Peeking: A Quick-Start Guide
/After Monday’s post I got a number of emails saying that sure, while peeking information may have some benefits over something like Enigma, there’s just no rationale for having someone write something down and putting it in a wallet or envelope or something like that. So how do I get around that flaw?
It’s a little frustrating to have people who read this site ask me that question, given that it’s something I’ve talked about in the past. And yes, I know new people are finding this site all the time (despite my best efforts) and it’s maybe unreasonable to ask people to go back and read all the posts, given that takes months to do. But that’s my new policy. Just go back and read the whole site. Take notes this time. Not that everything I write is brilliance. But if you like the site enough to email me about something and get my thoughts on it, then you must resonate on some level with my ideas. And even if only 5% of what I write is worthwhile to you in some way, you can still easily fill notebooks with the ideas you find here.
But because I got so many emails about it, I’m going to explain what I believe to be the basic elements of a successful peek. This information is elsewhere on the blog, but it’s now here too in this very clearly titled post. Please, I beg of you, after this, stop asking me “how can you justify writing a word down if it’s supposed to be mind-reading!”
Get Out of Your Fantasy World
Every form of “mindreading” has some sort of conditions involved. Reading someone’s mind of any thought-of word or picture (as peeking allows) is going to require that word or picture is manifested outside the spectator’s head. They’re going to have to write it down, or search for it online, or speak it aloud at some point. This is the trade-off that comes with the freedom of allowing them to think of absolutely anything.
In my opinion—based on 500 days of testing—having someone write something down is one of the least invasive conditions for mindreading. But magicians have this fantasy where the spectator will be able to think of anything just in their mind and the magician will be able to name it out loud without any other steps. That’s not a thing that exists. “But I saw Derren Brown do it. The person just thought of a word and—” He was fucking with you. I promise you. Derren Brown can’t do this. Nobody can do this. This is off the table.
First Write, Then Explain
“I’d like you to write down the name of a stuffed animal you had in childhood… Great. I don’t want to see what you wrote, so let’s just put it away for now, and we’ll get back to it later if we need to.”
That’s all there is to it. The word is written and peeked before the subject of mindreading even comes up. I break down a slightly more detailed version of this set-up in the same post linked above. It goes into why each sentence is important. Read that for a further breakdown.
This is the first key element to peeking. Don’t explain what you’re going to do and then have them write down their thought. Have them write down their thought. Make it clear that you don’t want to see it. And put it away for later.
This is all just “set-up.” It will be frequently be forgotten in the long-run. And it is almost never questioned. It’s not questioned in the moment because it happens before you’ve said what you’re going to do. But in my 500 days of testing, it was rarely questioned afterward either—even when asking people for weaknesses in the trick. When people look back on the totality of the effect, the idea that a target thought might be recorded in writing before a demonstration of mindreading is not illogical to people. So it’s not something that needs to be overly justified or explained.
Enter the Process
The nice thing about the new Enigma app is that people are seeing that having a process doesn’t diminish the impact of mindreading. The negative about Enigma’s process is that it involves the length of the word, letter shapes and vowel position and things like that. These are things that humans never actually think of when they’re thinking of something. When you think of a baseball, you think of the weight and feel of it in your hand, and the stitching, and the way your hand grips it, and the sound of a bat hitting it or maybe being in the stands watching a game on a summer day. You don’t think, “Ah yes, good old baseball. That eight-letter word, with a first letter made up of straight and curved lines. Yes, yes, just thinking about how the first two vowels are in the 2nd and 4th positions makes me feel like I’m back in old Yankee Stadium!”
The trade-off for Enigma’s strength (that the word is never spoken or written) is a process that is sort of bland—focusing on the least interesting aspects of a word (its spelling rather than its meaning or its emotional relevance). But even this dull process doesn’t detract from the effect.
When it comes to a peek, a process isn’t necessary. But at the same time, a process is necessary.
What I mean is, if they write something down and 12 seconds later you tell them what they wrote down, they will assume you somehow saw what they wrote down.
So you need a process (even though you don’t need a process) to put some temporal distance from them writing down the word, and to give them something else to focus on.
So if I just had you write down the name of your favorite stuffed animal, I might have you imagine saying the name out loud. Then I might have you picture yourself back at a young age walking into your bedroom, noticing details about the room and then picking up the stuffed animal and saying its name. When that doesn’t work, I might ask you to imagine a man dressed in black breaks into your childhood bedroom at night and pulls your stuffed animal from your arms and hops out the window. You chase after him and come to a cliff with a raging fire down below. The man in black stands at the edge of the cliff and tosses this stuffed animal—was it a bear? oh… an octopus—he tosses this stuffed octopus over the cliff. You run to the edge and look down and see the octopus growing smaller as it falls into the flames. And you say its name. No, you shout its name. Tears rolling down your face. Imagine seeing that and shouting that name for me as the octopus falls into the fire. You’re shouting… guh...Gigglepants? No… Mr. Gigglepuss??
Now, maybe you don’t want to traumatize the imagined childhood version of your spectator like that, but you can see how giving them a process—in this case one of ratcheting up the emotion tied to the thought of word—would give them something else to focus on and consider beyond just, “I guess he saw what I wrote down.”
Those, I believe, are the two fundamental concepts when you want to peek something a spectator wrote:
Get the writing and peeking out of the way before going into the details of what you’re going to do.
Have an interesting process to walk them through.
I’ve found that to solve most of the issues with peeking information.
Now, there are still bad peeks and bad peek wallets and stuff like that. That’s a conversation for another day. I’m just pointing out that I don’t believe the concept of peeking itself is flawed.