Magicology: The Science of Magic

Illusionists merely engage a fiction of sorcery, but there's a rich foundation of neuroscience beneath the smoke and mirrors. In this episode, Julie and Robert explore the ways in which magicians manipulate our senses and the inner workings of our minds.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
do you remember the Math Magician from Breaking the Magician's Code,
Magic's biggest secrets finally revealed? Oh yeah, you don't, well,

(00:25):
this was this was on TV all the time back
in the day. Um particularly, this was like especially and
probably you know reruns thereafter, but it was this this
magician and he wore this mask because he was he
was like a rogue illusionist that was that on the
on this this particular show, he was gonna come on,
he was gonna do uh, sort of a staple magic

(00:46):
trick and then he was going to expose how it
was done. And he was having to hide his identity
so that the Magician's Guild wouldn't you know, fire him
and destroy him, lock him in a cast, getting sinking
into the ocean kind of a deal. But but I
remember and then thinking this guy was kind of a jerk,
and you know, because he's coming along and he's like like, oh,
you think it is magic, I'm going to kill the

(01:08):
magic for you. And I could easily imagine him showing
up in his mask at other events to to destroy
the magic of other things, like you know, he could
do you know, a whole series of specials where it's
like breaking the puppeteers code, puppet tearings, biggest secrets finally revealed,
you know, and just going down through through the list,
they sit on tiny stools. They're wearing all black. But

(01:33):
but no, that that was the first thing that came
to mind when we were talking about doing an episode
on magic, on the science of believing, well, that there
are people who say, let's not reveal the magic. And
in fact, Um, one the reasons why we're talking about
this is because there was a great article that came
out talking about Teller of pen and Teller and Um
and his pen is the quiet one. That's what I mean. Yeah,

(01:57):
Tell was the quiet one, the loud one, and and
he has been lately, Um, he has been talking about
these secrets Um that they employed. But the thing here
is that I think of it as meta magic. I mean,
they have always been pretty forthright with their audience, like
we are telling you the secrets kind what we're doing,
and yet we are still going to fool you we

(02:17):
are still going to pull this magic trick off and
you're not going to really now. Yeah, I do like
the way that Penn and Teller tend to handle it, because,
first of all, it's not a oh, I'm gonna totally
expose the magic here, some secrets about to be revealed,
prepared to have your your dreams crushed. Like it's not
it's not about that, like they're they're really bringing And
it's also not a sense of in the case of
the mass magician. You don't get the sense that it's

(02:38):
like a magician that had some bills to pay and
was like, all right, this is the gimmick. I'm gonna
do like Penn and tell her all about really explaining
how magic works, because they love magic, because there is
there's some really amazing stuff going on beneath the surface
of the illusion. Not only is the illusion amazing, but
the way the the the illusion toys with our perception

(03:00):
reality that's amazing too, And they're all about sharing that.
But then at the same time they're all about using
this these secrets that they share as in midirection in
a magic trick. So yeah, it gets really met up
really fast. Yeah, because they're basically saying we're totally to
flu and this is how we're going to fool you,
and yet this is still going to happen. Um. And
for people who are who don't know Penn and Teller,

(03:23):
um me describe them. Pen As, you say, is the
one who speaks, he's uh, kind of you know Audashas.
He's six ft seven. He went to clowning school, by
the way. Yeah, um, and he is usually the person
who's talking about what sort of trick they're going to
do and sort of ushering that in, while Teller usually
executes the trick and is the quiet one. He never talked.

(03:43):
He's just kind of a mining in that style. Yeah yeah, um,
And I guess you can call it kind of highbrow
magic in the way that they really are sort of
asking you to um. They're they're trying to they're asking
you to be critical, to be analytical, and yet they
are obstucating your um critical thinking very much in the

(04:03):
in the vein of the amazing Randy Um who, of course,
in addition to being the madition, has the you know,
the this whole organization is built up. They have the
prize that the I think it's like a million dollars
could be wrong on that, but a huge cash prize
for people who can who can prove that they have
psychic abilities. And uh in Randy to a large extent

(04:24):
also falls on the footsteps of Fudini, who, in addition
to being an accomplished illusionist, was also really into exposing
uh frauds who were who were taking advantage of people
who had lost loved ones. And we're using like seance
environments and in various tricks to toy with people's emotions
and loosen their purse strings. So so yeah, that's kind

(04:46):
of the the mold of of these guys as well,
because they have that long running show UH we Can't
Bullplop uh to uhus, the censored version, where they would
talk about various things, often controversial things. X. Yeah, there
their skeptics, and they bring that that skeptic viewpoint into
analyzing all these topics when they also bring a fun

(05:06):
skepticism into their magic. Yeah, and so we're gonna talk
about how we can break down the magic here a
little bit with science and how they actually do that
as well, particularly Teller. Again, he wrote an article for
Smithsonian Magazine telling people how he does it and we're
gonna talk about why magicians are like camouflage designers of
the mind. We talked about camouflage and some of the

(05:27):
same uh sub diffusions going on in camouflage patterns as
as the magic acts. But first, let's uh let's talk
about the New York Times article Science of Illusion by
Alex Stone. He ushers in the article by talking about
a coin trick, a really simple coin trick. So he says, Okay,

(05:48):
pinch a coin at its edge between thumb and first
fingers of your right hand and begin to place it
in your left palm of letting go doing that now, Okay,
begin to close the fingers at the left hand. Okay,
the instant the coin is out of sight, extend the
last three digits of your right hand and secretly retract
the coin. Presumably that means like put it in a

(06:10):
little into The last three are kind of they're they're
kind of serving as a cover, like a shield, right right. Well, also,
it's making it look like it's drap in your like
your freeing your fingers from the coin at the same
time you're depositing that coin, let's say, right inside your sleeve. Um.
And then he says, um, secretly retract the coin, make

(06:34):
a fist with your left hand as if holding the coin,
as your right hand palms the coin and drops to
the side. Okay, and then you're going to reproduce that
coin later, all right. What they say in this article
is that this is a great example of something called
retention vanish. This is the illusion of a false transfer,
and it happens when there's a lag in the brain's

(06:54):
perception of motion called persistence of vision. So the audience
will actually see this is the crazy thing. The audience
will actually see the coin and left palm for a
split second after the hands separate. And this is because
your visual neurons don't stop firing once a given stimulus. Here,
the coin is no longer present to your brain. Again,

(07:15):
we talked about this. This this great pattern recognition machine
makes that coin appear because you have the visual neurons
still being stimulated. So what they're saying is that our
perception of reality lags behind reality about one of a second.
And this is what magicians are exploiting. Wow, it's it's
really interesting, and that we u We also recorded an

(07:37):
episode today on Camouflage, which either just came out before
this one, or will come out next. And there's a
lot of overlap between these two topics. And camouflage, you
are toying with pattern recognition a lot of the time
and using distraction and misdirection to ful like potential enemy.
And in in magic we see a similar thing. Here

(07:57):
we're exploiting pattern recognition where we're we're exploiting the lag
in perception and reality. Yeah, and this is where the
cognitive bias comes in, right, um. And we can say
that cognitive cognitive bias can be traced to evolution to
our ancestors because missing a pattern was much more dangerous
than seeing a pattern that wasn't their right, So that's

(08:19):
kind of why we're hardwired like that. Um. So if
magician magicians can tweak the patterns enough, then you can
lead the brain to cognitive bias. And that's where we're
constructing this false logic for ourselves. And as you say,
they're employing um, not just the um you know, a
pattern sort of falling into the background in us accepting
that the coin has been transferred, but also this idea

(08:41):
of dazzle as well, and this idea of distraction. Okay,
so um, absurdism, humor always comes into play with magicians
for a really good reason. Yeah. I found this really
fascinating because, I mean, on one hand, I mean it's
it's pretty obvious. You're you're gonna use basic misdirection. You're

(09:01):
you're not looking you're not looking at the coin. You're
gonna look at the assistant skimpy outfit, or you're not
looking at the allowed, you know, at at the thing
that's about to disappear. You're looking at the elaborate prop.
You're not looking at the handcuffs on the guy. You're
looking at this enormous vat of water that they're being
immersed to. So you end up focusing on the spectacle

(09:22):
and not necessarily on the small detail upon which the
entire trick hinges. And uh. And you know, so you're
you're taking in this an environment, You're you're working it
out in your head, what's about to happen. You're you
have expectations of what's going to happen. Throw in some absurdity,
throw in some humor. And they find that laughter disables
your ability to think critically for at least a moment um.

(09:44):
And I've I've been observing this recently. Um playing this uh,
this card game called Cabo. Um, we'll pull us out
with friends, and it's a very simple memory game. Um,
you can look it up online. It's like like I
think they used to sell it on Etsy. It's like
it's got like one of the cards has a rainbow
as a unicorn puking a rainbow. So it's that kind
of fun little game. But you end up having several

(10:05):
people set around and you're you don't know what your
cards are. Necessarily you get peaks of them and you
have to memorize it. Other people are memorizing their cards,
trying to keep track of cards that are moving, and inevitably,
if you have some fun people playing, somebody's gonna crack
a joke, somebody's gonna say something amusing, or something's gonna happen,
and then you totally don't remember where anything is right

(10:25):
the distraction there, So throw that out on a magic trick.
So it's like people think they're smart, Oh, I wonder
where that coin is. Then they throw in a fart
joke and you're good. You're good to go, like reset
the entire memory well, and Teller says that they all
immediately follow a trick with a joke every single time.
And that's exactly because they're manipulating that part of your brain. Um.

(10:45):
I want to go down real quick. His his seven
things that he does um to to defraud an audience. UM.
One which we already talked about. Exploit pattern recognition to
make the secret a lot more troublesome than the trick
seems worth. Complex trick, Yeah, Like for instance, he said that, uh,

(11:07):
for an appearance on David Letterman, for two weeks, they
trained themselves to work with these cockroaches two hundred of them,
really slow moving so that they would not you know,
skiter off um when they got their camera time. They
created some styrofoam thing that um that works really well
with roaches to crawl on, and then they inserted it

(11:27):
into this hat. And I mean really seriously, and all
we need said that, you know, they worked with an
animal trainer or this entomologist you know, day after day
so that they wouldn't scream like little girls when they
had to handle the roaches his words, um, And so
you know that is a lot of trouble for that trick, right, Okay. So,
and the reason is because he says, you have to

(11:49):
create some sort of simular Akham of reality that people
can buy into. Uh. Number three, he says, which, by
the way, that kind of ties into our discussions of
action in reality, the idea of it. You have a
scene where something fantastic is going to happen, say James
Bond wrestles the squid, but earlier in the book he's
making coffee or he's having a steak. Right, you're setting

(12:10):
up the this this illusion of reality that and again
the buying into thing, this, this idea, this narrative that
we're buying into. Number three, you get hard to think
critically if you're laughing. For keep the trickery outside the frame.
So he's talking about, um, you know, if he's you
pick a card out of a fifty two deck or
a fifty two card deck. Um, if he's taking off

(12:33):
his his jacket and throwing it outside the frame of
what's going on, that's diverting your attention because he's doing something, right,
then write some sort of flight of hand. Um. Five,
to fool the mind, combine at least two tricks. We'll
talk about that a little bit. And uh, he says,
Number six, nothing fools you better than the lie you
tell yourself. Um. And this is something that he means

(12:55):
that you come to discover on your own. The magician
lets you discover a truth on your own. Plants that
really number seven. If you're given a choice, you believe
you have acted freely. That I think it's fascinating. We'll
talk about that too. Um, but that that's kind of
how he goes about these tricks. And um, that's when
we talk about cognitive bias happening. And that's because your

(13:18):
brain is telling you all these things, it's making up
a story, it's creating the pattern, and misdirection becomes a
really key item for a magician. Yeah, Like I said,
misdirection is all about diverting the viewers attention from the
often trivial looking things that are the small detail upon
which the entire uh trick or illusion rather is is hinging.

(13:42):
So again, that's that's why you have I mean, I mean,
part of it, of course is its performance, and performance
needs to be visually amusing. But you have all these
elements in a magic trick that that are distracting. You
have a beautiful assistant that's skimply addressed. You have magnificent props,
you have uh explosions and fire and uh and slashing

(14:02):
swords and musical accompaniment and lighting effects. Um. It reminds
me a lot too of how of how a really
um well done haunted houses put together, because even that
is about the scares there are about misdirection if they're
done right, It's about let's get you looking over here
and then something will come from this direction. Let's have

(14:24):
you thinking about what the place sounds like, and then
we'll shock you with what the place feels like. That
kind of thing. I have a good real life example
of this. It was I guess inadvertent magic trick, and
it was how do you hide a half naked woman
in plain view? Okay, so will science Festival. I'm walking

(14:45):
down to a whole years. Yeah, I'm going to one
of the venues, and I'm passing in front of this
church or I'm approaching church on my left. Wedding party
is on the stairs of the church. On the right
of the sidewalk, the bride is about to get out
of the car. Coming forward is a woman in jean
shorts and no shirt or brawn, just just walking down

(15:05):
the street. Because it's in New York. Can people do that? Right?
And what I found amazing and made me feel completely insane,
like I was the only person I think actually who
noticed is that as she is crossing in front of
the wedding party on the stairs, none of them look
at her because they're all looking at the bride coming
out of the car. And I'm thinking about this, did
they not see this half naked woman passed right in

(15:27):
front of them? And that is how this this is
very similar to a magic trick, right that how could
you hide this, you know, thing that should be really
obvious and it's that misdirection. Huh. Anyway, well, it makes
me that I feel like, um, there have been some
some like bank heist movies where where they've used that

(15:48):
where it's like, let's have a sexy lady over here
and then the guy, you know, the guard doesn't notice
and they slipped by them. And it also ties into
my my longstanding theory that you could potentially rob a
bank with a basket of kittens, like if you were
just bring them in and like place them on the
table and people are gonna be transfixed by the kittens
and then be like, oh my goodness, and then they'll
touch the kittens like they're so soft, I can feel
their heart and then you just slip by and the heart,

(16:12):
you know, how do you do? You feel them? They're
so warm, they're like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right,
but no, you can you could totally rob a banquet
that's mine. I just did something horrible happening to the kittens.
I have to say in that scenario, No, you can't
bring a basketful of kittens into a robbery scenario. You
do not expect one of them to be splatter. The
only downside I see is that eventually that basket of

(16:32):
kittens will have to testify in court, so they'll be like,
up on this witness stand will be a basket of
kittens and uh, you know, really abusive lawyers coming in
and really trying to grill them on the stand, and
they're just they're kitten, so they're they're just completely out
of it. And there's your next Pixar film, Yeah, the
Bandit kittens. All right. So, Um, one of the things

(16:53):
that Teller was talking about is to fool the mind
combined at least two tricks. I wanted to talk about
that because he says that, Um, every night, Las Vegas,
I make a children's ball come to life like a
trained dog. My method. The thing that fools your eyes
is to puppeteer the ball with a thread too fine
to be seen from the audience. But during the routine
the ball jumped through a wooden hoop several times, and

(17:14):
that seems to rule out the possibility of a thread.
The hoop is what magicians call misdirection. A second trick
that proves the first. The hoop is genuine. But the
deceptive choreography I took um or I used, took eighteen
months to develop. Again see number two, more trouble than
it's worth it. Also, I can't help but think of

(17:35):
a fiction in this case to take one idea that
truly cool, take another idea that's really cool, combine them,
and if you do it in the right way, no
one will necessarily notice that all you did was say,
take the pacing for you know, this classic novel, and
simply infuse it with whatever this trend happens to be. Right,
That the idea is not to see the underpinnings bursting underneath, right. Um.

(18:00):
Teller is also talking about independent verification, so he says
when he cuts the cards, he doesn't magic trick with cards.
Um I think he says, like the worst uncle magic trick.
You can imagine, Um, he says, I let you glimpse
a few faces, and then you conclude the deck contains
fifty two different cards again pattern recognition. But who's gonna
who's actually gonna sit there and look at them? Right?

(18:20):
I mean, well you go through. All you need is
a couple, right, you say, okay, but when in fact
he's actually taken those three cards and replicated a full
deck by taking eighteen different decks of cards and taking
out those three cards, or so he's always going to
get one of those three cards. Yeah. Also cases where
the magician you know, is allowing individuals who are participating

(18:42):
the trick to handle objects that are involved, to touch
the cards, to touch the hoop, to touch the wand
whatever is being used to verify that it is not gimmicked. Right.
And you think too, that you've made a choice, right,
You've made a choice. You took that card and this
this was of your you know, this fifty two different cards, um,

(19:03):
and this this was the decision that you made. And
uh so then you feel like you have some skin
in the game, right, And what Teller says is that
if you're given a choice, you believe you have active freely.
This is one of the darkest of all psychological secrets.
And he actually does a little political action and points
back to our political system and says that this idea

(19:26):
of having a two party system is much like having uh,
fifty two cards of the same three cards in them.
Sort of interesting, um, you know it. Also, I'm reminded
to of pickpockets here. Uh. And there's certain there's a
certain overlap here because you do see plenty of magicians,
especially slight of hand magicians that are also a skill
that at least performance pickpocketing pickpocketing, if not actual pickpocketing.

(19:50):
And uh and like some simple pickpocketing techniques are as
simple as, oh, I bump into you while I actually
take your wallet, because you're your distract acted by the
bump to your shoulder. You don't feel the slight um
you know, fabric movement of your wallet disappearing that kind
of thing, or or also you know, distracting by visuals.

(20:10):
You know, you're handed a baby, or or here's a
you know, an attractive lady, that kind of thing. You know.
What's uh interesting about that is that their pickpocketing. Um,
I guess you could say rules are predicated on the
way that you actually approached the wallet. And this was
from an article by Jonah Laire and Wired. It's called

(20:30):
magic in the brain. And apparently your eye tracks really
well when you when you's on a sort of flat plans.
If you're if your hand is just reaching across in
a horizontal line, then you're gonna be able to track
it really easily. But if you do an arc like this,
your your machinery is pretty flawed in that sense, and
that our our brains, our eyes aren't able to really

(20:51):
read that motion. Isn't that interesting? And it also that
that ties into a lot of the flourishes that you
see in in in magic in these performance illutions, because
people aren't just I'm grabbing this orange and I'm gonna
grab that one. No, there's a lot of flourishing and
movements of the arm. It becomes difficult to track exactly
what's going on. We are gesticulating wildly right now, as

(21:13):
we talked by the way in here. Yeah, but you're right,
there's there's no linear movements. It's all sort of circular.
All right, We're gonna take a break and when we
get back, we're going to talk about this inherent blindness
we have, whether or not we're looking at a face
or we're making a choice on a particular let's say
jam that we like. All right, we're back, so we're

(21:39):
gonna talk about jam. We're gonna talk about jam, preserves, jelly.
I don't know what you call it, but jam in
my house. And the reason I want to talk about
it is because it was called out in this New
York Times Science of Illusion article um in one study
where shoppers in a blind taste test had two different
kinds of jam to pick from it so they can't

(22:00):
see it. They're just getting spoonfuls of it. They choose
the one they like. They are then given a second
taste from the jar they picked. Oh, they think they
are getting a second taste of it, but with the
researchers actually switched the jam flavor, so they get a
second spoonful and it is not the one they like.
But they fail to notice that they're tasting the wrong jam,

(22:23):
even when the two flavors are like super dissimilar, like
grapefruit and cinnamon apple, because their brain has already created
the narrative that this is the one I like, and
we're going with us. Yeah, there's been some really fascinating
experiments along this line involving wine, where you bring people
in and you really color someone's expectations of this wine

(22:43):
by letting them know that, oh, this is a fine vintage,
this is a more expensive wine, and then this one
is cheaper and it's you know, and this is the
I don't know, fill into blanks, what's the fancy wine.
Uh something something was, Yeah, that one. So the people
end up going to that experiment, their narrative is colored.

(23:04):
Like you said, they're already writing the story of their
their experience with that wine, and then they go in
and then there they end up getting it wrong because
it was swapped on them. I mean, this is the
classic we secretly swapped this person's coffee with folders, instant thing, right,
But it but it works. That's the thing. You. So
much of our experience of something is colored by our

(23:26):
anticipation of it, what other people seem to be expecting
of it. And then if you switch things around the
last minute, you can get a lot past the person. Well,
and there's this another thing called change blindness, which I
thought was fairly really cool. Um. It is a study
that shows how minor distractions can impair our ability to
remember remember faces. Um Psychologist Daniel Simon's had an experiment

(23:50):
or stop random strangers on the street and ask for directions,
and then midway through the conversation, a pair of confederates
called confederates walked between them and block the stranger's view,
and the experiment or switched places with one of the stooges,
so the person that as directions was then replaced. Yeah,
I've seen the video of this. Yeah. Yeah, when we
do a blog post to go with this podcast, I'll

(24:12):
try and find that video and embed it for you
so you can watch it right there. Yeah, and it
really is. It's great because you know it's just that
split second um uh, you know we're distraction, uh, and
then the stranger is talking to a completely different person
and most of the time, just like the jam experiment,
they really didn't notice, which I can see that. I

(24:34):
think that probably would happen to me before because your
brain is occupied with other stuff. But again, this is
what magicians are exploiting, and in doing it in a
way that you don't notice. I mean, that's that's the
whole thing is to the seamless incorporation of distraction in
this direction, so that the end of it you would
have to really think back on the moments where you

(24:54):
were you were tampered with. Well, it also makes you
think too, like how how how much stimuli we really
can't take in that that's entering the light entering into
our eyes and our brain trying to make sense of everything,
and how much of it is the brain is filling
in the gaps, like, for instance, seeing the coin that
isn't actually there, but it's just filling in the gaps

(25:14):
because it can't actually assemble all of that information. No,
we would melt down if we shot to right. It's
almost like them when we were talking about camouflage and
we're talking about Tom Harris's article and about this continuity
in our brains, taking those you know, stack of blocks
and saying, okay, that's one unit because they're all one color. Um, Okay,
now there are two different colors, are two different units. Um,

(25:36):
that's just the way our brains work, all right. So
here's something really interesting again from the New York Times
article is about transcranial magnetic stimulation and this this old
TMS grambler has shown up before in our podcast uh,
notably in as the God Machine used by Michael Persinger,
so called because its ability to induce feelings of transcendence,

(25:58):
but also has been the culprit behind some hallucinations people
imagined ghosts. When pormal experience abductions, Yeah, when their brains
are basically fussed with with this this super magnet that
is placed over their head uh and and manipulates parts
of their brains that that create these um these hallucinations

(26:20):
for them. And this is what we talked about this
before is a possible explanation again for abductions alien abductions.
And it turns out that some people have this high
libility and low libilities in their brain. In other words,
there are a little bit more sensitive to this magnet
than other people are. So our magicians using this magnet
no scramble the brains of audiences where the yet um,

(26:44):
but it has been used to look at our attentions fans.
So in other words, they've used this TMS over our
parietal cortex. This is a part of the brain that
controls attention, and they noticed that when they fuss with it.
Of course, people UM have a harder time identifying faces
and recalling things um, which is, you know, not surprising.

(27:06):
But again, here's here's something that magicians have known for
thousands of years um and have been doing these magic tricks,
and that neuroscientists are now just really excited to um
investigate through magic. Interesting. And again, while that while magicians
are not using magnets on people's brains, it is worth
remembering that certainly if you go to a magic show

(27:29):
in Vegas, there is a there's a very good possibility
that the individuals observing that magic show have have had
something to drink before it really gets going here. I'm
sure you're having environments where, you know, where wine and
beverages are served, so you're already sort of again, you're
not pointing a magnetic ray gun at someone's head, but well,

(27:51):
in a sense you are. It's just it comes in
a glass with a fancy little umbrella on it. Well,
your critical thinking abilities we probably teeny bit impaired. Yeah,
And I mean we talked about that lag in motion
right with your eye and and seeing those coin tricks,
so we already know that when you have too much
to drink about your own um, yeah, that is a

(28:13):
little bit impaired as well. So I mean one. One
drink is enough to you don't see through the illusions
of the world around you, much less what the guys
is doing on the stage. Oh man, that's nice, actually
done well. Wind does more than Milton can to justify
God's ways to man. But you had a quote you
want it ended up instead of me ending it with

(28:35):
an unrelated quote. Oh no, I just thought general there
in his article and wired um nail that you just
have a magician must sell people a lie, even as
they know they are being lied to. Unless the illusion
feels more real than the truth. There is no magic,
and we certainly want there to be magic all the time.
So speaking of magic, let's haul the robot over here
and have him deliver us some magic in the form

(28:58):
of listener mail. All right, we heard from a listener
by the name of Gene Genet wrote in about about
the horror episode, but also a little bit about Prometheus
and stuff. He says, Hey, guys, thanks for all the
awesome podcasts. I worked third shift pretty much by myself,
so it's great that there are so many to listen to.
You are also always smart and funny. I love that

(29:20):
I rarely write into anybody, but the Horror podcast was
just too good not to. I've been a lifelong horror fan,
so a lot of what you talked about hit home
seeing horror movie covers at the video store as a
kid Eat You in the bum Goolies, which, by the way,
I did a blog post U right talked about ten
different VHS covers that kind of mess with me as
a kid, and what I thought they may have done

(29:42):
to me. Inspired on inspired by Eating the Bumblies, yes,
and and and inspired by our episode on horror. Anyway,
he continues, um, Well, he says that he's on board
with the idea that clowns are horrible because thing, he says,
they don't scare me like they do my wife. My
problem is with sad clowns and book clowns, which is
interesting because those are the ones that I hold up

(30:03):
is being that it's always my defense against anyone who's
just great of clowns. I'm like, well, the hobo clowns
are great. How can you not like those? But he
says they are images of sad, broken people, and that's
supposed to be funny. It just doesn't sit right with me.
So it's an interesting perspective anyway. It continues for some reason.
People on people horror bothers me in films. I'm sure
there's a psychology paper on it somewhere out there. I

(30:25):
prefer supernatural monster evil based harror um and I didn't
agree with that. I mean, it's a different scenario. When
you have a monster attacking somebody, that's as much an
idea attacking somebody, or it's a at the very least
something unreal. Well, there's that benign violation theory, right, so
if you take if you make it non human, it
becomes benign in a sense that it's probably not gonna

(30:46):
happen to you in real life, where people doing horrible
things to people, that's a lot more agreeable. It's weird.
I used to be different on this. I used to
My old response to this was, well, a person with
a knife, I can run from a person with a knife,
I can back against the person with a knife. But
a ghost that kills people with its mind or something
like that, if that were real, I wouldn't have as

(31:07):
much of a defense about it. Um. Interestingly enough, a
friend that I saw Prometheus with his wife didn't come
because she is totally fine with like people on people
violence in movies, but not supernatural or unbelievable like alien
type things. Um So, anyway, Jane goes on too to
share that he's also a fan of space sorry, mentions

(31:29):
of a few things that he digs to the alien franchise,
Event Horizon, which was fun back in in high school.
Pandorum which uh, which which I really enjoyed. I think
a lot of people did not like it, but I
thought it had some really cool science fiction ideas in it. Um.
And then and also Dennis Quaid, So you know, a
sci fi film with Dennis Kaid, I'm always on board
for uh and uh. And then he also said there

(31:51):
was a Star Wars novel with zombies in it that
he was into. So um and he also mentions the
the Dead Space video game series, which which he holds
up is really good space hard and and I've actually
been toined with this game series recently, and it's I
agree that it's it's really well done, really well done
game with a lot of scars in it and some

(32:11):
actually some interesting science in places. All right, Well, let's
listen to one more listener mail here and then we
will call it a podcast, all right, And here's one
from Eleanor. Eleanor writes in on our Science of Promethea's episodes,
is Hi, Rob and Julia, I just found your podcast
and love it. I have a question about the recent
episode The Science of from Prometheus. You brought up the

(32:33):
subject of panties. You talked about in detail about Ripley's
panties an alien, but you didn't discuss in detail Shaw's
panties and Prometheus. I thought her quote unquote panties looked
more like a gauzy loincloth, something like Jesus wore on
the Cross. Uh. They weren't sexy at all, but her
buff body was. What did you think of Shaw's panties? Um? Wow?
What did I think of Shaw's panties? Well, okay, I

(32:55):
agree that they weren't They did not sexualize her, and
I think any more than she was wearing panties and
she's running around. Yeah, I think I was so distracted
by the blood on her from from the scene where
she performs her own C section that Um, I didn't
even think about it because my my main thing was, Hey,
doesn't anybody notice she's covered in blood? But I know

(33:18):
that they were all wrapped up and uh, in the
old dude. Uh that scene, So that's probably why they didn't. Anyway,
these are all willing suspension of disbelief issues. But yeah,
I my thoughts are pretty much the same. I felt like, yes,
she had underwear on, so you a woman in her
underwear in a movie. You it's hard to say that

(33:38):
it's not a sexually charged scene just because it's you know,
it is what it is. It wasn't meant to be sexy.
She wouldn't in some way or at least sexually provocative.
She probably wouldn't be in her underwear, or the same
with him, he wouldn't be in his underwear if you
weren't intended to two toy with us in that way
on some level. But that being said, you know, there

(33:59):
was not I didn't think there's anything overtly sexual about
what she was wearing, and and you could it's an
interesting commentary about the gazziness of it in the potential
loincloth pricings. Yeah, I was gonna say, I think that
there's so many different ways you could read this um movie,
and some people have certainly looked at the religious aspects
of that fits in nicely with some of the thematic stuff.

(34:20):
So it's interesting that, um that that you pick that up.
We'll see with the next thirty years of academic papers
on the top you have to say about it all right, Well,
if you have something you want to share with us,
if you want to talk about magic, if we have
some magicians, some illusionists, some pickpockets out there, right in
and let us know. We'd love to hear from you,
and you know what your thoughts on all of this
happen to be. Or if you just have a particular

(34:40):
magician that you like and you want to get their
name out there, then right in, let us know. You
can find us on Facebook where we are stuff to
Blow Your Mind, and you can find us on Twitter
where our handle is blow the Mind, and you can
always drop us a line at Blow the Mind at
Discovery dot com. Be sure to check out our new
video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join houstaf Work staff

(35:02):
as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.