Something I realized the other day. When you go out and perform magic you get different responses about exactly what they see you perform. They are witnessing the performance first hand live right under their noses. They are right in of you watching what you do. What makes me wonder is how accurate someone is when they witness a crime. Just cause someone sees something does it make it true. And how accurate someone sees something as time passes. I know witnesses are good to have. I just don't know how accurate people are when they see something. What are your thoughts on this topic?


I'm also curious to see how accurate crime scene investigators evaluate what they see during a magic show.

The "eye witness" has long been questionable at best to a good detective. Reason is that your mind thinks in pictures and this is not the best way to get a description believe it or not.

Also when people are remembering your show they are also trying to impart the emotion that they felt and the experience they had. It is not easy to describe that, so they add to a story to make it more emotional and bamo you are doing things not possible.

There is an old police academy exersise in which someone runs into the room and shoots the instructor. Then the cadets are told to describe the suspect. He ends up fat, short, tall, skinny and what not. It is facinating.

In their mind it may be the only truth.


Details tend to fade out and are sometimes replaced by inaccuracies.



Some people are more accurate than others.
People have been imprisoned and worse by failure of witnesses.

It has been proven time and time again that the least reliable form of testimony is eye witness testimony. It should probably be ruled inadmissible in courts of law.

It should also be noted that witnessing performances by ill-trained and inexperienced magicians is itself often witnessing a crime.

This book (and you HAVE seen the videos, yes?) opens with a scathing indictment of eyewitness testimony...and then goes on to explain the reasons why our observations and recall are so faulty.

An absolute must-read for all magicians:

http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Gorilla-......07459659

Well I think Danny did great job in a few words explaining that.



They may not get the details right but they would all go off with a few dilemmas hopefully.

If you know about the research around witness psychology, you also know that people do not remember what you expect them to. Still, if you think about it there are things you can do to make people remember something with more probability. I think most magicians, like myself, are too ambitious and try o take a too big bite. We want them to remember every minute, though it is not possible. What is possible? I don't think people will remember more than three things, maybe only one or two things from most shows if you ask them a month later. If you could decide what they will remember you could put it to use.

If you set your mind to try to really make people remember something from your performance how would you do it? and what would it be?

Not so sure there's a direct comparison between what people remember from a show they are attending and what they remember from an incident where they just happened to be nearby.

As suggested on another thread, pehaps "magic is the art of teaching a spectator what story to tell about an observed impossible event." Ammar's "Thirty Year Story" is not so much about the wierdness that happened, but the story of the magic that is passed on.