The Magicanada Project

Liam · Joined: 30 Dec 2007 Posts: 424

Mikes "false memory" post made me think of making a post about this

What i want to write and start a conversation about is different perspectives. Lets say you walk up to a group and ask who has had the most recent birthday. Lets say mark has. You then have mark select a card and on the back is says "Happy Birthday, Mark!" No doubts the applause would be thunderous. Unfortunatly this is fairly impossible. But a way you could pull this off for most of the audience is to have a card that says "happy birthday " leaving a blank spot at the end. Now you just have to force a card, show mike the back and say:
The weird thing about this is the back says "happy birthday, mark"
If you just show the back to mark he thinks "neat i chose the odd different card, it says happy birthday" But the rest of the people, who catch a glimpse of writing but dont read it think it says "Happy Birthday, Mark." Making him have selected the odd card with his name on it. Then during the reaction you can say "let me autograph that for you" and you write his name in the blank spot, and your name on the face. He will assume that you wrote his name to personalise it. But when he shows it off to the other audience members, they will truely believe they witnessed a miricle.

Of corse this doesnt always work. If you are just doing it for friends they will probably discuss it and find out that the effect was amazing, just not as amazing. Not that you would do this for friends, seeing as you can know their names and birthdays.

So the above was a simple example of using differen perspectives and interpretations to create real magic.

Shall we discuss?