As above, I am 100% sure neither of these things happened. As I mentioned, I was very focused on all the details, because I found it hard to believe it was possible and I was determined to see how he could pull it off if possible. In addition, as I mentioned earlier I was taken by the fact that he initially seemed to sort of suggest some other words - neither of those words began with a “b” (and neither was as long), which would have made no sense at all if it was known by that point that the word had to be a lengthy word beginning with a “b”.
ETA: I just asked my wife, who was also there, and she is also certain that it was a random word not required to begin with any specific letter.
I’m sorry, but this is an example of you forgetting things or being confused. I never had any memory of using a random book and never suggested anything of the sort anywhere in this thread. You can reread my prior posts and verify this. There has been nothing changed about my memory or description since I began discussing it here. (I have added a few details here and there in response to specific suggestions by others, but nothing that contradicted anything that I’ve said or implied anywhere in this thread.)
His back was turned and we held up the book. I don’t recall if he suggested holding up the book. I would have done it in any event, just to take no chances. I also don’t recall if he specifically announced that he would turn his back, but while we dealt with the book he turned back to the audience and directed his attention to them. I don’t know if that was just to keep their interest or a deliberate part of the act.
Have to apologize here - I see that I used the term “randomly selected” in my first post. :smack:
But I didn’t mean that we randomly selected the book from a selection of books before us. He offered us to take any book we wanted, but we didn’t take him up on it, not appreciating that a normal-looking book would be a trick book. At the time of my first post, I was thinking of that as being equivalent of “randomly selected”, but in retrospect it must not have been.
Again: my apologies. Nonetheless, my memory of what happened has not changed.
Here’s the thing: You don’t actually have a memory of what happened. You have memories of memories of memories. After the trick, you told someone about it: Now you remember telling about it. And if you told it wrong, then the things you got wrong actually become part of your memories. The fact that you’ve included the “randomly picked” detail in your description to us, even though it’s incorrect, will reinforce the notion in your memory that it really was randomly picked.
Again, I do not mean by this to impugn your honesty, or your intelligence. You don’t edit your memories this way because you are dishonest or stupid. You edit your memories this way because you’re human. We all do this, whether we like it or not.
But that happens to not be the case in this instance. As I said, I meant “randomly selected” in that the guy case us a choice of any book we wanted, even though we ended up using the book he offered us. In retrospect I shouldn’t have used that term - I did not appreciate that he might have had multiple ways of doing the trick and the details of how he did it may be specific to the fact that we chose his book - but my memory of it is not any different now than it was then.
I was clearer on what happened in post #60 of this thread.
Oh, and never forget that it is a magician’s job to lie to you. The good ones are very good at it and can convince you *without your noticing *that events happened in a way they actually did not.
How can you tell? The whole point of memories mutating is that once it happens, you don’t think it did. The only way you could be sure would be to go back and watch a video taken of the trick.
It’s a trick book - if you had picked a different book - he would have done a different trick or had you pick a random page out of that book and then tell him the number and give the number to someone else - who would have then given someone else the book.
I LOVE magic and have bought my fair share of tricks. Despite the fact I know how a decent number of tricks are performed - I still get fooled a decent amount of the time. Also I don’t want to destroy a magician who is performing. I once too did the pick a word from the book trick. I could sort of tell there was something odd with the book’ but picked a word - and he correctly guessed mountainside (which oddly enough was one of the examples used upthread).
Often - when I get home and look up on YouTube to see how a trick is done - or buy a trick from a magic shop - I realize that what I thought I saw - wasn’t EXACTLY what I saw. Magicians know how memory work and prey on that.
They are also very good at giving you the illusion of choice.
He wouldn’t have needed to bring his own books if he didn’t need his own books. While not everyone may have playing cards, a rabbit, or whatever else - virtually everyone has something with writing at their house. Whenever a magician has you do something - it is cause it is needed for the trick. If he is shuffling the cards - he NEEDS to be shuffling the cards for the trick to work. Otherwise he would have you do it as it would be more impressive. Same thing with the books. The only reason to bring his own (other than the fear you might not have one) is cause he needs them.
I suggested this earlier. But I did not appreciate this at the time.
Although, had he used a book from the host’s bookshelf he might have had to compensate by making the trick less impressive in other ways (e.g. flipping through the book and then using a magician’s choice to force the page selection, or whatever). So it was all for the good.
Not just you. That’s what I object to about some of the arguments being made in this thread. There are not a limited number of tricks in the world, such that you can declare that a given trick must have been done in one of these ways. Someone might have thought of some technique that you never heard of.
Absolutely, but it’s about small things that seem insignificant at the time and are thus overlooked. People here have been suggesting that I might be forgetting major parts of the trick, and things that would have obviously been part of the method to anyone watching at the time. This is ridiculous.
FWIW, this same mentalist did a small trick after the show and then demonstrated how in fact that trick relied on the illusion of choice (unless he happened to be lucky - which he was that particular time).
Also, he asserted during the show that he could figure out anyone’s SSN, and would do so if asked after the show. Naturally I asked him after the show, and he said sure, but then said this and that and came up with some minor excuse why he wasn’t going to do it but instead produced a locked combination lock that would open if set to the year of my birth. It did. But people suggested (after he left) that perhaps it was set so that any change of all 4 digits would open it (or something like that) - I had not thought to test it at a bogus year.
You are certain that your memory of this trick that you saw years ago was accurate. So accurate that you are absolutely sure that neither you nor your brother in law revealed the first letter or the page number.
This is the same memory that was so absolutely certain that you had never made a post 72 hours ago that said that you used a random book that you put it in writing.
And you are absolutely sure that you remember ever important detail of the trick because you were watching to see how it was done and analysing it afterwards. And yet you still stated emphatically twice over a period of days that magician would have had to select the word out of all the words in the English language. Something that you had believed for all the years since you saw the trick. It was only after being questioned at length that you realised that in fact you had used the magician’s book, and he only had to select from the words in that book. Yet for years, you had remembered that the magician had to have selected the word from all the possible words in the English language. And remembered so clearly that you stressed this fact multiple times in this thread.
Fotheringay-Phipps, I want to be quite clear none of this is a personal attack on you. You are human, just like the rest of us. I have been taken in by magic tricks because of misremembered details of exactly the kind that you have misremembered: “remembering” that a selection was random, “remembering” that the sample pool was infinite. And usually, the harder you try to concentrate to work out the trick while it is being done, the more likely you are to misremember crucial details. That’s because a large part of stage magic is dedicated to making you misremember details by giving you lots of irrelevant details to try to remember (eg a mentalist spiel, was the magician’s back turned) so that you are distracted when the important detail is revealed.
I’m going to ask you to look at this as you would if someone had said this to you.
A subject tells you that a trick is done using a random word from a random book. They tell you that they remember all the important details of the trick perfectly. And they tell you repeatedly for several days that they are mystified because the trick must have involved guessing a word out of literally the entire English lexicon.
After several days of questioning, the subject then reveals that in fact the trick in fact used a book the stage magician just “happened” to be carrying at a party. So the word wasn’t selected from a random book and it only needed to be selected from whatever words were in the magician’s book. But the subject still insists that he remembers all the important details of the trick. He insists that he hasn’t been misdirected into assuming the trick had been done with a random book. He insists that he was just “thinking” of it that way and his memory of other important details infallible and could not have been misdirected. And he insists that even though he has remembered for years that the word had to have been selected from the whole English lexicon and insisted on it multiple times over the past few days.
And we know that a trick book has been published and is widely used by stage magicians. A trick book that only contains 26 words. And one of those 26 words, “bartender” is precisely the same word that the subject remembers from the trick he participates in.
The trick book itself states openly that it relies on and teaches “Adrian Bint’s ‘no-pump’ handling of the first letter”. That book and various versions of it are routinely used by stage magicians (as you can see in the earlier clip I linked to, as well as here and here) and in every instance, the magician does indeed rely on a no-pump technique to get the subject to reveal the first letter.
The whole point of a no-pump technique is to get the subject to reveal the first letter so quickly and casually that it seems unimportant and unmemorable.
Now at this stage we have two possibilities.
The first is that a subject, who has demonstrated that they have a far-from-perfect memory of the details of the trick, was misled by a stage trick deliberately designed to mislead without being remembered, and doesn’t remember being misled. The magician used a standard, widely-used trick book and the “no-push” method taught by the book to get the subject to reveal the first letter without remembering revealing the letter.
The second is that that the subject’s memory of the trick is perfect and free of assumptions, except for the erroneous assumption that the trick involved a random book and the erroneous memory that the word must have been selected from every word in the English language. Aside from those two points the subject’s memory is perfect on important details. The fact that the word “bartender” was selected is entirely coincidental. The fact that nobody is able to find any footage of any other magician in the world performing the trick the way that the subject describes is simply because a small-time stage magician has invented a totally novel, impressive trick that the top members of the Magic Circle are unable to replicate. That’s even though You-tube contains footage form every magic act ever televised or performed in Vegas, no footage exists of any other magician performing an act so impressive.
Which of those would you think is the most plausible explanation for all this evidence if it wasn’t your memory that was being called into question?
Really we have two alternatives. 1) A small-time illusionist has created a novel and astounding act that nobody else in the world can replicate. 2) A small-time act paid a couple of hundred bucks for a trick book and instructions on how to get a subject to reveal the first letter of a word without remembering it, used that book, and a subject revealed the first letter of a word without remembering it.
But if that is what you meant, then why did you repeatedly insist that the word had to have been guessed form the entire English lexicon?
This is exactly what Chronos was talking about, and exactly what misdirection is intended to accomplish. The magician made a suggestion of something, and your mind then remembered the reality of it. In this case, the magician made a suggestion that the book could be random, and your mind then assumed it really was was random. And it did this to the point that for years you have been absolutely certain that the word had to have been selected from the entire English language, when of course it only had to come from the 26 word in the magician’s book.
Now, you might say that this isn’t “misremembering”, but the practical difference is nil. Ever since you saw this trick your brain has been working on the assumption that the book was chosen at random. Which is why your brain is telling you, and you are telling us, that the word had to be selected from the entire English lexicon. You memory was that the word had to have come from the entire English lexicon, which is why you told us that which is why we were so confused over how the trick was done.
Again, you might say that you didn’t “remember” that the word had to come from the entire English lexicon. But the difference between
“This is the way that I perceive the parameters of the trick when i think about it an analyse it”
and
“This is how I remember the trick”
are effectively non-existent.
The assumption of the parameters have become the memory of the parameters. Yes, you can alter those assumptions with effort and new data, as you can with any memory. But that is the memory until them.
And when you told us that the word had to have come from the entire English lexicon, did you remember that it had to have come from the entire English lexicon? Or did you remember that it only had to come from the book that the magician brought to the party?
The human memory is fr from perfect. My memory is no better than yours. We are both prone to doing exactly what you have just demonstrated: adopting assumptions as part of the memory.
I assume that I was short when I was seven, so I assume that i must have used a ladder to climb onto the roof. I’m sure I don’t actually remember using the ladder, I just remember being in the roof. But I remember using the ladder at other points in my childhood, so my brain sketches in the ladder as a rather irrelevant detail to fill out the narrative.
You assumed that the book selection was random because the magician misdirected that way, so you assume that the word choice must have come from the entire English lexicon. You don’t actually remember the book choice being random, you just remember him guessing the word from one book. But you were misdirected to believe the book choice was random, so your brain sketches in an infinite sample pool of words as a rather irrelevant detail to fill out the narrative.
Welcome to humanity, where even our own brains conspire against us.
Which do you think is more likely? That a small-time magician doing private parties has invented a new, simple and astonishing trick that just happened to use the word “bartender”? Or that he used a standard, off-the-shelf trick book?
Note that the tricks on “Fool us” that worked were quite complex. Lots of props, people being separated, obejcts being handled etc. However your trick, as you would have us believe it worked, was incredibly elegant and hence baffling. The magician gave you a book, never looked at it, couldn’t have used mirrors or cameras, never touched it after you picked your word, was never told a page number or letter, nothing was written down etc. He then infallibly picked the word. The trick uses exactly one prop and has no sleight-of-hand potential.
It is one of the most elegant tricks of all time.
As I have said before, this isn’t about a trick being “new”. Magicians invent “new” tricks with some regularity, but they are inevitably complex. The idea that some small-time magician has invented an elegant and baffling trick and remains a small-time magician and the trick just happens to produce a word used in a common tick book. That just beggars belief.
It’s not ridiculous. It’s normal for magic tricks. Ask James Randi or our own Ianzin. A large part of stage magic is learning how to make people do exactly this. I don’t know why you insist that you, out of al of humanity, are immune.
It’s not apparent that it’s a major part of the trick while you are observing it. That’s the whole point. While you are concentrating on the apparent “mentalist banter” because that seems to be the major part of the trick, you are fooled into offhandedly giving away the first letter.
As I’ve explained (repeatedly) I said it was a random book in the context of having had a free choice of that book or any other book. When it later became apparent that there are multiple ways of doing that trick and that the specific method he used may have been based on our accepting his book, then the concept of “random book” took on a different context, which is when I denied having said the book was random. It was and is inconceivable that I would have ever intended to communicate that it was not the guy’s book, which is why I denied having said it was “random” - that’s the meaning of “random” that we were using at the time, but earlier I had used “random” in a broader sense, as above. In sum, I was consistent in what my memory of the event was and in what I intended to communicate, but the specific words took on a different context as the thread developed.
What I said about all the words in the English language was in response to a suggestion that it was not a trick book but was some sort of mathemetical process of elimination or cold reading technique. Note that the idea that it was a trick book seems to have been accepted in this thread since te discovery that the word “bartender” is in that specific book. But there were other suggestions, especially earlier on, and it’s a mistake to go back and interpret responses to those suggestions as if they were responses to the “trick book” possibility and use that to challenge my memory of the event.
At this point I’m assuming that he probably used the trick book. I’m uncertain as to his technique. What I’m sure of is that he did not direct us to use a word which began with a certain letter.
I don’t know that what you say about the “Fool You” show is accurate. But even if it is, I don’t know that it’s impossible for the trick to be done otherwise.
I don’t agree that this is true, for several reasons given earlier. I don’t see much point in continuing to repeat myself. Believe what you want. This is GQ, not GD. I’m interested in knowing how he did it, which is why I raised the question. Convincing you that I know what I know is beyond the scope of things.
[BTW, why are you repeatedly saying that it happened “years ago”? As I wrote in my first post, this happened “last year”.]
It wouldn’t matter whether it was a trick book or not. Even if it was an off-the-shelf novel, the trick wouldn’t involve every word in the English language, as you insisted. the rick wouldl only ever involve the number of words in the book the magician told you to use. But your brain kept insisting that it must have involved every word in the English language, because you were quite convinced that the magician could have performed the trick with any book you selected.
Just as importantly, you weren’t even giving consideration to the fact that it was a trick book with limited words, even though that seems obvious in hindsight. And you weren’t doing that in part because you have been assuming that the magician could have performed the trick with any book.
This is classic misdirection at work. Suggest that the trick can be done with any book, and the audience’s brains actually remember that the word was chosen from the entire language.
I really don’t get why you feel the need to deny that you have misremembered something as important and obvious as giving away a letter or page number. Unless you are claiming actual magic was in use, we all accept that you have misremembered something important an obvious. Why you feel that can’t have been giving away the letter baffles me. That is what this trick relies on, it’s what the book teaches.
Could the trick have been done in some other way using something else that you don’t remember, like the magician handling the book after you put it down? Sure it could. But if you could forget that, then you could also have forgotten that your BIL let the first letter slip.
No matter how you look at this, you have misremembered some really obvious and important detail of the trick, probably because you were trying furiously not to. Why you insist that the really obvious and important point you misremembered couldn’t have been giving away the first letter is baffling.
Anyway, at this point I think it’s quite clear that you were fooled by a trick book, almost certainly the MOABT linked to above. The only real mystery stemmed from your initial claims that this trick was performed with a randomly selected book, with no forcing. Now that we have established that the trick was performed with a known trick book, the remaining mystery is simply “What important detail that gave away the first letter or page number are you misremembering”. That’s it!
You are misremembering something, as almost everyone else in a magic show audience does. I think that is probably when you or your BIL told the magician the first letter. You deny that is possible. It’s rather irrelevant because the only real mystery is *what *obvious point you are not remembering clearly, not *whether *you are failing to remember clearly.
So at this stage the real mystery is which of a dozen important points you are misremembering, not how the trick is done.
I don’t agree with this at all. A lot of what a magician does is misdirection. If he is shuffling cards, it’s just as likely to be because it makes you think the cards play some role in the trick. If he brings a book, it may just be to distract attention from the fact that the book isn’t needed at all.
You can see this in one of the videos linked to earlier. The magician is using trick book with 26 words. But he asks the subject to keep selecting words until she gets the one the magician is thinking of. And each time she picks “wrong”, he riffles the pages of the book. This isn’t done because it need to be done. It is done because it makes people in the audience, watching for the trick, *think *that him handling the book is an important part of the trick. It distracts from the fact that he doesn’t even need to be in the room to do the trick. He then makes a big show of writing down an answer, and getting the subject t write down the answer with a different coloured pen. Once again, this isn’t done because it needs to be done. It’s done to distract attention from how simple the trick is.
All that handling of books and passing around pens is a distraction. People trying to spot the trick will be trying desperately to remember what colour pens were used, what pocket they were put into, how many times he riffled the pages and so forth. To the point where they forget the literally half-second exchange where he asks for the first letter.
That makes a much more impressive and hard to detect trick than simply saying “Pick a word and tell me the first letter. B? OK, your word must be bartender”. Anyone would figure that trick out almost instantly. All that stuff with using different coloured pens and picking multiple words isn’t necessary for the trick to work. He doesn’t need to be writing anything down, he just needs a distraction and that’s what he chose.
The same could be true of bringing his own book. It might not needed, it could be done deliberately to make you *think *that its needed. That makes your brain concentrate on why he needs to use his own book, rather than on why he needs to cover the book with a handkerchief.
Fascinating thread - I just wanted to jump in and add a few things.
You seem to have a REALLY strong memory of the story this “random” party guest told about seeing this trick performed by the same magician. You come back to this a lot as part of whatever you are trying to argue*
It seems apparent to me that this guy was not a random party guest that happened to br familiar with the trick but a confederate. This conversation with him was an integral part of the “force”. You DIDN’T feel the need to pick a random book because this guy convinced you that the trick would work with a random book, one in a foreign language no less. You don’t seem to have ever considered that this guy lied to you.
It’s funny how this dude’s presentation of the trick colored your memories. I’m willing to bet that his patter included something about the immense quantiles of possible words contained in the book and I’m willing to bet that he got you to pick a long word by convincing you that it made the test more challenging.
*( I’m still not sure what your argument is, you posted a general question and got some of the best and most detailed factual answers I’ve ever seen on this board and you keep resisting …I’m starting to think you honestly believe this guy really has magical powers)
This is an example of people - in this case, you - seeing what they want to see. I mentioned the story of the other party as a parenthetical remark because it has relevance to whether the trick relies on a trick book. That’s all.
Seemed relevant to me. Still does.
What’s apparent to you is not worth a whole lot, evidently.
There were no confederates present - everyone there was close family plus one neighborhood couple, and I obviously know all these people quite well. And the guy didn’t mention the story of the other book until we were discussing the matter later in the party, after the mentalist had already left.
Don’t try Vegas. And if you do, stick to slots or something else that relies on pure luck.
To the extent that I’ve been “resisting”, it’s because some of these “best and most detailed factual answers” rely on the assertion that what happened was not what actually happened.
But since you’ve decided to engage in ridiculous speculation about what I “honestly think”, I’ll share a bit of the same, though a lot better grounded. IMO there’s a certain arrogance that some people have, who have some knowledge and can’t bring themselves to accept that there’s other knowledge out there that they don’t possess. In this case for example, they know a few techniques and that’s it - anyone doing the trick has to be doing it with the few methods that they personally know. The idea that maybe there might be something else that they with their vast erudition have not come across is a challenge to them in some manner, and they can’t bring themselves to accept it. So they have to force the round peg into their square hole, and if there are details that don’t conform, well obviously those details never happened altogether. That pretty much sums it up.
As far as the fake-book trick goes, I’d be willing to bet that the magician never said exactly what he would do ahead of time, at least not until after the audience chose his book rather than one off the shelf.
Which, when it’s spelled out that way, makes it pretty easy to guess that, had the audience insisted on using a different book, the magician would simply have done a different trick. Nothing’s stopping him from claiming he could have done the word-guessing trick with a different book, but that doesn’t mean his claim is true.
(Obviously, if he could do the trick with any book at all, why the heck would he bother carting around his own book everywhere?)
