I Want to Believe

The first magic show I ever attended was not at Caesars Palace or the Golden Nugget but rather, of all places, the National Arts Club. That’s where, in late September, Jeanette Andrews debuted The Mental Architecture of Magic, a performance-lecture that is doubly revealing about the efficacy and mechanics of deception. Andrews, a visiting artist at MIT, talks about magic as a genre of experience in which we permit ourselves “to experience perceptual failure.” The stakes for us viewers, she said, are low, but our level of scrutiny is high because we know we are about to be duped.

That checks out. Like any magician presumably worth their salt (as I’ve said, I’m new to this scene), Andrews is skilled at the act of transmutation: She made a ball “disappear,” only to make it “reappear”; she made that same ball “morph” into a crystal triangular prism; and she bent the erect stem of a wine glass into flaccid defeat. When she tossed a red apple above her head, it appeared to swap guises midair, descending back into her hand as a bright green Granny Smith. Her stage persona is similarly fluid. Andrews was warm, effervescent, eager to dish on why we are so eager to trust. But as she proffered professorly explications for her nimble-fingered feats, her mood became stoic and theatrically pensive. “I feel like magic,” she said, “acts like a perceptual prism that splits open the gaps within our perception to show that it is this larger continuum of what we think and what we think may be there.”

Andrews concluded by throwing a works-cited page onto the overhead projector. Influences included Graham Jones, an anthropologist who has written about how magicians’ sleight of hand techniques induce mental error, and the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, who studies the way that the brain’s need for perceptual clarity can be exploited by bad-faith actors. Nguyen calls this concept “hostile epistemology,” and for Andrews, a magic show provides a safe place for its exploration. Theory acted as chaser for magic, dulling the humiliation of “consensual deception.”

As the title of her act suggests, the magician is also a sort of architect. “You know you’re being tricked, which is a really weird thing to participate in,” Andrews said, “We know what the end shape of the building is.” That cognitive dissonance didn’t seem to bother most of the audience, who were completely enthralled by Andrews’s stagecraft. But the woman sitting next to me was skeptical. She refused to enter the building; she refused to be fooled. I couldn’t blame her—if anything, I felt like committing arson myself: I couldn’t help but feel a little upset after all this talk of how easily we can be deluded about what is transpiring right before our eyes. I’ve always thought of myself as a relatively discerning individual, but as it turns out, I am consummately fallible. I am only human. This was only magic.