Do You Believe in Magic? (TED talk #5)

Based off of the TED talk by Keith Barry: Keith Barry does brain magic

After watching the TED talk Keith Barry does brain magic, I feel even more perplexed and amazed about the human brain and what feats we can do. The brain is such a complicated organ that it is hard to say any one thing about it, which means that everything that we are learning has some truth to it, but it is never one way or the other. It will always be a combination of what the future will need and what we have had in the past. Keith Barry starts out by having the audience perform a stunt with their own hands (you must cross your arms a certain way, and then uncross them, which no one can do). After spending a couple of minutes trying to figure out what he did, I was stumped. He made a very interesting comment which was that people only saw what he wanted them to see. This relates to many other things in life as well. If someone is being bullied, or doing things that they should not be doing, they can manipulate their parents to see what they want them to see, which is that everything is fine. I have heard of too many stories where friends and family think that everything is OK, but in reality it is not, because they are only showing what they want people to see. Everyone hides secrets about themselves that no one knows because they do not want people to know them. Sometimes it just takes someone to really dig deep and find what that person is hiding, just like with a magician: you must really look to learn their secrets.

Keith Barry then goes on to show a movie clip where he is driving blindfolded with a stranger in the passenger seat. He never crashes, but he claims that he was seeing through the eyes of the girl in the passenger seat. Now I have never really believed in this magic voo-doo type of stuff, but it was pretty crazy to watch him drive a car blindfolded but to seem to know where he was going. I caught myself making up numerous explanations for how he was driving: the car was automated, the blindfold was see-through, he had traveled this road a hundred times before, he was lucky, there were bumps on the road to guide the car, and on and on. After understanding what I was thinking, I realized that all of these explanations were pretty crazy and could never happen. Afterwards, he makes another interesting comment, which is that most people try to come up with explanations for things that they do not understand. Our brains do not see the logic in magic, and so we try to come up with things that we can make sense of. This reminds me of the left-side right-side argument about the brain. Since the right-side is more creative and the left-side is more logical, I wonder if people who are more right-brain dominant would have an easier time accepting this stunt. Right-brainers think more outside the box, and they are also probably the more extremists. For left-brain people, something has to make sense, or else they are skeptical. I would consider myself more towards left-brain, and I am having a really hard time believing that what he did was for real. Since society as a whole has grown up thinking, teaching, and living basically left-brain, that could explain some of why magicians and voo-doo practitioners have been shunned from society as crazy.

To prove his point, Keith Barry then held other experiments. I had a hard time believing these demonstrations of magic, and I think that part of that was from personal experience.  I have had a couple of magic kits before, and even when the tricks seem impossible to explain, there was always a clever way to explain how they were doing the tricks. Some types of magic are like a big problem-solving puzzle that you just need to figure out the answer to. I love those problems that are seemingly-impossible to solve and have a very clever answer, and once you do solve them you feel so accomplished. Magic tricks are like that because when you finally figure out the trick behind the magic you immediately say ah-ha and then smile at the trickiness of it. But even if it was set-up beforehand there was no denying that they were pretty cool. I wonder how he came to be a magician, and what his lifestyle is like. No doubt, that would be a fun job.

I found Keith Barry’s TED talk to be extremely fun and exciting to watch. He incorporated some of his thoughts about magic with some actual magic tricks. He had a movie to show in the beginning to capture the audience’s attention, and to help explain what he was all about. He actually used the audience in his presentation, which was fun because it made the audience feel a part of the show. Audience participation is a plus! Having interesting, intriguing, and most of all cool activities to do definitely highlight his TED talk, and made it a memorable one. He had a sly sense of humor, and even if something did not go as planned in his talk he was able to play it cool and go along with what happened.

Some things are hard to believe in life because they do not have the science and absolute proof behind them, but this is where faith comes along. I can see magic tying in with religion because none of them are 100% hard evidence, and so it is up to the person to believe what they want to believe. Faith is all about accepting things that we cannot prove, and so if people around the world want to believe in the type of magic that Keith Barry does, then that is fine. It is all about people’s own decisions of what is real and what is fake.