“Magicians court the spotlight while living in constant fear of exposure. They regard magic tricks as being like quantum states — destroyed by the very act of examining them up close.” —Alex Stone
A few years ago, Alex Stone arrived in Stockholm to take part in the World Championships of Magic. As an avid practitioner of the craft, he was rather excited about this milestone event in his life; his parents even traveled to Sweden to see their son’s performance.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be less than satisfactory; after several unforgivable mistakes, Stone was eliminated from the competition. Depressed and dejected, he vowed to never perform magic again — but this too didn’t go as planned.
In his dorky, ridiculously comical, and downright nerdy book, “Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind,” Stone unravels not only his personal, and at times embarrassing, relationship with magic but also the history of magic itself. Covering everything from its roots and progression to the hidden scientific and mathematical properties that make magic possible, the book is surprisingly informative, wildly entertaining, and candid to a fault.
After the Stockholm fiasco, Stone enrolled in a physics program at Columbia University to quell his “existential longings.” However, the lack of a social life and his inextinguishable obsession with magic led him to take up the craft once more. And so, in pursuit of the perfect trick and impeccable technique, Stone proceeded to immerse himself into the strange underground community of eccentrics, scholars, scoundrels, and math geniuses who keep the secrets of the craft.
To learn how to handle cards, he sought out Richard Turner, a blind magician who “does things with cards that nobody else in the world can do,” and discovered how touch-related tasks engage the somatosensory cortex.
While attempting to master Three-card Monte, Stone reached out to con men who manipulate their targets’ greed by inflating their victims’ egos, only to rip them off for hundreds of dollars moments later. As Stone notes, “The biggest myth about the three-card monte is that it works because the sucker doesn’t realize it’s a scam. In fact, the monte depends on the sucker realizing it’s a scam — and then wanting in on it.”
And, in order to understand the mechanics of human attention and how to direct it, he joined forces with Dr. Arien Mack, a professor at The New School for Social Research, and proceeded to test “inattentional blindness” in a controlled environment. The book is full of amazing factoids about human psychology, mathematical oddities, and scientific curiosities, which only makes it that much more enthralling.
“Fooling Houdini” not only reveals the behind-the-scenes culture of magic, it also deeply explores the importance of secrecy within a community constructed on deception. To say that the book is worth the read is a gross understatement — it’s a must read for anyone who loves being fooled and entertained.
This article is updated from its initial publication in Brain World Magazine’s print edition.
