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In a post-truth world of misinformation-spouting incoming presidents and AI deepfakes, you may be questioning what you know about reality. A radical magic contest, of all things, may reveal the secrets of how the mind is manipulated. Also: We are able to do the investigative reporting that corporate media will not because we are reader-supported and independent. If you are able, become a paid supporter today. Rock the boat.
The Art Of Deception
By Lois Parshley
 In a composite image, Donald Trump’s head appears from the hat of a magician. (H. Armstrong Roberts & AP Photo / Alex Brandon) [View in browser] At loose ends one night during the pandemic, Tyler Gigbot picked up a deck of cards. The energetic teenager quickly taught himself a basic trick. His first audience consisted of his surprised parents. “They had to kind of pretend like they were amazed,” he laughs. But it was more than a simple illusion for Gigbot, who has a rare eye condition called aniridia, meaning he was born without irises. He sees the world through a constant haze of light, “like living in an impressionist painting.” Flipping through the deck, he realized that “for the first time ever, I can see things that other people can’t see,” he says. Enthralled, he sought out old magic books and haunted online forums, trying out his new skills on strangers via his webcam. Often, his audience never realized he couldn’t see the cards. As he improved, Gigbot wanted to know more than just how his sleight of hand worked — he wanted to know why. In 2023, he came across the research of Gustav Kuhn, a magician-turned-psychology-professor at the University of Plymouth in England, and decided to email him out of the blue. Impressed by the 21-year-old’s determination, Kuhn invited him to use his summer break from the University of Southern California to work with him in Plymouth, where the two set out to study what it’s like to experience magic when you can’t see. Humans evolved to evaluate their surroundings by prioritizing visual information. It’s how we navigate the world, alerting us to both hazards and attractions. That’s why magicians typically exploit cognitive shortcuts involving our eyes — manipulating cards, mirrors, or hands in plain sight. To find a purely auditory illusion, Kuhn explains, would require magicians to expand the boundaries of their craft.  Tyler Gigbot performing a magic trick. Credit: Peter LaFata. With Gigbot’s input, Kuhn’s Magic Lab announced a global competition this fall, soliciting tricks that use sound alone, without verbal cues or other sensory elements. After a year of failing to come up with any auditory illusions of his own, Kuhn wasn’t sure there would be any submissions. “I fear it’s going to be very difficult,” he said. The magic contest gains its challenge from a fragile truth about the human mind: how easily we can be deceived by the senses we trust the most. It’s often challenging to accurately judge our own cognition, and misjudgments can have sweeping real-world consequences. We are not only often wrong about what we think we see — like viral fake videos of election workers tearing up ballots — but also the extent to which we can trust the things we remember, like how our current emotional state recasts our memories of past civil conflicts. Many of our experiences are, in fact, an illusion. By studying magic, Kuhn hopes to gain insight into the mental shortcuts that influence our beliefs and decisions, revealing vulnerabilities that can be weaponized through misinformation and media. As new technologies like generative AI and algorithm-driven platforms make reality harder than ever to parse, “deception is such a huge topic,” Kuhn says. “It’s always been a huge topic throughout history, but it’s particularly important now.”
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“A Wilderness Of Mirrors” The mechanisms of magicians’ misdirection have long been exploited far offstage. In 2009, a historical adviser to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) stumbled on a poorly photocopied manual. Reading through the fuzzy pages, he discovered it was one of the only surviving projects of the agency’s notorious MK-ULTRA program, a search for unorthodox Cold War weapons that explored mind control. The U.S. was late to the counterintelligence game because it was reluctant to centralize its espionage efforts. The Soviets quickly gained a significant lead in what James Angleton, the chain-smoking poet in charge of the agency’s counterterrorism efforts, later called the “wilderness of mirrors” — a political funhouse where the line between fact and fiction blurred. So shortly after World War II, the nascent CIA turned to experts of illusion, including the magician John Mulholland. A tall, skinny stork of a man, Mulholland’s 90-minute show specialized in close-up magic, like making a cage of birds disappear mere feet from his audience. He was fond of telling interviewers that “the appeal of magic is mental, not visual.”  Illustrations from the Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception, republished in 2009. The message resonated with the agency, which offered him $3,000 in 1953 to write up advice for agents in the field. Working from a small apartment filled with old props on the Upper West Side, Mulholland turned from pulling rabbits out of hats to explaining how to surreptitiously administer acid doses. He advised spies to take advantage of people’s “almost infinite capacity to self-rationalize,” leaning on the techniques that persuade audiences who know a person can’t survive being cut in half to suspend their disbelief. One such strategy involves managing sight lines, limiting what the audience can actually see while ostensibly operating in “full view.” Mulholland suggested, for example, that agents trying to surreptitiously deliver drugs could use a flaming match rising in one hand to distract from the other dropping a substance into a drink. He also recommended deploying common objects people were accustomed to seeing, like toothpaste tubes, as props to hide powders or pills. This stage management is what the agency later used to rescue six U.S. diplomats stranded in Iran after the American embassy was overrun in 1979. Tony Mendez, then chief of the CIA’s disguise section and a magic aficionado, created a fictional Hollywood company and a sci-fi movie script to smuggle the officials out of the country as pseudo-producers. When the diplomats worried over whether his scheme could possibly work, Mendez performed a trick for them with wine-bottle corks, demonstrating how persuasive his showmanship could be.  Fake movie posters created for the cover operation. Credit: CIA “Magicians are rarely lying to their audiences,” says Anthony Barnhart, an associate professor of psychological science at Carthage College in Wisconsin. “Instead, they’re setting up conditions that allow the audience to deceive themselves.” To do so, performers often rely on storytelling to control their audiences’ attention. One popular technique called the “peak-end heuristic” exploits the fact that our memories skew toward moments of peak emotional content, as well as how experiences conclude. Politicians also regularly deploy this kind of reframing. At the end of the campaign trail, for instance, former President Donald Trump repeatedly described Jan. 6 as “a day of love” and its participants as “patriots,” minimizing the rioters’ violence and distancing himself from responsibility. Magicians will also carefully script a trick’s climax, reshaping details to lead the audience to recall something different from what may have actually occurred. “They’re trying to draw your attention to things they want you to perceive,” Barnhart says. While Donald Trump claimed to be “all about growth” on the campaign trail this fall, for example, claiming “the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff,” his first four years in office did not deliver huge economic gains. In fact, overall job growth, unemployment, national debt, and manufacturing investments have consistently fared better under Democratic presidents. Patterns of repetition and other kinds of psychological manipulation hinge on deeply rooted cognitive habits. Many are socially influenced: We instinctively follow where someone else is looking, assuming it reveals something of importance. Performers exploit this tendency by looking away from the mechanics of their trick, knowing their audience’s gaze will follow their own. Like democracy, “magic is an inherently social endeavor,” Barnhart says: Its tools can exploit “automatic tendencies that people have that they can’t really shut off.” These psychological shortcuts are powerful even when audiences are aware they’re being manipulated. Max Hui Bai, director of the Political Belief Lab, an independent research group, found over the course of five experiments that Americans’ beliefs were changed by reading something fake, even when they knew it was made up. The impacts were persistent, lasting for days and creating partisan divides where none existed. This makes it “easy for someone with ulterior motives to create political polarization,” Bai warned. Russia recently created fake videos showing mail-in ballots for Trump being destroyed, for instance, while the Kremlin paid a Tennessee media company $10 million to hire popular right-wing influencers. “I see a lot of parallels between politics and misdirection,” Kuhn says, “but it’s grim because it’s very hard to know what you can actually do about it.” In 2022, he ran an experiment in which a magician demonstrated false paranormal abilities, using trick dice to demonstrate mind reading and staging “volunteers” to pretend to communicate with the dead. For half of the participants, Kuhn explained the experience was a trick, while the other half were told it was a genuine spiritualist demonstration. Surprisingly, the context had no impact on people’s interpretation; viewers maintained their original attitudes toward the occult. “Even if people know that what they are hearing and seeing is false, they still believe it,” Kuhn says.
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“The Illusion Of Control”For those with differences or outside systems of power, the lesson that perception can distort what we think we know can hit early. Gigbot’s own revelation came at a childhood track and field race. He’d pushed himself through the final lap. “I could feel all this adrenaline rushing through me,” he says. “As far as I could tell, when I threw my chest across the finish line, I had won the race.” Later that night, his dad gently broke the news he’d actually finished second — he just hadn’t been able to see the runner ahead of him. Gigbot vowed to be so far out front, he’d never again have to worry about what he couldn’t see. He turned his impaired vision into a strength, spurring him “to push harder at things.” But just before heading to the United Kingdom in 2023, he developed a cataract in his left eye, obscuring the sight he had left. That’s when his doctors told him that during the necessary operation, medical discoveries would also make it possible to implant an artificial iris — potentially improving his vision. He quickly saw the whole ordeal as a blessing in disguise. And though he tried to manage his expectations, he secretly hoped that he would wake to a new view of the world. The surgery took place after he returned from England. In the sterile calm of the operating room, Gigbot drifted away from perception altogether. The surgeon opened a tiny incision in his eye, and slicing through the clouded lens, the operating team inserted a custom-made silicone prosthesis. He regained consciousness in searing pain. In the grindingly slow recovery, he couldn’t sleep. He lay in the dark for weeks, miserable. As it became clear that the surgery was not successful, Gigbot struggled to hold onto his characteristic positivity, worrying his friends and family. “I realized I wish I could have sight. I wish all along, my whole life, I could have seen like everybody else,” he says. Deep down, “All I wanted was just to see.”  Tyler Gigbot sits with a deck of cards. Credit: Peter LaFata. It would take a little magic to find his way forward. The human brain is wired to seek patterns and reliable outcomes; magical thinking is particularly appealing during difficult times. Laura Krantz, a journalist on The Lever’s Master Plan podcast and author of Do You Believe in Magic, says that when things are uncertain, many look for tools to help them “exert a tiny bit of control over a world that does not feel very hospitable.” Studies demonstrate that people are more likely to turn to things like star charts when they are under stress or after negative life events. Astrology, for example, notably surged in popularity under the last Trump administration. Just because these coping strategies pertain to the impossible doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t work. Anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski suggests that magical beliefs help reduce tension and endure the unknown. In his book Experiencing the Impossible, Kuhn notes that during the 1990-1991 Gulf War, people who lived in areas under direct threat of a missile attack were more likely to demonstrate superstitious behavior. In another example, the frequency of students’ pretest magical rituals increased along with the stakes of an exam. “Superstitious behavior therefore seems to give us the illusion of control,” Kuhn explains, “which can reduce anxiety during stressful situations and consequently improve performance.” But the same illusion can be perceived very differently. Since magic depends on the chasm between what we believe and what we perceive, not everyone experiences it the same way. Just as linguistic relativism argues that the way you think about reality is influenced by what language you speak, Kuhn is now collaborating with Nicola Clayton, professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge, to research embodied cognition, or the idea that thoughts and perceptions can be shaped by the way our bodies move. They plan to study deception on cuttlefish, intelligent invertebrates related to octopus and squid. “We start from the performance and then look at the mechanisms that underpin it to apply them to real-world issues,” says Kuhn, who’s trained members of the U.K. military and the FBI on deception, particularly in the context of cybersecurity. Clayton’s past work with corvids, a family of birds, including crows, known for their intellect, explored how they perceive and react to magic tricks typically designed to fool humans. She says the results — which indicated the birds were more likely to be fooled by tricks that involved hands behaving like wings — suggest that “the shape of the body we inhabit informs the ways we interpret” the world. That may mean our physical form also influences memory and metacognition, the ability to reflect on one’s own thought processes. Both humans and animals, for instance, rely on prior experiences to interpret ambiguous information. For decades, research has shown that our perception of the world is subject to our expectations. Researcher Florian Zimmermann recently found that financial investors’ beliefs about trends are strongly shaped by associations, often leading to overreactions based on past experiences. In other words, our cognitive biases can shape our behavior, creating distortions that have real-world effects, coloring everything from election polling data to economic forecasting. As Gigbot found, the space between expectation and reality is where we find the capacity for both awe and disappointment. Barnhart, who once performed magic under the stage name “Amazing Anthony,” says the real magic is that these kinds of questions can “help us understand what it is to be human.”  Barnhart as a teenage performer, touring under the name “Amazing Anthony.” Credit: Anthony Barnhart. “The Hand You’re Dealt”As Americans argued over whether polls could be trusted and both parties spewed political ads trying to shape the cultural narrative, Kuhn received the magic contest’s first submission. Soon, people from six different countries had sent in tricks, created by those not old enough to remember the United State’s obsession over hanging chads and others born just as World War II was ending. One was Ed Brims, a London-based software engineer and amateur magician. As a former software engineer on Google’s smart device team, he’d wondered if the company’s audio devices might be able to play tricks — so when he saw the contest on Facebook, he thought he’d give it a try. He blindfolded his young son Felix and sat him in a chair in his living room. In a wobbling home video, Brims explained that he would ping a spoon off a bottle and asked his son to listen carefully and point toward his location, “exactly like the sonar pings of a submarine.” Felix cheekily grinned. “That is enough of being honest,” Brims declaimed, slipping into a ringmaster’s prattling flair, “because ladies and gentlemen, tonight, for one night only, I will be demonstrating the world’s first-ever teleportation device!” As Brims circled the room, tapping on the bottle, his son tracked his progress. The brain is good at distinguishing which side of the body a sound is coming from. But when a noise originates from directly in front or behind us, those subtle differences are masked, creating a zone of auditory ambiguity known as the “cone of confusion.” This results in an illusion that the sound is coming from one location, when the source is actually somewhere else. So when Brims slipped from behind his son’s chair to directly in front of him, Felix never realized he’d shifted his location. “Phoompp, and I’m over here!” His son pulled up his blindfold, amazed. Felix, of course, didn’t actually think his dad had teleported. Kuhn explains that an illusion only works if people both believe and disbelieve it, experiencing something they know to be impossible. That tug-of-war of expectation happens on a neural level: When Kuhn and a colleague scanned the brains of people watching tricks, they found two areas became active: One part of the cortex that monitors conflict and another that tries to resolve it. “Magic is all about conflict,” he says.
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Sometimes, that makes room for growth. Gigbot had thought he was prepared for his surgery; after all, he says, his sight couldn’t get any worse. But in its aftermath, he was haunted by other versions of himself, taunting “what-if”s and “I can’t”s. In the darkness, “I had nothing but my thoughts and a deck of cards in my hand,” he says. Shuffling through his well-worn tricks, he decided to surrender to the uncertainty, letting it become a kind of clarity. It was a turning point. As he got back on his feet this fall, he says, “I’m enduring. I’m allowing myself to feel what it means to be vulnerable, to feel what it means to be open.” It’s something magic has shown him how to do. “Our adversities shape us — not define us, but help shape us,” he says. There was nothing to do but accept the pain and let it pass, bit by bit. As with cards, Gigbot adds, “You can’t control the hand you’re dealt, only how you use it.” The Cone Of ConfusionThe morning of the election, it was sunny and calm in Los Angeles as Gigbot signed onto his laptop’s Zoom window to discuss a different set of results. As one of the magic competition’s judges, he’d been torn on how to rank the submissions. None of the tricks fully abided by the rules; they all used some form of language. But the judges, all experienced magicians, were thrilled. “There were some very interesting nuances in the way that people tried to use the general principle,” said Vebjørn Ekroll, a judge and professor at the University of Bergen in Norway. The process itself raised valuable questions about how we identify objects, Kuhn says, and he plans to hold future contests in the hopes of stimulating other nonvisual discoveries. In Las Vegas last week, as Democrats reckoned with the swing state’s shift to the right, Kuhn announced the magic contest’s winners: Brims and two others who relied on the cone of confusion would share the award. Brims and his son Felix were delighted. In his current job at the financial and media company Bloomberg, Brims is interested in experimenting with making charts and graphs more accessible for people who can’t see the screen, trying out converting numbers into musical clefs. “The musical charts actually have quite a lot in common with the auditory magic,” he says. Like political progress, the pursuit of knowledge rarely travels in a straight line; far more often, it’s a messy journey of trial and error. As the country gears up for another four years with President-elect Donald Trump on center stage, some new tricks may be exactly what’s needed. “Some performers think the magic is about them,” says Barnhart, the magician turned professor, while others “think that magic should be about the audience,” making spectators the “heroes of their own stories.” That kind of participation relies on moments of genuine connection.  Tyler Gigbot reveals the hand he’s dealt. Credit: Peter LaFata. For Gigbot, the thrill of performing comes from the relationships it creates — the way people’s defenses soften, everyday pretenses slipping away, and in their place, the seeds of childlike awe. “The magic is the interaction,” he says. Deception without wonder, after all, is just lying.
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