Method vs. Effect
Magician Methods
The zoom magician uses methods.
The methods are not magic.
The virtual mentalist use mentalism tricks.
They use tricks because nobody can read minds.
Oftentimes, even usually, where the effect is sensational, the method is mundane. Sometimes, the method is more fascinating than the effect itself (in such cases, the trick should not be performed).
In rare cases, the effect is sensational and the method is fascinating.
When you see a magician or a mentalist perform, you’re witnessing impossible things happen (apparently).
When the magician vanishes a coin, the effect is that the coin disappears into thin air. But obviously you know that the coin didn’t really dematerialize magically. The magician is a human using tricks. He used any of hundreds of methods; mechanical, technical, or psychological or, usually, a combination.
Let’s suppose the method he used was sleeving (not many modern magicians use this method today). With practice, you can snap a coin or other small object up into your sleeve so fast that, under cover of a larger motion, the human eye cannot see it.
It takes many hours of study and practice to master sleeving, but it’s possible. It’s impossible to literally vanish a coin, but possible to ostensibly vanish it.
When a magician uses a magic wand, magic powder (aka “woofle dust”), or simply waves his hand and says “presto chango,” you know that none of that malarkey is the real method.
Still, it’s important that magicians use an overt process because it relieves the mind of the spectator—despite the fact that any spectator knows deep down that it’s all silly hogwash.
If the magician fail to display any process at all, the witnesses are more likely to discover the real method.
Mentalists, too, layer window dressing on top of their routines. The difference is that the spectator is far more likely to fall—hook, line, and sinker—for the mentalist’s red herring.
In a mentalism (or mind reading) trick, in lieu of magic words and magic wands, the performer uses body language (“Look at me, ah, your lips quivered…that means you must be thinking of 641.”), statistics, or scientific-sounding lingo “NLP” (Neuro-linguistic Programming). Anything that seems remotely plausible.
But it’s all a bunch of nonsense.
Though the use of body-language-reading or NLP may sound more plausible than the use of magic words, it’s all the same.
Neither is essential, and neither the woofle dust nor the body language literacy is necessary to achieve the impressive tricks.
Yes, “tricks.”
Magicians and mentalists use tricks.
Every single mentalist you’ve ever seen depends on tricks. None—absolutely zero—depend on NLP or body language or psychic powers. Those are all red herrings and have nothing to do with the method and everything to do with the effect.
The best magicians know that the effect is all that matters.
That doesn’t mean the method is unimportant. A lousy method, by definition, means that the effect won’t fly (or it could mean that it renders the trick impractical, or unnecessarily difficult).
Lazy magicians may use as an excuse that bit of wisdom—the effect is all that matters—and choose the easiest method even when there are far better (though more difficult sleight-of-hand or more scary misdirection) methods.
