Anti-Suggestion

Do you have any suggestion-based tricks in your 100-trick Repertoire? —MG

Not really. I don’t think suggestion-based tricks really work in the type of situations in which I perform. I’m not totally convinced they work all that well in any performing situation.

In the early days of focus-group testing we did less live performing and more testing where we would show people recorded performances of magicians and get their feedback based on those performances. The lowest scores I ever saw were connected to magicians doing suggestion based routines.

When performed for a group or large audience, it’s generally just one person who experiences the suggestion. So the audience perceives the effect through that one person. But that person’s reaction is almost never what you’d expect it to be if the effect was really happening. Instead, their reaction always has to be teased out of them. So you’re putting the full audience’s experience in the hands of someone who is reacting nowhere near the way they should if events were truly unfolding as the magician/mentalist is implying. It’s just not a very structurally sound way to build an effect.

I saw a mentalist once tell a woman to look at the palm of her hand and he said something along the lines of, “And you’ll notice the lines on your hand are starting to move and twist around.” And she looked at her palm and was like, “Uhm… okay, yeah.” And I feel like he thought that was a success because he got her to say yes. But it didn’t really ring true to the audience.

It should have gone like this:

“Look at the palm of your hand. You’ll notice the lines—”

“Holy fuck, what’s happening to me!!! The goddamn lines on my palm are moving!! Someone call a doctor!”

And in one-on-one performances suggestion-based effects have other issues.

Think of a coin bend. You’re holding a coin in your hand and I say, “And if you concentrate you’ll really feel it getting warmer. Warmer and warmer and now it’s getting softer and starting to bend. You can feel that, yes?” You may end up agreeing to that or not, but even if you do, on some level, you’re going to realize that I talked you into that response. Unless it’s something you really want to believe for yourself, you are going to sense the suggestion.

If I tell you you’re going to see or feel something and then you have to try to see or feel that thing, that’s not strong.

In my experience, there is nothing that takes people’s enjoyment down more than feeling like they had to “play along” with the magician. If people like being fooled, then they want to be fooled with their defenses up. If they don’t like being fooled, they’re not going to enjoy being coerced into pretending to be fooled either.

The Power of Anti-Suggestion

While I don’t use suggestion as a sole method for any effects I do, I think you can use suggestion to get people to feel and sense certain imagined stimuli, but you don’t do it by using coercion. You do it by planting a seed and then allowing them to water it. It’s something I think of as “anti-suggestion.”

For example, if the spectator has a coin they don’t know is bent held in their fist, I might say…

“I want you to imagine yourself sending energy from your heart, into your arm, and down into your hand. You might be able to feel a warm sensation radiating down your arm as you do this.”

Notice, I’m not saying they will feel it. I’m just saying they might feel it. And the truth is, if you concentrate on a part of your body, and imagine it felling warmer, it usually will. But that’s not the anti-suggestion.

I’ll then say, “Continue to feel the energy move down your arm and into the coin in your fist. Some people, if they’re particularly tuned in and sensitive, will feel the coin start getting warm, and the metal starting to soften a little. You’re probably not going to feel that, given this is your first time. But don’t worry, that doesn’t mean it’s not working.”

Anti-suggestion is telling people something they’re not going to feel/see/experience.

So now if you do get a hint of this thing I told you that you probably won’t feel, it becomes something you’re going to magnify in your mind without any pressure from me.

Here’s another example. Sometimes I’ll do a simple nailwriting trick where I try and send some initials to my spectator. I sort of guide them through the mental preparation required to receive the thought from me. And then I say something like, “When you get good at this, and you’ve practiced it, you’ll close your eyes and sort of see a sea of letters, far away in blue. And after some time thinking over those letters, two will rush up to the forefront of your mind’s eye and they will glow big and bright in a fiery red. That’s probably not going to happen now. That’s just an idea of what the process might look like someday.”

Then I have them concentrate and give me two letters and about half of the time they’ll say something like, “It was just like you described it. A mass of blue letters and then two bright red letters just shot to the front.”

And I’m like, “Wow… really?” As if I’m impressed. As if I didn’t just tell them exactly how to envision thinking of these letters.

My favorite way to use Anti-Suggestion is to say, “[Something] is probably not going to happen.” And then do something to make sure it happens. I call this Enhanced Anti-Suggestion.

Here are the three varietals of suggestion in action. Let’s say the spectator has a word written on a business card under their hand. I say, “I’m going to extend the aura from my hands, slide it under your hand, and use my aura to feel the word on the business card.” As my hands approach their hand:

Traditional Suggestion: “You’re going to feel my aura as it surrounds your hand. Yes? You can feel it? Like a little tingle, yes? And you can feel it slide under your hand as well. Be honest. Does it feel more like a tickle or a tingle?”

Anti-Suggestion: “Okay, you’re probably not going to feel this. Unless you have a very sensitive aura yourself. Then you might be able to feel our auras interact as my hands are close to yours. It will feel like a tingle. But it doesn’t matter if you don’t feel it. I’m just going to slide my aura near yours…”

Enhanced Anti-Suggestion: Verbally I would say the same thing as I do in anti-suggestion, but I would also use a loop or other form of invisible thread to make them feel the thing I told them they weren’t going to feel.

That’s the Enhanced Anti-Suggestion technique. It’s very strong. Spectator’s don’t expect something to happen that’s stranger than what the magician says is likely to happen.

Both regular and enhanced Anti-Suggestion are ways to make the spectator push the suggestion rather than have you try and pull it out of them. I think this is psychologically a much stronger technique. And it can work regardless of what the spectator’s disposition is towards you. If they like you and want you to succeed, then they will amplify any sensation you hint at. And if they’re fighting you, then the worst that can happen is that they will be forced to agree with you that they didn’t feel what you told them they’d be unlikely to feel. But they may actually fight you enough to persuade themselves into feeling what you said they weren’t going to feel.

And the best part about this is that it’s almost impossible to screw up Anti-Suggestion whereas it’s seemingly really easy to screw up traditional suggestion. I say that because—while I’m sure there are some performers who use suggestion masterfully—most often it comes off as something between bullying and “I’m just going to make this as awkward as possible until you go ahead and agree with what I’m suggesting so we can move the hell on with our lives.”