Cheating and Deception by Bell J. Bowyer

Author:Bell, J. Bowyer [Bell, J. Bowyer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-09-03T21:00:00+00:00

Tactile Deception

Our so-called sense of touch (actually comprising separate sensors for feeling, temperature, pain, pressure, and weight) is also subject to deception. Outright physiological misperception is rare in that there are far fewer tactile than optical illusions. The best known example is Aristotle's Illusion: cross your fingers, rub the tips down the ridge of your nose, and you feel two noses. There are also physiological illusions involving the sense of pain—trauma in one part of the body sensed as pain in another (“referred pain”) and the tingling felt by amputees who continue to feel a tingling that seems to come from the limb that has in fact been amputated. A curious weight illusion results from the interplay of expectation and physiology. Because experience teaches us that large objects are generally heavier than small ones, our brain anticipates the need for greater power to lift large objects and adjusts our muscles accordingly. Consequently, if two objects, say, tin cans of equal weight but different size are picked up simultaneously in each hand, the larger one will feel lighter because the arm picking it up will have overadjusted.

The main use that magicians make of touch is to have the spectator “verify” the continued presence of an object (“You do feel the coin under the handkerchief?”) that has already been replaced by a different but similarly shaped object. Thus spiritualists in a séance can link a ring of hands held under the table in a lightless room by a dummy hand so as to leave one of the medium's hands free.

Several coins lie on a table. They are identical except for their dates. Turning his back, the magician instructs a spectator to choose one and memorize its date. After the spectator returns it to the table, the performer quickly examines each coin in turn and announces the chosen one. The coin picked up by the spectator will be slightly warmer than the others.

Another touch trick involving temperature sense is to place metal foil in the hand of a volunteer and announce that it is getting warm, warmer, so warm that it is literally too hot to handle; the volunteer drops the foil with a scream. The foil has been treated in advance with a special chemical that reacts exothermically with the volunteer's skin, causing it to bum. This is one trick that should be exposed, because the chemical is highly poisonous and can cause crippling and even death, particularly to any performer who handles it regularly. Uri Geller dropped this from his bag of tricks when he came to the United States in 1972.

Our sense of pressure is also easily deceived—much more so than most people realize, so they are that much more readily taken by surprise. For example, if the magician places two rather than only one sponge-ball in your hand and closes your fingers over into a fist, you will be unable to detect the second one even though the combined pressure is twice as great as with only one sponge-ball.

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