If you find yourself seriously considering hypotheses like micromuscle reading or subliminal suggestion, then that’s probably because the magician has managed to slip a false assumption past your defences!
The subliminal suggestion part isn’t that implausible a priori, though. Suppose I first tell you to think of some tool, after which I tell you to think of some color.
Znal crbcyr jvyy svefg nafjre “unzzre”, orpnhfr gung’f n cebgbglcvpny gbby, naq gura nafjre “erq”, orpnhfr obgu jbeqf ner nffbpvngrq jvgu pbzzhavfz naq gur zragvba bs n unzzre cevzrf nffbpvngrq pbaprcgf.
While I’m not sure of how well that will work here, once back in junior high school I had happened to read that and a list of other priming questions from somewhere, and tried them out on my classmates. I didn’t always get the expected answer, but I did get it more often than not.
My favorite was one that only works in Finnish—asking people to say “kuusi” for several times in a row, which is a word that means either the number six, or a spruce tree. Then I would ask them to name a vegetable, and often they would say “carrot”—which happens to have a similar shape as the popular way of drawing cartoon spruce trees.
For the record, I thought of “spade” and then “orange” (perhaps because of an association of spades with the merchant B&Q, whose logo and branded materials are orange, though of course this is post-hoc rationalization on my part).
The reason why I think concentrating on “suggestion” is often an indication that you’ve missed something, is that suggestion is not reliable enough for magicians to use it as the sole mechanism for an effect, especially in settings like live television where the stakes are high. Magicians prefer to use it in combination with another method. Then, if the suggestion works, the effect is spectacular, but if it fails, the other method comes in and saves the effect. For example, Derren asks David Frost to picture something “in the back of your mind” and emphasizes this by tapping the back of his head. He then guesses that the word will “begin with a guttural sound, like a C or a G”. I wondered if this was an attempt at suggestion (via an association from “back of the mind” to “back of the mouth”) that didn’t quite come off, with some other method then saving the effect. (My own word was “apple”, which does start with a guttural sound—a glottal stop—though this would not have helped Derren, because no-one in the audience would know enough phonology to recognize that this was the case.)
But yes, you’re right, I was a bit too strong in my comment above and suggestion does sometimes deserve consideration. If by good luck it works in a trick, then you might not get a hint from the performance as to what the backup method was going to be.
(If you can point me to televised tricks that you think are pure suggestion, then I’d be interested to see them.)
The subliminal suggestion part isn’t that implausible a priori, though. Suppose I first tell you to think of some tool, after which I tell you to think of some color.
Znal crbcyr jvyy svefg nafjre “unzzre”, orpnhfr gung’f n cebgbglcvpny gbby, naq gura nafjre “erq”, orpnhfr obgu jbeqf ner nffbpvngrq jvgu pbzzhavfz naq gur zragvba bs n unzzre cevzrf nffbpvngrq pbaprcgf.
While I’m not sure of how well that will work here, once back in junior high school I had happened to read that and a list of other priming questions from somewhere, and tried them out on my classmates. I didn’t always get the expected answer, but I did get it more often than not.
My favorite was one that only works in Finnish—asking people to say “kuusi” for several times in a row, which is a word that means either the number six, or a spruce tree. Then I would ask them to name a vegetable, and often they would say “carrot”—which happens to have a similar shape as the popular way of drawing cartoon spruce trees.
For the record, I thought of “spade” and then “orange” (perhaps because of an association of spades with the merchant B&Q, whose logo and branded materials are orange, though of course this is post-hoc rationalization on my part).
The reason why I think concentrating on “suggestion” is often an indication that you’ve missed something, is that suggestion is not reliable enough for magicians to use it as the sole mechanism for an effect, especially in settings like live television where the stakes are high. Magicians prefer to use it in combination with another method. Then, if the suggestion works, the effect is spectacular, but if it fails, the other method comes in and saves the effect. For example, Derren asks David Frost to picture something “in the back of your mind” and emphasizes this by tapping the back of his head. He then guesses that the word will “begin with a guttural sound, like a C or a G”. I wondered if this was an attempt at suggestion (via an association from “back of the mind” to “back of the mouth”) that didn’t quite come off, with some other method then saving the effect. (My own word was “apple”, which does start with a guttural sound—a glottal stop—though this would not have helped Derren, because no-one in the audience would know enough phonology to recognize that this was the case.)
But yes, you’re right, I was a bit too strong in my comment above and suggestion does sometimes deserve consideration. If by good luck it works in a trick, then you might not get a hint from the performance as to what the backup method was going to be.
(If you can point me to televised tricks that you think are pure suggestion, then I’d be interested to see them.)