Quotes by Richard Wiseman

“Magicians are manipulating your consciousness. They are showing you something impossible. Theyre getting you to construct a narrative, which simply isnt true. So that means they know how to make you aware of certain things and blind to other things. What Im hoping is that magic, this entertainment vehicle that has been around for a long time, will give us a real insight into the deep mysteries of consciousness.”

“Over the last five years, theres been a reawakening as we look at things like change blindness (a failure to see large changes in a visual scene) and at the fact that consciousness is a construction and may even be an illusion. Now theres a recognition that magicians are doing something very special.”

“Were starting to realize that magicians have a lot of implicit know-ledge about how we perceive the world around us because they have to deceive us in terms of controlling attention, exploiting the assumptions we make when we do and dont notice a change in our environment. There is an enormous amount of really detailed instruction on how to perform magic. People are always blown away by how detailed a description youll have.”

“What it shows is just how much of the picture in our head of our surroundings is a massive construction, based on expectations, what we think is important, what we normally encounter and so on. And thats what magicians are very good at exploiting.”

“social contract for disaster”

“If he passed himself off as having psychic abilities, he wouldnt be half as successful,”

“According to the results of our experience, unfortunately I cannot confirm that Skibbereen is the luckiest town. It was absolutely no different to Dublin.”

“We had about 40,000 jokes sent in by people all over the world. Here is my favourite.”

“[The last time an experiment of this type was attempted, Wiseman said, was in 1971 at a Grateful Dead concert, when an image was projected on a screen above the frenetic crowd and two professional psychics tried to receive it.] One did well and guessed it, ... the other didnt.”

“What his research seems to be saying is that women are the laughers and men get the laughs.”

researchers discovered that people who have just consumed caffeinated drinks were more likely to be swayed by arguments about various controversial topics.55 In short, good evidence that there really is no such thing as a free lunch or an innocent cup of coffee.

When people can afford necessities in life, an increase in income dones not result in a significantly happier life.