Michael Scot was a man who navigated the gap between science and illusion with extraordinary fluency. Born circa 1175, the Scottish mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer became famous in his day for divining the future based on planetary position and motion. Then he traveled to foreign lands, where he translated Muslim and Hebrew texts into Latin. People back in Britain began to associate him with the mysticism that he interpreted.
It was said that Scot tamed a devil by giving him the never-ending task of making rope out of the sand of Kirkcaldy beach; that he captured the plague and locked it deep within a vault in Glenluce Abbey. He supposedly summoned a demon-horse, which he commanded to stomp its hoof three times: The first stomp made the bells of Notre Dame ring; the second caused the palace towers to crumble to the earth; and before the third blow, the French king acquiesced to Scotās demands that the French plundering of Scottish ships cease.1 Michael Scot had some serious power, and not all of it was fictional.
In 1223, Pope Honorius III offered Scot the position of archbishop of Cashel, and four years later Pope Gregory IX tried to make him archbishop of Canterbury. Although Scot declined both appointments, he continued to travel in illustrious circles. Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Sicily, warmly welcomed the philosopher-magician into his court as imperial tutor to teach him the scientific laws of the universeāincluding augury.2 Scot was not the first, and he wouldnāt be the last to turn the art of illusion into an instrument of power, but he was one of the few real-life Merlins to hold so many reigning kings and popes spellbound.
My own introduction to the hidden benefits of illusion might seem laughably modest next to Michael Scotās, but mine involved a hero who was no less than a king in my eyes: the incomparable Will Shortz.
It was January 1, 2010. I was thirty years old and meeting the New York Times puzzle master for the second time in my life. Weād first met when I was a teenager, after Shortz gave a talk at the Wellfleet public library on Cape Cod. Already then a card-carrying member of the National Scrabble Association, I successfully converted LACKIES + P to SPECIAL K during the audience participation segment, and Shortz made my year by inscribing a dedication in my book of Games magazine puzzles: āTo David, a puzzle āchamp.āā It wasnāt long before I began corresponding with the guru of games through my own crossword submissions to the Times, and eventually this magnanimous wordsmith even accepted a few. But we hadnāt met in person again, until this New Yearās Day.
We were to play table tennis. Shortz had once been told by a neurobiologist that table tennis activates all parts of the brain that crosswords do not, though, like puzzle construction, the game requires both a driven pursuit of excellence and a desire to command the person on the other side of the net. So for more than three decades Shortz had been an avid player and tournament competitor. He believed that if āevery day I do puzzles and table tennis, Iām getting an all-around brain workout.ā In 2009, heād founded the Westchester Table Tennis Center, the largest of its kind in North America and the site of our first match.
But I had a hidden agenda. I had a trickāliterallyāup my sleeve, as well as in my pockets, where Iād concealed a deck of cards, a kiwi fruit, a knife, a Sharpie, and some invisible string. Jeans and a button-down long-sleeved shirt were required to hide this cache, but they made the worst possible outfit for professional-level table tennis. Shortz, whose athletic prowess was the result of thousands of hours of drilling, repetition, and trial and error, predictably wiped the floor with me. In three games I won just two points. But then came my chance to redeem myself.
I asked Will if heād like to see some magic, and he enthusiastically summoned a crowd to the reception area, where I served up one of my standard āopeners.ā First, I made four jacks appear from my bare hands. Then, with a twist of the palm, they turned to aces. After this quick and flashy start, I handed over the kiwi fruit for audience inspection. Separately, I asked Shortz to sign a dollar bill, which a wave of my hand turned into one thousand Korean won. Though he probably lost about fourteen cents on that transaction, he was nevertheless pleased by the transformation. Next, I returned to the deck and asked several spectators to choose a playing card for what is known as a āmultiple selection routine.ā Ten cards were taken, and through a variety of dexterous cuts, flashy waterfall shuffles, and pop-out moves, I located each and every card. For the finale, I asked Shortz to slice open the kiwi, and inside he found his one-dollar bill, covered in seeds and juice but still bearing his signature.
The puzzle master was gobsmacked! My hero, the encyclopedic guru of all things enigmatic and puzzling, couldnāt figure out a single one of my illusions.
This was the moment when the ultimate value of magic crystallized for me. My skill was like a secret key. Magic made me impressive and memorable, just as it had Michael Scot. It garnered interest and respect, even from the most exalted of audiences. What Iād glimpsed was the inherent power of illusion as a force for personal command.
To be sure, magic typically distills this power into an art form that impresses in order to entertain audiences, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that illusion exerts its influence over virtually every field of human activity, from politics and religion to science and industry. So success in any field requires mastery of the principles of illusion.
The Perceptual Gap
Instinctively, we humans believe what we observe with our own eyes. We trust our senses and our powers of perception. We assume that weāre smart and alert enough to distinguish the real deal from the phony, and we have faith in our ability to tell a smart idea from a stupid one, an upright citizen from a cheat, a genius from a wannabe. Seeing is believing. This equation guides our choice of friends and mates, of our most trusted employees, advisors, and leaders. It helps us decide where to live, how to vote, and what to buy. Itās in our DNA.
If we werenāt wired this way, we couldnāt function. Weād have no ego, no self-confidence, no courage. If we didnāt trust our senses to guide us, weād probably never get out of bed. But while our faith in our own perceptiveness allows us to act decisively and take calculated risks, it also leaves us vulnerable to illusion. Thatās because our perceptions are riddled with blind spotsāgaps that our mind fills automatically with assumptions that can be logical, or magical, or as misleading as a mirage of water shimmering over a desert highway.
Consider the simple flip, or āflickā book, which was a precursor to animation and film. A series of pages are drawn to show a progression of images, like Mickey Mouse in āSteamboat Willie.ā Then the drawings are bound so the pages can be flipped to create the illusion of a single, seamlessly moving picture. The illusion works because our brains fill the gaps between the pages, allowing our minds to āseeā more than our eyes can.
The same wiring allows us as kids to āseeā the suggested picture even before drawing the lines in connect-the-dots puzzles. It allows us to admire images of water lilies, haystacks, and families picnicking on the grass in paintings by Impressionist painters that actually consist of tiny disconnected spots of paint. It also allows us to read by bridging the gaps between letters to form words, between words to form sentences, between sentences to āseeā larger ideas, arguments, and stories. Without your brainās natural aptitude for illusion, this page would simply appear to you as a bunch of black squiggles on a white background.
Illusionists take full advantage of the processes by which the mind connects the dots of perception. One of these is called amodal completion. You see the front of a dachshund to one side of a tree trunk, and the hind end to the other side, and you mentally picture the whole continuous dog behind the tree. Thatās amodal completion at work. A magician, however, would know that itās also possible to position two dogs (perhaps even more) behind the tree, or maybe two stuffed half dogs. This same magician could then blow your mind by āstretchingā the dachshund to a seemingly impossible length, or by ācutting the dog in half,ā all by exploiting the gap between what you truly can see and what you assume.
But the role of illusion in our lives extends way beyond vision. When we listen to an orchestra we hear a single unified piece of music, rather than sixty separate instruments. Even when we read a mangled line such as, Fr scre and svn yrs ago or fthrs brt frth on ths cntnnt, a nw ntion, cncved in Lbrty, nd dedcted to th prpsition tht ll mn ar creted equl, we have little difficulty filling in the missing vowels and recognizing the beginning of the Gettysburg Address. When we take a bite of yellow cake we register the overall taste of cake, rather than the separate flavors of salt, flour, eggs, butter, milk, vanilla, and sugar. The larger general impression quickly overwhelms any notice of the individual component ingredientsāunless you happen to be a connoisseur like some culinary taste testers who have trained themselves to notice the micro flavors within the macro.
Our cognitive tendency to fill in gaps also dominates our ability to solve problems and read character, using what we do know to help us make assumptions about what we donātāassumptions that we then view as reliable facts. This can easily lead to unintended consequences, as some British voters discovered in 2016 after casting a āprotest voteā for the U...
