Magic, Manipulation and Meaning
As learning and development professionals continue to look for ways to engage their students, participants and global audiences in meaningful training programs, we’re discovering that we are often tasked with pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
Heightened interactivity, gamification and mobile, adaptive learning are some key drivers that modern audiences are screaming for again and again.
Raymond Teller, famed part of the magical duo Penn & Teller, recently penned (pun intended) a fascinating article in Smithsonian Magazine about magic and the psychological manipulation of the human mind. What is so fascinating about how magic works is in its similarities to creating effective learning.
In magic, as well as in L&D, you need to focus on the design and development of the learning (the trick) and the delivery (the performance of the trick) with equal energy and effort.
Teller points out that magic is about understanding — and then manipulating — how viewers digest the sensory information. This is quite similar to great instructional design, which uses a sort of “manipulated discovery model” to spark creativity and critical thinking in a way where the learner feels that they are controling their own experience (when in actuality the learning program has been designed to do just that).
The great magician provides us with 7 key principles that are used to create magic and deliver the trick:
1. Exploit pattern recognition. I magically produce four silver dollars, one at a time, with the back of my hand toward you. Then I allow you to see the palm of my hand empty before a fifth coin appears. As Homo sapiens, you grasp the pattern, and take away the impression that I produced all five coins from a hand whose palm was empty.
2. Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches (the kind from under your stove don’t hang around for close-ups) and taught us to pick the bugs up without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we built a secret compartment out of foam-core (one of the few materials cockroaches can’t cling to) and worked out a devious routine for sneaking the compartment into the hat. More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians.
3. It’s hard to think critically if you’re laughing. We often follow a secret move immediately with a joke. A viewer has only so much attention to give, and if he’s laughing, his mind is too busy with the joke to backtrack rationally.
4. Keep the trickery outside the frame. I take off my jacket and toss it aside. Then I reach into your pocket and pull out a tarantula. Getting rid of the jacket was just for my comfort, right? Not exactly. As I doffed the jacket, I copped the spider.
5. To fool the mind, combine at least two tricks. Every night in Las Vegas, I make a children’s ball come to life like a trained dog. My method — the thing that fools your eye — is to puppeteer the ball with a thread too fine to be seen from the audience. But during the routine, the ball jumps through a wooden hoop several times, and that seems to rule out the possibility of a thread. The hoop is what magicians call misdirection, a second trick that “proves” the first. The hoop is genuine, but the deceptive choreography I use took 18 months to develop (see No. 2 — More trouble than it’s worth).
6. Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself. David P. Abbott was an Omaha magician who invented the basis of my ball trick back in 1907. He used to make a golden ball float around his parlor. After the show, Abbott would absent-mindedly leave the ball on a bookshelf while he went to the kitchen for refreshments. Guests would sneak over, heft the ball and find it was much heavier than a thread could support. So they were mystified. But the ball the audience had seen floating weighed only five ounces. The one on the bookshelf was a heavy duplicate, left out to entice the curious. When a magician lets you notice something on your own, his lie becomes impenetrable.
7. If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely. This is one of the darkest of all psychological secrets.
Ultimately, things like perception, process, practice, timing, and fun are crucial factors in creating great magic and learning.
Unlike magic, however, L&D professionals are not trying to trick the learner, but provide them with intuitive learning and performance programs that resonate with them both as active participants and human beings.
And it takes more than the wave of a magic wand to do that.
