His climax is a change-blindness trick (the bowtie vanishes long before you realize that it's gone)!

Follow-Up: Psychic Tweets

Over at NewScientist.com, Richard Wiseman has published the results of his recent Twitter experiment on remote viewing (previously blogged about here). Wiseman traveled to a number of different secret locations. Once there, he directed Twitter participants to "tweet" about any feelings they were receiving about the secret location. Later, he sent them a link to a website that presented participants with images of five different places. They had to choose the location they believed Wiseman to be at. In addition, Wiseman probed participants about their belief in the paranormal and psychic ability.

Not surprisingly, the group (of nearly 1000) failed miserably. Wiseman treated the most frequently selected location as the group's choice in each of four trials. The group failed to choose the correct location on every trial. In addition, those who proclaimed belief in psychic ability performed no better on the task than those who professed no belief. Granted, this is far from being an ideal experimental design, as anyone with genuine psychic ability would get washed away by all the guessing within the group. What this study does accomplish is a demonstration of a possible (and promising) use for social networking sites by the scientific community.

Some folks are getting all bent out of shape about this experiment. I suggest you head over to the comments section on NewScientist.com and enjoy the circus.

Friday Magic Showcase: Al Flosso (1895-1976)

Dubbed "The Coney Island Fakir" by Milton Berle, Al Flosso perfected the side-show barker character and was the first magician to appear on the "Ed Sullivan Show". For nearly 40 years, Flosso owned and operated the famed Martinka & Co. magic shop in New York, previously owned by Houdini. Flosso's first major business choice was to stop cleaning the magic shop, as he didn't want to disturb Houdini's dust. His son, Jackie Flosso, took over the business after his father's death.

Results: Japanese Words Quiz

A few weeks ago, I invited you to take part in an online survey for which I provided very little background. Your job was to determine which of two English words was the appropriate translation of a Japanese word. Since most people in the Western world have very little knowledge of the Japanese language (aside from "konnichiwa" and "sayonara") you were probably just guessing. But, is there anything systematic about people's guessing in an experiment like this?

What you didn't know while taking the quiz was that the appropriate translation was not always provided as one of the answers. Sometimes the Japanese word was paired with its actual translation and an unrelated item. Other times, it was paired with the opposite of its actual translation and an unrelated item (so, the Japanese word for "bright" was paired with "dark"). A recent experiment in press at the journal Cognition used a similar design. Nygaard, Cook, and Namy (in press) taught English-speaking participants the translations of a series of Japanese words that were presented auditorily, but unbeknownst to the participants, they were either learning the direct translation of the word, it's antonym, or an unrelated translation.

Nygaard et al. found that participants learned the items more efficiently (evidenced by accuracy and response time in a recognition task) if they were learning the true meaning or its antonym than if they were learning an unrelated translation.

from Nygaard et al. (in press)

Languages are thought to be abstract and arbitrary, with no systematicity between word sounds and word meanings (aside from onomatopoetic words). The authors argue that this experiment suggests a different story, that there is some sort of underlying sound to meaning correspondence that is systematic across language systems, as none of the participants in this study had even a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese. The antonyms were thought to benefit learning since they were from the same semantic category as the paired Japanese item.

I find this conclusion highly suspect. The authors point out a possible confound that I think is at the heart of the effect being seen here. During the learning phase of the experiment, the Japanese tokens were presented auditorily, paired with a written English translation on the computer screen. The spoken Japanese items were, of course, provided by a native Japanese speaker, meaning that the speaker knew the actual meanings of the words they were saying. Spoken language is a much richer source of information than the printed word. From a speaker's voice, we can ascertain things like their gender and age as well as gain information that can aid in the understanding of the words they're saying. In fact, the authors cite research demonstrating that listeners can intuit word meanings based only on voice inflections (or prosody).

In the "Japanese Words Quiz," I wanted to determine whether people could guess the meanings of the Japanese words without any sort of auditory input. Granted, this is a much different experiment from Nygaard et al. and I didn't have a fully-counterbalanced design, but if there is any systematic phonetic (or orthographic) to semantic relationship that readers can pick up on across languages, then it would be quite possible that they could guess the meanings above chance levels.

I had planned to carry out a full statistical analysis of this data, but looking at the raw numbers tells me that further analysis is not necessary. The results were almost perfectly at chance, with an overall accuracy of 51%. Accuracy on matched trials (where the actual translation was one of the possible choices) was 52%, and accuracy on antonym trials was 50% exactly. That's not a promising outcome.

I'm thinking of following up on this experiment with a formal replication using spoken word tokens generated by someone who doesn't speak Japanese but who has training in Japanese pronunciation...Someone like a vocal performance major. Thus, they would be unequipped to provide prosody that would be informative to the true meaning of the word. Could be fun! Stay tuned.

References:

Nygaard, L. C., Cook, A. E., & Namy, L. L. (in press). Sound to meaning correspondences facilitate word learning. Cognition. (link)

Magic Tony @ the Clean Comedy Showcase

What are you planning to do this weekend? That's right...nothing. You have no plans (other than just sitting at home hoping that I'll post a weekend blog entry, which just doesn't happen, folks). So, let me give you a plan for the weekend.

Saturday evening, I'll be opening for Robert Mac at Phoenix's "Clean Stand-Up Comedy Showcase." There. You've got all the makins' for a wonderful evening: magic, comedy, and ... comedy. Best of all, it'll only cost you $5. Here's all the information you need in order to plan the night of your life:

What: Clean Stand-Up Comedy Showcase
When: Saturday, June 6th, 7:00PM
Where: Mountain View Rec. Center, 2927 East Campbell Ave., Phoenix, AZ (map)
Why: Seriously? You're asking why?

If you want to see all of this information repeated, please feel free to visit my facebook page for the event here. Here's a video of Robert Mac's stand-up to whet your whistle.

Psychic Tweets

Today is your chance to become a part of history, folks. Psychologist Richard Wiseman (along with New Scientist magazine) is carrying out the first experiment examining psychic ability via Twitter. From Richard's blog:

The experiment will examine the possible existence of ‘remote viewing’ – the alleged ability to psychically identify a distant location.

So, how is the experiment going to work?

Well, at 3pm (UK time) each day, I will travel to a randomly selected location. Once there, I will send a Tweet, asking everyone to Tweet about their thoughts concerning the nature of the location. Thirty minutes later, I will send another Tweet linking to a website that will allow everyone to view photographs of five locations (the actual location and four decoys), think about the thoughts and images that came to them in the thirty minutes before, and vote on which of the five they believe to be the actual target location.

If the majority of people select the correct target then the trial will count as a hit, otherwise it will count as a miss. There will be trials at 3pm on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this week. Three or more hits in four trials will be seen as supporting the existence of extrasensory perception.

In addition to these formal trials, there will be an informal trial (to test the procedure) today at 3pm.

As well as being the first ever scientific experiment on Twitter, I think this is going to be the largest ever test of Remote Viewing, so I am excited about the project.

So, head on over to Richard's Twitter stream at https://twitter.com/RichardWiseman to take part in the fun!

Friday Magic Showcase: Mahka Tendo

More bad news for the magic community. The inimitable Mahka Tendo passed away this week of throat cancer at the age of 49. From Magic Unlimited with Ellis & Webster:

Mahka Tendo is best known for his ground-breaking work with jumbo card productions which earned him a Silver Medal in Manipulation at FISM 1985. More recently he's brought out a selection of products including canes, with SEO Magic, and he was presenting a weekly magic spot on NHKTV in Japan.

Motor Theory: A Bit of a Stretch?

The June issue of Scientific American contains an interesting review of a recent experiment providing support for Liberman and Mattingly's (1985) motor theory of speech perception. Liberman and Mattingly posited that spoken language is not just perceived through a process of auditory deconstruction. Instead, we are perceiving the motor "gestures" that were used to produce the utterance. The implication is that every time we hear speech, we recognize it by simulating the motor activity of the speaker. The oft-cited McGurk effect (MacDonald & McGurk, 1978) is a clear demonstration that speech perception is a multi-modal process. Watch this brief video to experience the McGurk effect for yourself.



The study outlined in the Scientific American article examined the motor contributions to speech perception in a different way. If we are constantly simulating oral gestures when listening to speech, then manipulating our own oral motor activity during speech processing should influence perception. Ito, Tiede, and Ostry (2009) presented people with an ambiguous word (somewhere in between "head" and "had") while a machine, pictured below, stretched the participants' mouths in one of three directions.

From Ito, Tiede, and Ostry (2009)

Two of the stretching directions corresponded to the way the face changes during the pronunciation of "head" and "had." The third was unrelated. As the motor theory would predict, the direction of stretching biased participants toward hearing the word that matched the facial movement, even if the token was more similar to the opposing word. The unrelated stretching condition had no discernible effect on perception. So, there's plenty of evidence that supports a motor component to speech recognition, but, as yet, no one has come up with an experimental design that can unequivocally refute motor theory (although methods in brain imagining are beginning to come close). It seems that it's largely unfalsifiable, which makes it a difficult theory to accept wholeheartedly.

P.S. If you liked the McGurk effect, you should check out this version of it combined with the Margaret Thatcher illusion.

References:

Ito, T., Tiede, M., & Ostry, D. J. (2009). Somatosensory function in speech perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 1245-1248. (link)

Liberman, A. M. & Mattingly, I. G. (1985). The motor theory of speech perception revised. Cognition, 21, 1-36. (link)

MacDonald, J. & McGurk, H. (1978). Visual influences on speech perception processes. Perception & Psychophysics, 24, 253-257.

Penn Says: A Fatal Bullet Catch

In this recent installment of the "Penn Says" vlog, Penn shares an interesting story told to him by a spectator at his Las Vegas show about the famed victim of the bullet catch, Chung Ling Soo.

From Crackle: A Fatal Bullet Catch

For more information on the history of the bullet catch, I encourage you to read Jim Steinmeyer's treatise on Chung Ling Soo, The Glorious Deception.

Friday Magic Showcase: Lance Burton

Lance Burton is currently taking some time off from his wonderful show at the Monte Carlo Hotel in Las Vegas to nurse a broken foot. Let's hope he heals quickly, because his is one of the best shows on the strip. While Lance is healing, please enjoy this video of his award-winning act.

The Japanese Words Quiz

Please take a moment to complete this brief (probably invalid) survey. It may lead to an entertaining blog entry later! Thanks!

The Japanese Words Quiz

Bad Times for Magic

On Coincidental Thinking

In my blog entry regarding "The Fallacy of Personal Validation," I hit on the topic of probability estimation. People are exceptionally bad at accounting for population base rates when making decisions and are wholly incapable of recognizing randomness when they see it. In the example of an astrological reading, people underestimate the prevalence of certain personality traits in the population, thus personalizing what is in reality a quite generic personality profile. A new study just published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology by Paul Rogers and colleagues suggests that this gross inability to consider probabilities may be the factor that differentiates a believer in the paranormal from a nonbeliever.

Rogers, Davis, and Fisk (2009) examined individual differences in susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy, wherein people judge a series of random events as more likely to co-occur than to occur individually. Here's a concrete example. Rogers et al. presented people with the following situation:

Billy has a long lost friend who he has not seen in years. They were good friends in school but drifted apart when they went away to different colleges. Billy comes home from work one evening and sits down to eat his dinner.

They then had participants rate the probability (chance in 100) of three statements:

• a. "Billy thinks about his long lost friend."
• b. "Billy's long lost friend unexpectedly phones him."
• c. "Billy thinks about his long lost friend and suddenly his long lost friend unexpectedly phones him."

The conjunction fallacy occurs when the third item (the conjunction) is rated as more probable than either event individually (the constituents). Statistically, the conjunction should never be more probable than each constituent. Interestingly, paranormal believers (as measured by the Australian Sheep-Goat Scale) were significantly more likely than non-believers to give the conjunction a higher probability rating. Although participants who had more experience in math, statistics, and psychology made fewer conjunction fallacy errors, the effect of paranormal belief was still present when math ability was held constant.

As Cohen (1960) stated, "Nothing is so alien to the human mind as the idea of randomness."

References:

Cohen, J. (1960). Chance, skill, and luck: The psychology of guessing and gambling. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books.

Rogers, P., Davis, T., & Fisk, J. (2009). Paranormal belief and susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23, 524-542. (link)

Friday Magic Showcase: Penn & Teller Blast Off

I realize that this blog is a bit Penn & Teller heavy, but good magic is good magic. Here's some classic Penn & Teller to brighten up your Friday (the Muppets are an added bonus!).

Best Visual Illusion of the Year

The Vision Sciences Society has announced the winner of their annual Visual Illusion of the Year award. This year's top entry demonstrates why baseball players perceive a curveball to "break" when it enters their peripheral vision (as it nears the plate). From the illusion designer's explanation:

The spinning of the curveball creates both a physical effect (“the curve”) and a perceptual puzzle. The curve arises because the ball’s rotation creates an imbalance of forces on different sides of the ball, which leads to a substantial deflection in the path of the ball. The perceptual puzzle arises because the deflection of the ball should appear gradual, but from the point of view of the batter standing near home plate, the flight of the ball often appears to undergo a dramatic and nearly discontinuous shift in position (this sudden shift is referred to as the curveball’s “break”).

As I can't post any of the illusions themselves on this blog, here's a related video of 10 classic optical illusions in 2 minutes.