Month: July 2008

While musing over yesterday’s post on the use of psychological language as a form of a magician’s misdirection, I remembered Dennett’s 2003 article [pdf] on consciousness where he uses exactly this as a metaphor for why consciousness doesn’t exist as some scientists think it does.

Dennett argues that the ‘hard problem‘ is a red herring – the whole question of how conscious first person experience arises from the biological function of the brain assumes that consciousness is a single thing that needs explaining.

He suggests that there isn’t a single thing that is consciousness, just a collection of mental components, but the fact we’ve named it as a single thing fools us.

In his article Explaining the “Magic” of Consciousness, he gives a great analogy of how the use of the word ‘the’ was used in a card trick to make it seem completely mysterious even to fellow professional magicians.

The tempting idea that there is a Hard Problem is simply a mistake. I cannot prove this. Or, better, even if I can prove this, my proof will surely fall on deaf ears, since CHALMERS, for instance, has already acknowledged that arguments against his convictions on this score are powerless to dislodge his intuition, which is beyond rational support. So I will not make the tactical error of trying to dislodge with rational argument a conviction that is beyond reason. That would be wasting everybody’s time, apparently. Instead, I will offer up what I hope is a disturbing parallel from the world of card magic: The Tuned Deck.

For many years, Mr. Ralph Hull, the famous card wizard from Crooksville, Ohio, has completely bewildered not only the general public, but also amateur conjurors, card connoisseurs and professional magicians with the series of card tricks which he is pleased to call “The Tuned Deck”…

Ralph Hull’s trick looks and sounds roughly like this:

Boys, I have a new trick to show you. It’s called ‘The Tuned Deck’. This deck of cards is magically tuned [Hull holds the deck to his ear and riffles the cards, listening carefully to the buzz of the cards]. By their finely tuned vibrations, I can hear and feel the location of any card. Pick a card, any card… [The deck is then fanned or otherwise offered for the audience, and a card is taken by a spectator, noted, and returned to the deck by one route or another.] Now I listen to the Tuned Deck, and what does it tell me? I hear the telltale vibrations, … [buzz, buzz, the cards are riffled by Hull’s ear and various manipulations and rituals are enacted, after which, with a flourish, the spectator’s card is presented].

Hull would perform the trick over and over for the benefit of his select audience of fellow magicians, challenging them to figure it out. Nobody ever did. Magicians offered to buy the trick from him but he would not sell it. Late in his life he gave his account to his friend, HILLIARD, who published the account in his privately printed book. Here is what Hull had to say about his trick:

For years I have performed this effect and have shown it to magicians and amateurs by the hundred and, to the very best of my knowledge, not one of them ever figured out the secret. …the boys have all looked for something too hard [my italics, DCD].

Like much great magic, the trick is over before you even realize the trick has begun. The trick, in its entirety, is in the name of the trick, “The Tuned Deck”, and more specifically, in one word “The”! As soon as Hull had announced his new trick and given its name to his eager audience, the trick was over. Having set up his audience in this simple way, and having passed the time with some obviously phony and misdirecting chatter about vibrations and buzz-buzz-buzz, Hull would do a relatively simple and familiar card presentation trick of type A (at this point I will draw the traditional curtain of secrecy; the further mechanical details of legerdemain, as you will see, do not matter).

His audience, savvy magicians, would see that he might possibly be performing a type A trick, a hypothesis they could test by being stubborn and uncooperative spectators in a way that would thwart any attempt at a type A trick. When they then adopted the appropriate recalcitrance to test the hypothesis, Hull would ‘repeat’ the trick, this time executing a type B card presentation trick. The spectators would then huddle and compare notes: might he be doing a type B trick? They test that hypothesis by adopting the recalcitrance appropriate to preventing a type B trick and still he does “the” trick – using method C, of course. When they test the hypothesis that he’s pulling a type C trick on them, he switches to method D – or perhaps he goes back to method A or B, since his audience has ‘refuted’ the hypothesis that he’s using method A or B.

And so it would go, for dozens of repetitions, with Hull staying one step ahead of his hypothesis-testers, exploiting his realization that he could always do some trick or other from the pool of tricks they all knew, and concealing the fact that he was doing a grab bag of different tricks by the simple expedient of the definite article: The Tuned Deck.

pdf of article Explaining the “Magic” of Consciousness.

I’ve just watched a video of an immensley entertaining TED presentation by ‘brain magician’ Keith Barry who does an act with various ‘mind control’ or ‘mind reading tricks’.

It reminded me of an early book by Derren Brown, an English magician who has a similar pitch. Brown is better known for his more recent TV shows and books, but some of his early publications are fascinating because they not only discuss his approach, but also shed light on our increasingly psychology-focused culture.

Keith Barry’s TED presentation contains part suggestion that would be well-known to hypnotists (in fact, the arm raising and lowering is used in standard hypnotisability measures) and part stage magic, all wrapped up in the language of psychology.

He starts the presentation by noting that the redirection of attention is an important part of magic and gives an example of our tendency to follow the magician’s gaze.

In fact, this is preceded by a clasping trick which surely demonstrates this, where the audience’s attention, and rather unfairly for the internet viewer – the camera, are diverted away from him reclasping his hands in a different manner.

I’m not going to pretend that all of the tricks in Barry or Brown’s shows are obvious, as some leave me completely baffled and in awe. I suspect only poor magicians will allow their tricks to be apparent even to the most curious of psychologists.

However, in Brown’s now sadly out-of-print book Pure Effect he makes the fascinating point that the narrative itself is part of the redirection, and describes how framing magic tricks in psychological language leads to certain expectations which, of course, make certain redirections more easily achievable.

This classic presentational ploy that Banachek calls ‘psychological direction’ allows for the illusion of enormous skill, as long as you let the participants figure out for themselves that you are employing such methods. I believe I earn their respect by denouncing psychic ‘psychic power’ as woolly guff and I challenge those lobotomised flower fairies who believe in such nonsense, appealing to their intelligence and belief in themselves as sceptical creatures. The other advantage of this angle is that is allows the effect to sit comfortably with a magic routine that suggests that similar ploys are at work.

The two sets become connected by a seductive undercurrent of apparently deft manipulation of the participant’s minds. At first, these techniques are being employed to produce wonderful, artistic and mystical effects. Then the tone darkens, and the performer, almost with an air of reluctance, sensing the correct rapport in the group, casts aside his props and amusements and begins to rely entirely on his knowledge of human nature to delve into the thought processes of the group. The spectators sense this intensifying of the situation, and adjust their interpretation of the event accordingly. What we are seeing is no longer trickery.

Such an approach uses our cultural familiarity and belief in psychological explanations to redirect our thinking to one place, while the magician is working the ‘magic’ below our level of awareness. In other words, most of the magic is done before the trick even starts.

This is what most impresses me about professional magicians. The slight of hand and the perceptual tricks are cool, but its the cognitive magic, the shaping of expectancies through narrative, that makes them seem so wondrous.

UPDATE: I just noticed this rather well-timed article on Wired Science entitled ‘Magic Tricks Reveal Inner Workings of the Brain’ that expands on the topic. Enjoy!

Link to Keith Barry TED ‘brain magic’ presentation.

An ingenious study just published in the Journal of Consumer Research has provided a striking demonstration that taste perceptions and product preferences are strongly influenced by our personal values – to the point where people who believe in the importance of social authority perceived a sausage roll labelled as vegetarian as far inferior to a ‘meat’ version, even though they ate the same sausage roll on both occasions.

The same result appeared whether the participants actually ate meat or vegetarian sausage rolls, and the participants couldn’t reliably distinguish the two in any condition.

The study, led by psychologist Michael Allen, is a neat demonstration of how our product preferences are influenced by an interaction of our personal values, the cultural meaning of the product and its physical properties, along the lines of an earlier study that found that wine described as more expensive tastes better, even when it was no different from the same wine described as being cheaper.

Of relevance to this study is that fact that red meat has been consistently associated with social power while grains, fruits and vegetables with social equality. What this new study suggests is that these social meanings interact with our own values to affect our perception.

If you think this effect might be specific to sausages, the study conducted a similar experiment with brands of cola, finding that people who endorsed the values linked to Pepsi (excitement, enjoyment, social power and recognition) perceived a cola labelled as Pepsi as tasting better, regardless of whether it actually was the genuine article, or whether it was a budget supermarket brand.

As we’ve discussed previously, perhaps what’s most interesting is that most consumers tend to think that they select products primarily on the basis of physical properties, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.

This is the ‘psychological blind spot’ which most marketing is targeted at. Indeed, I’ve always suspected that it’s the people who say “advertising doesn’t affect me” who are the marketers’ dream consumer, largely because they lack insight into the inescapable effects of marketing.

The study is well worth reading in full, or failing that, just the first few pages, as the introduction is a fascinating review of the psychology of product symbolism and how it affects decisions and preferences.

This research suggests that products have important social meanings that much product preference is driven by a need to manage our social appearance and identity.

It’s not that people who strongly identify with the importance of social power and eat red meat, or people who identify with excitement and drink Pepsi, just say they taste better.

The taste is genuinely different for them, but only when they think they are consuming these products. Assuming the products are similar to a certain degree, a significant slice of our perception is actually driven by what we want to be the case because of the values we already hold.

Link to write-up from Medical News Today.
Link to full text of study.