Serious amateur magician here (magician member of the Magic Castle). Note that the trick done for the monkeys is not done the way that a real magician would do the trick to fool a human. The French Drop actually can have surprisingly deep subtleties. To fool a human, you would hold the coin between your thumb and forefinger so that there is a visible gap between the bottom of the coin and the palm of the hand holding it into which it will be dropped. Then the hand that grabs the coin is moved into place in a smooth continuous motion, covering this gap very briefly, during which time the coin is dropped. The key is that the gap is visible during most of this motion, after which the grasping hand pauses briefly before closing the thumb and forefingers to "grasp" the (now missing) coin. The key to making it convincing is that the trick actually happens before the dramatic pause before grasping the coin, but the pause focuses the spectator's attention on the fact that during the pause the gap is visible, making it "impossible" for the coin to be dropped without being seen. It's considered one of the most elementary of tricks, but it's actually quite challenging to do properly. In the hands of a skilled magician it can be very convincing even when you know how it's done.
Magic is an art with vastly more subtlety and attention to detail than it generally appreciated by muggles.
I do a great french drop. I don't know much other magic, but I can really vanish a quarter or other similarly sized object. My kids love it, so I still practice a fair amount.
The drop itself is a very unnatural way to transfer a coin from one hand to the other, so the first step for me to doing it well was to practice actually transferring the coin without the vanish.
Something about this process really blew my mind and changed the way I thought about learning new skills. It's a lot of work and effort to make something look casual and easy like that, and until you get to that level of comfort, it's honestly not even worth showing anybody.
so are you now going to lose your membership for giving away the secret? ;-)
on one of the nights out, there was a magician that would just walk around the club to do a couple of tricks to groups just hanging out as part of the entertainment. i think i must be the perfect mark, since i'm convinced if i watch close enough i'll prevent myself from getting fooled. which is precisely the thing i'm guessing makes me the perfect mark!
One time I actually did watch close enough and saw something I wasn’t supposed to see - the magician somehow flicked a card flat into his inside front jacket pocket.
Even after I saw it I couldn’t believe my eyes. Like, how could you flick it like that with such high precision.
There's some core moves like the "French drop" and "double lift" and "pass" that are well out of the bag right now, and tons and tons of youtube videos on how to do them.
This is true, but one of the things I never appreciated about magic before I started hanging out at the Castle and learning from actual humans was how little the "moves" actually matter. Magic is a performing art, and it's much more about the details of the performance than the "moves". I learned the "moves" as a kid, but I was a horrible performer [1] until someone started drawing my attention to all the other little details. It's the difference between playing the notes and what someone like Yo Yo Ma does.
[1] I'm actually still not all that great, but at least now I know why!
The one I do with dogs, cats and babies is much less sophisticated but works well. The left hand with the food is flat and open you pretend to pick it up with the tips of your fingers and move towards the spectator. Simply close the left hand and turn it over.
That's a great video, but note that it demonstrates a slightly different technique than the one I described. Still a very good video, and also a good illustration of the range of subtlety in even a very simple trick.
> “There is increasing evidence that the same parts of the nervous system used when we perform an action are also activated when we watch that action performed by others,”
Certainly there has to be a 'theory of operation' in the viewers mind for the trick to work. One way is by having first-hand familiarity with the mechanics. I'd be curious if the trick would work on an animal very familiar with human mechanics but no thumbs, say a smart breed of dog.
When I watch people perform intricate physical movements (e.g. dance, gymnastics, yoga) I can actually feel in my "mind's eye" what it would be like to be in their place, including the sensations of movement and pressure against whatever they are making contact with. So to me it's obvious that my nervous system gets activated just by watching others, and I assumed (probably wrongly) that most people have the same experience.
I also thought this would be obvious to scientists since it's well known that babies mimic adult facial expressions, and therefore there must be some correlation to the parts of the nervous system being activated in both individuals.
It's mirror neurons, as mentioned in the article. Well known to the science community for decades now but still a lot of research that needs to be done.
There’s a very simple trick where you have someone twist their arms in such a way that there hands end up in the opposite places than is typical. You then have the person with twisted limbs move a finger that’s pointed to but not touched. In most cases, the subject moves the finger on the wrong hand.
Completely anecdotal, but the best magic "show" I "attended" was a close-up magician at a medieval fair. During his show the crowd grew dramatically and inched closer and closer to his little table. No fence no nothing, so in the end the closest guys basically had their noses touching his coins and cards.
He ended his show with a snarky "of course i am messing with you ... these are magic coins, see? ... this one is this big from one side and ..." [flips coin on the table, no toss, just a simple half turn] "... and this big [larger] from the other".
I don't have the faintest idea how he did any of his tricks. People were watching him from inches away from every angle even from behind.
Kind of reminds me of a video I saw on Twitter of someone doing a super-simple shell game trick with a mountain lion and the lion’s favorite toy. Frankly, I expected the lion to react to the missing toy by biting the human’s face off.
I haven't read the study, but I think there is an extremely high chance that this is showing confirmation bias. And i feel the video they show supports this interpretation. I don't know monkeys so didn't know which ones had opposable thumbs but felt just from the hand movement that I understood when the researcher intended the monkey to follow the moving hand and when the researcher didn't, moving the hand more significantly when wanting the money to focus on it, and damping the movement when wanting it to focus on the still hand.
If they didn't already do this, they should train some people to perform the trick that doesn't know the difference between the monkeys and don't know what the expected outcome is based on their current hypothesis.
I'm reminded of the radio lab episode about the color blue which suggests that ancient cultures without the ability to make blue dye don't perceive that color (at the very least, they didn't have a word for it).
Manipulation and perception appear to be quite linked.
that's more about categorization than perception - some cultures don't have a word just for blue, but they still very much perceive it. it's just lumped into the same category as green ("grue").
> The research suggest that sharing a biomechanical ability may be necessary for accurately anticipating the movements of those same limbs in other individuals.
I wonder if it's really about sharing a biomechanical ability, or just being familiar with a bicomechanical ability. They're familiar with how their oposable-thumbed hands work, and then can relate to how human hands work.
But, if a non-oposable monkey was raised alongside another species that did have opposable thumbs, would they be familar enough with how opposable thumbs can operate - and therefore get fooled.
> Illusion involving a hidden thumb confounds capuchin and squirrel monkeys for the same reason as humans – it misdirects the expected outcomes of actions they can carry out.
To be fair. As a human I would state you expect it to be a trick (a very easy one to spot in this case) and you can easily infer that the coin just _drops_ into the hand it was to start with. It does not feel that it has anything todo with what actions you can carry out. The coin is either grabbed by the non-coin hand or not, it depends on the magician, right?
That is what I am talking about. It could be either in the initial coin hand, because the performer just let it drop, or the performer could take it. There is no way of knowing.
You have to guess based on the situation, and the thumb part feels like a stretch.
It feels like more an intuition based thing that might relate to some level of intelligence which might correlate to having thumbs for certain mammals?
As a human, I would expect a trick given the article's title, or maybe in a context where it seems some sort of test or demonstration is being given, but then, I have seen these sort of things before.
The trick works on humans, even when they know they are watching someone performing an illusion, if the performer can distract their attention at the right moment.
This video is of incredibly poor quality? It's hard to understand what the magician is doing, also it is quite clear that the coin is in his left hand (right side of the screen).
Was the trick also done so poorly when used on monkeys too?
Magic is an art with vastly more subtlety and attention to detail than it generally appreciated by muggles.