Secrets of Mind and Reality

Learning To Do Magic Tricks

I first learned to do magic tricks for the same reason that pretty much everyone learns to do magic tricks: I wanted to impress people – particularly the girls. Learning magic can be a lifetime study of the arts of illusion and the science of perception, but it always starts with a desire to entertain and impress. That is where magicians get their showmanship. They want people to like them, and so they figure out what people like. They also have to trick people, so they figure out how most people perceive things and what people don’t see.

My first memory of learning how to do magic tricks involved my father. He had this really lame trick he would do for us when we were about five. He would fold up a dollar bill and then unfold it so that it was facing upside down. I was a little kid, so at first it baffled and amazed me. I tried doing it myself a few times and suddenly, I understood it. I felt somewhat foolish for not getting it sooner, but more than that I felt intrigued. It was neat to know that my dad was capable of fooling people, and that I could learn how to do the same thing.

I first became serious about learning to do magic tricks when I got to high school. I had learned a bit about how to do card tricks already, but most of them were lame and wouldn’t stand up to an adult audience. I knew that I could trick my friends, but by that point I also knew that I had to aim higher than that. Doing magic tricks – if you want to get good at it – involves a constant striving for higher and higher states of illusion. First you want to be able to trick your peers, then the older kids, then your parents, and then everyone else. I learned some basic levitation techniques, a little bit of prestidigitation, and even a little bit of mind reading. It was all trickery of course, and everyone knew it, but still they were amazed. When people can’t figure out how you accomplish an illusion, it bothers them and intrigues them. They feel this need to get to the bottom of what you’re doing , and that keeps them coming back for more.

Of course you never really learned to do magic tricks until you start putting on shows. Practicing stage magic alone is one thing, but really captivating and audience is another thing entirely. It takes you to an entirely different level when you try to fool people publicly, entertaining the whole crowd. When I started doing tricks as a performing magician at the age of 16, I really started to learn.