Married neuroscientists Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik are surprised by what they learn when they investigate deception at a psychic convention.

Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik are award-winning neuroscientists and professors at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center. They are best known for their studies on perception, illusions, and attentional misdirection in stage magic. They produce the annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest, now in its 13th edition, and are the authors of the international bestseller Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions. Their new book, Champions of Illusion: The Science Behind Mind-Boggling Images and Mystifying Brain Puzzles, comes out October 24th.  

This story originally aired on September 7, 2018 in an episode titled “Expectations: Stories about surprising discoveries.”

Story Transcript

Stephen Macknik:  A few years ago, we were writing our book about the neuroscience magic and how magic tricks work in the brain.  We realized that we were very fascinated in the concept of psychics.  Were psychics using the same kinds of techniques as magicians to actually get their customers to think they were actually reading their minds? 

Susana Martinez-Conde:  Something that you need to understand about us is that as neuroscientists studying magic and illusions, we are hardcore skeptics.  We didn’t understand how it’s possible for psychics to fool their customers into believing that they're witnessing actual supernatural feeds so we had to go there and see with our own eyes how it’s done.

Stephen Macknik:  So we registered at a psychic fair in Sedona, Arizona.  Sedona, to paranormal believers, is one of the fourteen power points of the earth and it can ground the vibrational frequencies from extraterrestrial sources so it was the perfect location for our little experiment.

Susana Martinez-Conde:  We didn’t know what may be in store for us so we had to do some advance preparations.  Through my reading, I learned that the psychic fair there may be something on psychometry, which is not quite scientific as it sounds.  Basically, you bring an item with you that you feel specially connected to and psychics will provide a reading of that object’s history and significance. 

After some consideration, I settle on a little metal toy soldier that I found inside of a chocolate Kinder egg as a child in the 1980s. 

Stephen Macknik:  I dug through our closets and pulled out some tie-dyed t-shirts that were super groovy and far-out, man, so we could blend in. 

Susana Martinez-Conde:  And with that we were good to go. 

Stephen Macknik:  So we drive up to Sedona.  We lived in Phoenix at the time.  We show up at Sedona to a resort hotel ballroom, which wasn’t exactly the drumming circle in the desert we had imagined.  But inside was basically set up like every other conference we’d ever been to.  There were vendors around the room, there were lines of chairs, and that’s where the similarity started to break because the vendors were selling things like potions and ointments that could cure your cancers and your wounds.  And you could get a psychic massage that would remove the negative frequencies from your body. 

So we realized that when we looked around, though, that it wasn’t exactly the hippy-dippy groovy set that we were expecting with free love and all of that.  It was actually a bunch of older folks that could have fit in at a mall anywhere in the U.S.

Susana Martinez-Conde:  We were literally the only two people in tie-dye inside.

Stephen Macknik:  Okay, so I had imagined incense-filled tents and marijuana clouds and all sorts of things like that and what we ended up with was something all completely different because my attempts at camouflage completely failed. 

Susana Martinez-Conde:  We decided to split ways so we wouldn’t stand out so much.

Stephen Macknik:  I went immediately to a table, a vendor who was selling psychic pictures.

Susana Martinez-Conde:  And I decided to go and get some psychic advice on whether I should go back to school or remain a stay-at-home mom which I've actually never been.  But I created this character, a different person from who I am in reality because I was partly curious to see whether the psychics might see through the façade. 

The first couple of psychics that I went to advised that I went back to school but I figured that they were following very closely my body language and facial expressions so when I nodded and smiled they stayed the course, but if I frowned or acted confused they will reverse themselves.  They were basically telling me what they thought I wanted to hear. 

Stephen Macknik:  I went to a table run by this guy named Elvis.  He had a box with a Polaroid camera in it and inside the box was also a light source and a spinning color wheel.  He closed the box up and he took my picture with it and I got this Polaroid and I was watching it develop.  It developed into my face and it was surrounded by this beautiful rainbow color aura with splotches of color all around.  Elvis explained to me that those splotches of color were my guardian angels and the energy I was giving off.  Then he asked me for $33.

Susana Martinez-Conde:  When the third psychic told me that she saw success in my future, I tried my best passive expression so she quickly told me that she didn’t mean professional success as such but successful, meaningful personal relationships.  She advised that I stay home with the kids. 

So I had proven my point but it didn’t feel quite as satisfying as I had envisioned.  Throughout this whole experience, I had started to have the irrational, bizarre feeling that I was being a little unfair to the psychics.

Stephen Macknik:  I headed to another table filled with all sorts of sundry items, flashlights and laser pointers, pendants, and these I was told had been quantum accelerated with crystals.  He also had these bracelets and it was explained that inside it was a material that would actually polarize and align all the protons in my body which, of course, if it was true, would turn me into a magnet.

Susana Martinez-Conde:  I was feeling a bit out of sorts after my psychic readings so I decided to go check on Steve.

Stephen Macknik:  I was so relieved when Susana showed up because I was getting kind of filled up to the brim with the pseudoscience.  So I explained to Susana that the gentleman at the quantum acceleration table had just explained to me that he had taken this quantum-accelerated laser pointer and used it to remove the cysts from his wife’s breasts.

Susana Martinez-Conde:  I literally could not think of any suitable reply to such a statement.  All I managed to do was turn around 180 degrees and convulse in silent laughter.

Stephen Macknik:  She literally ran away.

Susana Martinez-Conde:  It was time to get my first psychometry reading on my little soldier but I was a bit concerned that no psychic would take exercise seriously if I told them that I found the soldier inside of a chocolate egg.  Instead I said that I had found this object lodged between two planks of wood at my old rental apartment in Boston and that I felt a special connection to it. 

Stephen Macknik:  So I was starting to feel a little depressed.  We were writing this book on magic, we were working with magicians, we were going to Las Vegas and visiting them at their shows in casinos on The Strip and one of the things we learned about these casinos is that the gamblers there, they're not all the happy-go-lucky gambling crowd you might expect.  That many of them actually were kind of worried and desperate to win.  That you realize you are standing next to somebody who might be having the very worst day of their life at any given time.  So we realized that the psychic fear that it was a similar feeling that these people were having, feeling frantic and desperate themselves.  This kind of led us to wonder what was it that they were feeling and why was it they were feeling this way.

Susana Martinez-Conde:  I handed the toy soldier for the first psychometric reading and waited to hear the verdict.  The psychic told me that the reason I felt this strong connection to the soldier was because this soldier represented me in a prior life. 

“It’s you back when you were Caesar,” she told me.  Which frankly made me feel pretty good, although I didn’t believe a word of it.  But throughout this experience, I found myself bizarrely of two minds.  Intentionally skeptical as is my nature but also wanting to know more. 

Then the psychic said, “Hold on.  Not Caesar himself but one of his most trusted generals.”  Which I still thought sounded pretty impressive.  Until she said, “Wait a minute.  Who was Caesar again?  Was he some sort of king?”

Stephen Macknik:  For the record, the soldier is a 1760s British infantryman with a musket on his shoulder. 

Susana Martinez-Conde:  The next psychic that I went to told me that this toy soldier was not an actual toy but a chess piece from the 1940s that used to belong to this old gentleman.  And that the reason that I felt connected to it was because the soldier was from the same precise German town where I had lived my prior life as a scullery maid.

Stephen Macknik:  In her current life, it may be true that I haven't quite been able to let go of that whole scullery maid thing.

Susana Martinez-Conde:  I don't even know what a scullery maid is.  But the psychic did say that my life as a scullery maid had been mostly joyful.  I had good friends and a husband who loved me.  But I had had this one sorrow and it’s that even though I have very much wanted to have children, I never got to have any. 

“That’s so sad,” I told the psychic. 

I sort of left my face unguarded for a second or two because she asked me, “Is there something that you're struggling with in this life?” 

And I said, “No.  I have two little boys.”  But I didn’t mention the two pregnancy losses between my first and my second child and I realized right then and there what a comfort it would have been a few years prior to believe in the concept of this one life out of the many lives that came before and just as many lives that will come right after. 

Stephen Macknik:  So the attendees of this conference were clinging to the wispiest of false evidence.  They were the ultimate consumers of false hope.  That they were hoping that someone with authority would tell them that their cancer would go away, that their family and friends in the military would come home safe, that they would be reincarnated next time with a better life.  Maybe they’d go from being a scullery maid to one of Caesar’s generals. 

The psychics there, we realized, were in fact using the magic tricks that we thought they were using but they were really taking advantage of these people to tell them what they wanted to hear.  They were… how should I put this?

Susana Martinez-Conde:  They were using their cognitive failures to their advantage.  For one, I myself as a staunch skeptic was startled to find myself in a couple of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I moments.  I realized that believing can be much easier than disbelieving and feel a whole lot better.  That’s both the beauty and the danger of the stories that we tell ourselves.

Stephen Macknik:  Exactly.  Of course it was all an illusion.  As we drove home, we were in a thoughtful mood.  We were thinking about how the psychics were in fact using the magic tricks that we had imagined when we drove up there in the first place and we remain just as skeptical of psychic phenomena as when we arrived.  But we also felt a lot more sympathy for our fellow attendees at the conference that, in fact, we realized that they brought an important component to the psychic phenomenon which is that they bring to the table part of the illusion which is the need to believe.  Thank you.

Susana Martinez-Conde:  Thank you.