Arjun Singh 0:03 Arjun from the lovers, reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm Arjun Singh Donald Trump likes to say he perfected the art of the deal, but he's really the master of illusion with a penchant for lies and hyperbole. Trump's insistence that we live in a post truth society has shattered the conventional norms of how elected officials communicate with the public, and its impact has spilled into other parts of American culture today. It's not uncommon for Americans to feel like there are two different countries living in two different realities, and seemingly unable to bridge that divide. But why is that? Why did Trump's lies embed themselves so deeply in our culture, the answer to that might not be found in politics, but in magic. Yes, real magic, the kind practiced by the likes of Harry Houdini and Penn and Teller today on lever time, we're going to hear from the lever senior investigative reporter Lois parshley about the science behind deception and illusion, and how a magic contest might hold the key to Understanding what is happening in Our political system Today. You Arjun Singh 5:29 Hi, Lois, I hear you've got a magic trick for Lois Parshley 5:33 me. Yeah, I haven't necessarily mastered any new tricks, but after the selection cycle, it does feel like a lot of things have vanished into thin air. Arjun Singh 5:44 It's it's interesting that you bring up the election, because I know with this election, I talked to a lot of people, surprisingly, on both sides of the aisle, people were watching the same data, the same trends, the same polls, and yet they were coming out with wildly different interpretations. I talked to Republican pollsters and operatives, and they would tell me that they were extremely confident Trump was going to win, but I would talk to people on the Democratic side, and they would say the same thing, and that was just very surprising. Usually you can get an indication that one side isn't as confident, but it was weird that people seem to be looking at the same information and kind of seeing two different things, but I hear you spend some time talking to some magicians, and those magicians might actually have the key as to why people were seeing things differently. Lois Parshley 6:35 Yeah. So like you, as the election approached, I wanted to learn more about how our brains process misinformation and the ways that people might be manipulated. I love ideas that challenge common perceptions, and I came across a magic contrast looking for tricks that work without sight. So I was really intrigued by this, because there's been a lot of conversation over the last few years about how we think about what's true and false. And for me, this reporting gave me a chance to think more deeply and ask questions about how reality can be distorted. And as I dug in, I stumbled on records of a forgotten CIA experiment, an answer to why everyone's so into astrology now, and some life lessons that apply far, far off stage. Arjun Singh 7:30 Yeah, I mean the CIA astrology, that sounds like a regular Tuesday afternoon for me. So one question for you. Do you believe in magic? Lois Parshley 7:38 I do now. Arjun Singh 7:40 Okay, well, I know that you've got a very fascinating episode for us up ahead, so let's get on into it and hear what you learned when you spent some time in the world of magic. Tyler Gigbot 7:54 I believe that magic is far more than just the tricks and illusions you might see on a stage. I think that magic is all around us in every way. When you hear the term magic trick, there's the trick which is what you're watching, and there's the magic which is what you're feeling. Lois Parshley 8:09 That's Tyler gibgot, a 21 year old magician from Los Angeles. He taught himself tricks during the pandemic. When stuck at home at loose ends, one night, he picked up a familiar deck of cards. His journey into magic would raise questions about the fundamental nature of illusion. Tyler Gigbot 8:26 I loved the way that the cards fell to my hand. I loved shuffling them. I didn't know what I could do with them. I just knew that these were 52 pieces of paper that meant so much and have evolved so much throughout history. Lois Parshley 8:37 He practiced and practiced until he felt ready to try his first audience, his surprised parents. I Tyler Gigbot 8:43 showed them a card trick, and as every parent does, they had to kind of pretend like they were amazed. Oh, my God, that was amazing. And I think it was kind of a more simple card trick. But I will also say this, because this is an interesting part of who I am, and an interesting part of what differentiates me from other magicians. I was born with an extremely rare and blinding eye condition called Aniridia, which means the lack of the iris. So I don't have irises in either one of my eyes. This was almost like the perfect calling for me, because it's almost like when I show people a magic trick, for the first time ever, I can see things that other people can't see. So it kind of levels the playing field between me and other people. For the first time, Lois Parshley 9:27 as he improved give God wanted to know why his tricks worked, to understand what happens in the brain when we witness a magic trick, he decided to study cognitive science at the University of Southern California, where he came across research by Gustave Kun, a magician turned psychology professor at the University of Plymouth in England. Intrigued give God sent Kun an email in 2023 out of the blue, asking to join his magic lab for the summer. Impressed by the young man's determination, kun said, yes. Well, I Gustav Kuhn 9:57 think the problem is that I. Vision is very good at giving us about providing us with information about the current state Lois Parshley 10:04 of the world. That's Gustav Khan speaking from his office in the UK, Gustav Kuhn 10:08 as I'm looking like I've got this cup of coffee that's on the table, and I can look at it, and it's there, and I know that it's there. Arjun perception, on the other hand, it gives us information about happenings, like, if I drop the cup, there's a sound, and that sound doesn't tell that, basically, to tell me something about what has happened rather than what's actually there. So it may be that maybe that that's one of the key differences between visual perception and auditory perception. Now it's not the same for like, I mean dolphins or bats, like they use and humans as well. To certain extent, we can use some echolocation, and that kind of auditory information can give us information about the state of the world, but in most of the instances, auditory information tells us about what's happened rather than what's actually there. Lois Parshley 11:05 Khan studies the liminal space between perception and reality. He explains that we evolved to navigate the world by prioritizing visual information. It alerts us to both important hazards and attractions, and that's why magicians typically exploit cognitive shortcuts involving our eyes, often manipulating cards, mirrors or hands right in plain sight. In other words, it's much easier to perform sight based tricks because our brains focus on filling in the blanks, while we're often more critical of sounds that don't match our expectations, finding a purely auditory illusion they realized would require magicians to expand the boundaries of their craft with give God's input. The magic lab announced a global competition this fall soliciting tricks to only use sound without verbal cues or other sensory elements. After a year of failing to come up with any auditory illusions of his own. Khan wasn't sure there would be any submissions. I Gustav Kuhn 12:03 mean, to be honest, I'm not holding my breath. The competition is also just about creating a discussion amongst magicians to think more broadly about what could they do to make their magic more inclusive? I mean, it'd be great if we get some examples, but it's going to be really, really difficult. Lois Parshley 12:20 It can be hard to accurately judge our own cognition and misjudgments can have sweeping, real world consequences. As President Donald Trump gears up for a second term, I wanted to learn more about how our brains process misinformation and the ways people might be manipulated through these kinds of cognitive biases. We're often wrong about what we think we see, like viral fake videos of election workers tearing up ballots. We're also often wrong about how much we can trust the things we remember. For example, our current emotional state reframes our memories of past civil conflicts. Many of our experiences are, in fact, an illusion by studying magic, Khan hopes to gain insight into the mental shortcuts that influence our beliefs and decisions, revealing vulnerabilities that can be weaponized in misinformation and media. Deception Gustav Kuhn 13:13 is such a huge topic. I mean, it's almost been a huge topic throughout history, but it's particularly important now. Lois Parshley 13:19 The contest gains its challenge from a fragile truth just how easily we can be deceived by the senses we trust the most. New technologies like generative AI and algorithm driven platforms are making reality harder than ever to parse, but the mechanisms of magician's misdirection have long been exploited far off stage, CIA Ad 13:43 the nation we got it is counting on you to Discover the Truth. I'll call the White House. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the CIA Lois Parshley 13:52 in 2009 for example, a historical advisor to the Central Intelligence Agency stumbled on a poorly photo copied manual. It was one of the only surviving projects of the agency's notorious MK Ultra program, a search for unorthodox cold war weapons that explored mind control. The Agency had turned to experts of misdirection, like magician John Mulholland in 1953 he went from making cages of birds disappear mere feet from the front row to teaching spies how to surrectiously administer acid doses. The key, he wrote was to take advantage of people's almost infinite capacity to self rationalize. This kind of stage management is what the CIA later used to rescue six US diplomats stranded in Iran after the American Embassy was overrun in 1979 Argo Clip 14:44 I need you to help me make a fake movie gave me to the right place. Wanna set up a production company and build a cover around making a movie that we're not gonna make? No. So you wanna come to Hollywood act like a big shot, yeah, without actually doing anything. Know, you'll fit right in Tony Lois Parshley 15:01 Mendez, who's then the chief of the CIA disguise section, and also a magic aficionado, created a fictional Hollywood company and a sci fi movie script to smuggle the officials out of the country as pseudo producers. Anthony Barnhart 15:21 Magicians are rarely lying to their audiences. Instead, they're setting up conditions that allow the audience to deceive themselves, to lie to themselves, to make assumptions in the moment that are inaccurate assumptions. I am Anthony Barnhart. I'm an associate professor of Psychological Science at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I also used to be a professional magician, and so that shapes much of the work that I do in the Lois Parshley 15:51 laboratory. Performers often rely on storytelling to control their audience's attention. One popular technique called the peak end heuristic exploits the fact that our memories skew toward moments of peak emotional content, as well as how experiences conclude at the end of the campaign trail. For example, former President Donald Trump repeatedly described January 6 as a day of love and called its participants patriots. Magicians will also carefully script a tricks climax, reshaping details, to lead the audience to recall something different than may have actually occurred. It's Anthony Barnhart 16:27 all attentional control, right? Magicians are trying to draw your attention to the towards the things that will allow you to be deceived. As our politicians, right? They're choreographing their audience's attention, and you can sort of measure the effectiveness of film by tracking audience members eye movements while they watch it. And everybody's looking at all the same places at all the same times when they're watching a really well directed film. Many Lois Parshley 16:55 of these deeply rooted cognitive habits are socially influenced. We instinctively follow where someone is looking, assuming it reveals something of importance. Even when people are aware they're being manipulated, there are automatic tendencies we can't really shut off. For instance, a researcher at Stanford impact lab found over the course of five different experiments that Americans beliefs were still changed by reading something fake, even when they knew it was made up, the impacts were persistent, lasting for days and creating partisan divides where there were none. Gustav Kuhn 17:27 I see a lot of parallels between between politics and misdirection. It's grim because I don't know what. I don't know what you can do. It's very hard to know what you can actually do about it. In Lois Parshley 17:38 2022 Kun ran an experiment where a magician demonstrated false paranormal abilities, things like using gimmick dice to demonstrate mind reading and staging volunteers to pretend to communicate with the dead. For half of the participants, Kahn explained the experience was a trick, while the other half were told it was a genuine spiritualist demonstration. Surprisingly, the framing had no impact on people's interpretation. Viewers just maintained their original attitudes toward the occult. Gustav Kuhn 18:08 Even if people know that what they are hearing and what they are seeing is false, they still believe it. I mean, yeah, look at the US elections, or kind of like a lot of the conversations that we are having here right now. So actually pumping out fake news and misinformation, well, even if people know that it's false, it can still have a significant impact. Arjun Singh 18:39 After the break, Lois will take us even deeper into the world of magic, and we'll hear the results of Gustav Kuhn's competition. We'll be right back Lois Parshley 18:58 for those outside cultural norms or systems of power, the lesson that perception can distort what we think we know can hit early give God's revelation came at a childhood Track and Field race. Tyler Gigbot 19:09 As I neared the final stretch of the race, I was running and running, and I was so out of breath, but I could feel all this exhilaration and all this adrenaline rushing through me, and as far as I could tell, when I threw my chest across the finish line, I had won the race, and I was so proud of myself, I felt so accomplished. I threw my arms around my dad and gave him the biggest hug of my life, and I told him, I did it. I won. I won. Lois Parshley 19:40 Later that night, his dad gently broke the news he'd actually finished second. He just hadn't been able to see the runner ahead of him. Tyler Gigbot 19:49 All I could think of to say in response was the following, I have an idea, dad, from now on, I'm just going to keep the runners behind me. Then I'll never. Have to worry about trying to see the people ahead of me, and from that point on, I never let anyone else go in front of me. Lois Parshley 20:07 Gig bot turned his impaired vision into a strength, but just before heading to the UK, he developed a cataract in his left eye, obscuring the sight he had left. His doctors told him that during the necessary operation, medical discoveries would also make it possible to implant an artificial Iris. He quickly saw the whole ordeal as a blessing in disguise, and though he tried to manage his expectations, he secretly hoped that when he woke, his vision might finally improve. I told Tyler Gigbot 20:36 myself to approach it with every with the same attitude I've approached every other event in my life that is with zero expectations. And I really thought I did, but I will say, admittedly, to become more vulnerable deep down, I had expectations. I had expectations that coming out of the surgery, there would be some recovery period, sure, but after that short recovery period, I would be able to see Lois Parshley 21:05 the surgery took place after he returned from England in the sterile calm of the operating room, the surgeon opened a tiny incision in his eye, slicing through the clouded lens. The operating team inserted a custom made silicon prosthesis. He regained consciousness and searing pain in the grindingly slow recovery, he couldn't sleep. He lay in the dark for weeks, miserable as it became clear that the surgery was not successful, gig bot struggled to hold on to his characteristic positivity, worrying his friends and family. Tyler Gigbot 21:39 That was certainly a moment where I felt such a lack of hope, such a deep remorse for my own from my own life and my own plight as someone with a visual impairment. And it was in that moment that it was like I realized I just I wish I could have sight. I wish all along my whole life, I could have seen like everybody else. Because I like you said I am. I am a very positive person. My friends see me that way. My family sees me that way. So, you know, my whole life, I've gone with it. I've gone on this attitude. I've lived with this attitude where I'm like, Man, I'm so grateful for my eye condition. I'm so grateful because it makes me who I am. It allows me to push harder at things. But in this recovery, it was like the first time I ever really regretted my eyes. I regretted having this eye condition. I looked down upon it and all I wanted was just to see Lois Parshley 22:34 it would take a little magic to find his way back to himself. In difficult times, people tend to turn toward the supernatural. The human brain is wired to seek patterns and reliable outcomes. Laura Krantz, the journalist and author of Do you believe in magic, explains that magical thinking is particularly appealing during instability. Laura Krantz 22:54 I would say magic in general, like the types of magic, with Alchemy or spells, or any of that, that or even superstitions, is an attempt to have control over the world around you. And you see a tendency to turn towards magic or magical ideas more when things feel unstable, when the world feels unstable, when there is an increase in war or poverty, or just bad news in general, you I think you will see a correlating increase in interest in magic and trying to exert a tiny bit of control over a world that does not feel very hospitable. Lois Parshley 23:31 Astrology, for example, notably, surged in popularity under the last trump administration. Just because these coping strategies pertain to the impossible doesn't necessarily mean they don't work. In his own book, experiencing the impossible, Gustav Khan notes that during the 1990 to 91 Gulf War, people who lived in areas under direct threat of a missile attack were more likely to demonstrate superstitious behavior, while the frequency of students pre test magical rituals increased along with the stakes of an exam. But the same illusion can be perceived very differently, since magic depends on the chasm between what we believe and what we perceive, not everyone experiences magic the same way. Kun, for example, is now collaborating with Nicola Clayton, Professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge, to study deception on cuttlefish, intelligent invertebrates related to octopus and squid. They're searching for insights into embodied cognition, or the idea that thoughts and perceptions can be shaped by our bodies rather than existing solely in the mind. Nicola clatyon 24:36 We're in the very infancy of the experiments, but the idea is that given that if you have a hand that works like a wing, or you have a hand that has fingers that do this, or you have a hand with opposable thumbs, shapes what you think you saw, what you think you remembered, and what you think that means for the. Future for your anticipations and expectations. What would it be like not to have hands, but to have eight arms and to have a soft body without a backbone? Well, welcome to the cephalopods. That's what they have, the cuttlefish and the octopus and the squids, but the whole idea that the kind of body plan we have, the shape of the body we inhabit, might actually influence how we interpret those things, I think, is quite new, and because the cephalopods are so different, but they're really the masters of Houdini. Sorry, Houdini, eat your art out, because what the cephs are so good at is dynamic camouflage. So they are masters of deception. Lois Parshley 25:51 Both humans and animals rely on prior experiences to interpret ambiguous information. For decades, research has shown that our perception of the world is subject to our expectations. Researcher Florian Zimmerman recently found that financial investors beliefs about trends are strongly shaped by associations, often leading to overreactions based on past experiences. In other words, our cognitive biases can shape our behavior, creating distortions that have real world effects coloring everything from election polling data to economic forecasting. But while Americans argued over whether polls could be trusted, Gustav Khan received the magic contest's first submission. Soon, people from six different countries had sent in tricks. Ed Brimms 26:38 Felix, thank you very much for coming up to do this. I realize it's a bit scary to be on stage blindfolded with no idea what's going to happen. So just be totally honest, no one and nothing is going to touch you. Nothing's going to jump out at you. No one's trying to make you look silly. Lois Parshley 26:51 One was Ed brims, a software engineer and an amateur magician. As a former member of Google's home device team, he'd wondered if the tool might be able to play auditory tricks. So when he saw the magic contest on Facebook, he thought he'd give it a try. He sat his son, Felix, in a chair in his living room with a blindfold on in a wobbling home video, brims explained that he would ping the spoon off a bottle, and asked his son to listen carefully and point toward his location Ed Brimms 27:21 tonight, for one night only, I will be demonstrating the world's first ever teleportation device. Felix is up here to provide what we call a blind test to see if it really does work. Now, Felix, with your playing fold on you, are going to verify my machine Lois Parshley 27:37 as brim circled his son, tapping on the bottle, Felix tracked his progress. The brain is really good at distinguishing which side of the body a sound is coming from come explained, we can Gustav Kuhn 27:48 use our ears to identify the location of the sound. The way that we do that is by working out time difference between the sound arriving in the left ear and the right ear. So the sound coming from my left will arrive on my left ear before it does in my right ears, just like a fraction of millisecond, basically. But our brain can use this information to work out a spatial location, and that's basically what happens when you listening to stereo sounds on a headphones. So the problem with that is that if you've got a sound coming right from the front, we can't distinguish that from the back, because that time difference is exactly the same. So this is known as the cone of confusion. There were few tricks that relied on this principle. It's like a basically a teleportation effect, something moves from kind of like the front to the back, or vice versa, Lois Parshley 28:44 when brim slipped from behind the chair to directly in front of Felix, his son pulled up the blindfold, amazed, and I'm over here, that tug of war of expectation actually happens on a neural level. When Khan and a colleague scanned the brains of people watching tricks, they found two areas became active, one part of the cortex, which monitors conflict and another which tries to resolve it. Gustav Kuhn 29:09 I mean, magic is all about a conflict in beliefs. We can think of magic as a conflict between the things that you believe to be possible and the things that you experience Lois Parshley 29:18 sometimes that makes room for growth. Gig bot, for instance, had thought he was prepared for his surgery. After all, he says his sight couldn't get any worse, but in its aftermath, he struggled as reality failed to live up to his hopes. Tyler Gigbot 29:32 In that time, where I had to be face down for a week straight, I had nothing but my thoughts, nothing but a deck of cards in my hand, and I had, I had to do a lot of reflection. You cannot control the circumstance only how you react to it. In the sense of cards, you can't control the hand or doubt only how you use it. Lois Parshley 29:50 As Democrats reckoned with losing the election, Khan announced brims and two others who had used the same principle had won, sharing the award the judges. Alex. Experienced magicians said none of the tricks had truly abided by all of the rules. They all use some form of language, but they were still thrilled. Gustav Kuhn 30:07 I think it's sort of a first. I don't think anybody's ever had a competition to create a trick to meet specific criteria, but that has given me a lot of confidence that we can actually use this, use this process to really drive the idea of more inclusive magic forward. Brams Lois Parshley 30:25 and his son Felix, were delighted to in his job now at Bloomberg, brims is interested in experimenting with how to make charts and graphs more accessible for people who can't see the screen, trying out converting numbers into musical clefs. So Ed Brimms 30:40 we had charts going up and down, and I spent a bit of time experimenting with how you can make them accessible people who can't see the screen. Because what we did at the time was just, you navigate to the chart and it reads out a list of numbers. But that the point of a chart is not to be the list we you know, anyone can see the list of numbers, but, but the chart is a different thing that's meant to give you a sense of how it's moving. And what I did was I converted the chart into music. I said, Okay, let's put a treble clef at the beginning of the chart and actually play the notes of where it's going up and down. And it was really interesting that you can do that. Once you actually make that work, your ear can get a sense of, oh, okay, I see how it's moving. It goes up then down, then up again, or whatever it is. So I've, yeah, a few times. Actually, I've sort of come up with different ways of looking at things that, okay, how can you give someone this same experience if they can't see what they're actually doing? I haven't thought of that, but yeah, you're right. The musical charts actually has quite a lot in common with the musical the auditory magic, though. Gig Lois Parshley 31:41 bots excited about the contest's results. He says picking a winner was really beside the point. There's implications Tyler Gigbot 31:47 here for not just magic and and the inner workings of the craft, but in life in general. Because the reality is, we are all artists, right? The world is a big blank canvas, and our brains are the paint brushes. Our brains fill in color, fill in meaning, our brains construct the reality as we know it. And being aware of this fact, being aware that our brains are the ultimate puppeteer of what we see and what we know, it's almost freeing for Lois Parshley 32:18 gig bot. It's not a matter of just being positive or even performative. I'm just Tyler Gigbot 32:24 doing what I have to do. I'm enduring and I'm allowing myself to feel what it means to be vulnerable, to feel what it means to be open. And that is what magic has shown me, too. Because when I'm performing magic with people, it's a human and human interaction. There's no superficiality involved. There's no worries or anything of that sense. It's all about the interaction. It's all about the magic is the interaction. Like Lois Parshley 32:52 political progress, the pursuit of knowledge rarely travels in a straight line, far more often, it's a messy journey of trial and error as the country gears up for another four years with President Elect Donald Trump on center stage, some new tricks might be exactly what's needed. All right, so I'm gonna tap my magic glass and I'm gonna teleport. Okay, okay, so I was inspired by brims to try his trick, I set up a friend in a chair in my own living room, and I thought I would try it out, behind, behind, Arjun Singh 33:37 behind, for real. Unknown Speaker 33:38 But blaster, damn Nicola clatyon 33:42 it. Again, Unknown Speaker 33:44 it works. Unknown Speaker 33:47 God, I was listening for you moving and everything. Lois Parshley 33:49 I was so ready to cheat. Lois Parshley 33:58 Honestly, I did not think it would work. It was pretty fun. There's something really beautiful in the simplicity of seeing this work, especially in a moment when reality is so complex, deception without wonder, after all, is just fun. You Arjun Singh 34:40 thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by Lois parshley, with help from Chris Walker and editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Arnstein. Our team music is composed by Nick camp. I'm Arjun Singh. We'll be back next week with another episode of leverage. Transcribed by https://otter.ai