Could It Be Magic?:Mysticism, Mesmerism, Memories, and Minds.

You'd think if you were staring at somebody on a stage and they changed their t-shirt in front of you you'd spot it happening, wouldn't you? Well, I didn't - and I was certainly not the only one at last night's excellent, thought provoking, and funny London Fortean Society talk (held at The Miller, their south London outpost - and provider of fair to middling cheesy chips) - Magic, the Paranormal and the Complicity of the Mind.

Dr. Matthew L. Tompkins, author of The Spectacle of Illusion, describes himself as a professional magician turned experimental psychologist but, in order to avoid any confusion, he devoted the first section of the talk to explaining exactly what he meant by that job description before segueing effortlessly into a breakdown of the different kind of illusions that magicians use to trick our brains before, finally, signing off with a brief run through some of his favourite characters and stories from the history of magic.

Or, indeed, trickery. Because Dr Tompkins was eager to make clear that he couldn't perform magic (he doesn't have, in his own words, "genuine wizard powers") but that he could do tricks. He took as inspiration the 19c French magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin (the man Harry Houdini took his name from) who, it is claimed, proposed the idea that 'the magician is an actor playing a magician'. Using not just trickery but skill and ingenuity also.

When it comes to psychology, Dr Tompkins doesn't look to Sigmund Freud as much as he does to another German, Wilhelm Wundt - a new name to me but not to anyone who has studied experimental psychology as Wundt is considered to be the father of that movement/method. One which seeks to use laboratory experiments (don't worry, not squirting poison in rabbit's eyes - more sensation, perception, and cognition) to get a better idea of how our human minds work.

Introduction taken care of, it was time for a little experiment. An image appeared on a screen which Dr Tompkins asked those able to to take a photo of. He then explained how this apparently simple image (it doesn't matter what it was, you should go to the talks if you want to know EVERYTHING that happens) could be used to demonstrate three different types of illusion.

Most people like to think of their memory as working like a video camera but this experiment proved that that is not the case. We were shown how our complicated minds use top down processing to take on information, how that is (for the most part) effective and necessary, how sometimes the way this works ends up creating weird anomalies, and how magicians (and con artists) can 'hack' these complicated human eccentricities to provide either entertainment or to rip people off.

The illusion of omission is when we don't see things that are there. These could be things we take so much for granted we blank them out or things that are surplus to our need to read a situation. When we look at a street scene, for example, there is so much going on that we can't possibly take it all in so our brains work out (in a highly complicated process but one we rarely even think about it) what the relevant information is and kind of blocks out the rest.

The illusion of commission is both similar and completely different. That's when we see things that aren't there because we think they should be there or when we try to find patterns, shapes, or, of course faces in places where they don't really exist. Or, as a later example showed (and not for the first time at a Fortean event) we hear things that aren't there when it's suggested they are. Cue a blast of Stairway to Heaven played backwards!

The illusion of metacognition is a bit more complicated. Its the idea of thinking about thinking. The idea that even though we're using illusions of omission and commission all of the time we, somehow, think we're not doing that. This was the point that Dr Tompkins told the audience that while he'd been speaking he'd changed his white t-shirt for a purple one and nobody had noticed. I certainly hadn't.

An impressive looking card trick further demonstrated the illusion of metacognition. As did a demonstration of the flicker paradox (you've probably seen 'Gorillas in our Midst' by now so different examples were used) where three images appear in quick repetition. The middle one is a blank screen, the other two are very similar images but with something missing. It's really difficult to work out what's missing - right up until you spot what it is - then it's difficult to work out how other people can't work it out.

The flicker paradox demonstrates both change blindness (our not being able to notice something right in front of our face) and change blindness blindness (our inability, once we've done so, to not be able to not see it - and to not understand others not being able to see it). It's all about the selectivity of attention and the way our brain process the information given to us.

This is all pretty fundamental human stuff but, oddly enough, empirical studies of magic tricks and how they worked really only began to boom about twenty years ago. Even though going as far back as the days of Spiritualism and the sad life stories of the Fox sisters there were people out there either debunking 'magical' or 'mystical' ideas.

Which led our talk on to a list of some of Dr Tompkins' favourite folk in the 'scene' and their often complicated and conflicted lives. Oliver Lodge was one of the, possibly the, first to demonstrate wireless signalling. That certainly would have looked like magic to people who'd never witnessed it before. Unfortunately for him, when he was out in Italy investigating the supposed medium Eusapia Palladino and her ectoplasm, a certain Guglielmo Marconi patented it. Something Lodge never forgave him for!

Black Herman was an African-American stage magician (born in Virginia, 1889) whose act involved him resurrecting himself. He'd bury himself alive in a local cemetery, sometimes up to a week before the show, and then reappear on stage in front of a stunned audience. The most likely explanation is a tunnel from his 'grave' which led to a guest house. That, and the fact Black Herman stole a lot of the act from his previous partner - White Herman, isn't even the most bizarre thing about him.

When Black Herman died (for real) people refused to believe it and simply waited for him to reappear. To prove he was dead, Black Herman's stage manager exhumed the corpse and charged punters to poke it with a needle saying "it's what he would have wanted". Then the stage manager stole Black Herman's show and toured with it!

Another who stole his act was Will Robinson, born in New York state to Scottish parents in 1861. Impressed by the Chinese stage magician Ching Ling Foo, Robinson changed his name to Chung Ling Soo and started performing Ling Foo's attack in 'yellow face' to much acclaim. He soon become more popular than Ching Ling Foo. Robinson/Ling Soo died on stage doing a 'bullet catch' at Wood Green in London but it was soon suggested that one of his many girlfriends had killed him rather than the bullet. With so many girlfriends it's a wonder he needed those 'ten assistants'!

It gets confusing. As does the case of Washington Irving Bishop. Known as 'Wellington', and styling himself a 'mentalist', Bishop took to the road debunking spiritualist claims whilst at the same time claiming he did have genuine psychic powers. He too died on stage but his brain was found in his chest cavity and the suspicion was that his doctors had murdered him using surgical equipment.

A more successful debunker, in fact he was known as 'the scourge of mediums', was Harry Houdini himself. So devoted was he to outing the fraudsters that he'd even conduct sting operations with local police, turning up to seances in disguise etc; Arthur Conan Doyle was a massive fan, but Arthur Conan Doyle, surprisingly considering his most famous creation, had been totally taken in by Spiritualism. He was convinced that Houdini DID have magical powers, even though Houdini refuted this constantly.

A dead man can't argue though, so after Houdini's death Arthur Conan Doyle claimed Houdini had got in touch from beyond the grave to both apologise and confirm that Arthur Conan Doyle had been correct all along!

And that, in essence, is how the likes of Uri Geller and Peter Popoff have been able to not only continue long after being debunked, but thrive. People want to believe a comforting lie more than they do an inconvenient truth. It's how we got shit like Brexit, it's how we got shit like Trump, and it's how we got shit like religion.

No doubt it will continue to bring us more shit (hey, that's just my personal opinion) and no doubt nights like this will shine a light on that shit and we can all stick needles into as if its the cadaver of Black Herman. Thanks to Dr Matthew L. Tompkins and thanks, yet again, to the London Fortean Society.