This Is Your Brain On Magic

Author: Cari Romm

“I’m going to flip through here and I want you to glance at a card in the middle,” Jay Olson tells his volunteer, offering the deck of cards in his hands. “Not the bottom one—that’s kind of simple for me—but one in the middle. Okay?”

She okays. He flips; she glances.

Olson, a graduate student in psychiatry at McGill University, puts the cards back in their box and hands it to her. “So which one did you choose?” The 10 of hearts, she tells him. “The 10 of hearts,” he repeats. “Great. So now if you could just examine the outside of the box to make sure it’s normal”—she does—“and then take that box and just close it right inside your hands.”

He snaps his fingers over hers. “Now I want you to slowly open your hand and read the bar code”—and sure enough, there are the words, printed right on the box: the 10 of hearts. The volunteer hands the box back to Olson, giggling at the seeming impossibility of what just transpired, unaware that she didn’t really choose the 10 of hearts at all.

Olson chose it for her, in a piece of trickery so quick and so subtle as to seem almost like magic.

The scene is part of a video released in tandem with Olson’s latest study, published earlier this week in the journal Cognition and Consciousness. Together with a team of researchers from McGill and the University of British Columbia, he demonstrated the effectiveness of a technique that magicians call forcing, or manipulating a person’s decisions without her knowledge.

In the first part of the study, Olson, a practicing magician, approached 118 people and asked them to randomly pick a card as he flipped through the deck, an act that took about a half-second in total. Each time, though, Olson already had a specific card in mind. As he flipped, he’d let his target card show just slightly longer than the rest. Ninety-eight percent of the time, the participants picked the one he had in mind, even as 91 percent said the choice had been entirely theirs—illustrating, the study authors wrote, that magic “can provide new methods to study the feeling of free will.”

But when I asked Olson about the method in question—how, exactly, did he maneuver the flip so that his card showed for just a fraction of a second longer?—he deflected. “I can’t share that,” he said. “It’s part of the secret.”

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