Magical Thinking
Learning Magic Tricks To Expand Your Brain's Potential
Workshop
Mark Mason doesn’t want to be just another magician doing tricks to fool you. Instead he loves the way magic can develop your thinking. So he does the tricks for you – then helps you to work out how he did them. Cards, coins, iPhones, wallets: all these and more are used to amaze you – and then you amaze yourself by (with Mark’s hints) solving the mystery of how the tricks are done.
The aim is not just to teach you some incredible magic you can use to baffle your friends (although of course that’s part of it). The real point of the session is to get your brain working in a different way. By showing you how a magician’s mind works, Mark reveals the mental techniques that will let you solve pretty well any trick you’ll see in the future. What’s more, the techniques can be applied to problems you’ll encounter at work and in life more generally.
There are also valuable lessons in how we present ourselves to the world - the ease with which some truly astonishing magic can be performed has echoes in everyday life. Where do you think the phrase 'confidence trick' came from?
Mark draws a cross on a card – and it’s the card you then pick from the pack. You’ll see a coin disappear from one hand and then reappear in the other. An elastic band will pass through another elastic band as you watch them. At the beginning of the session you'll have no idea how such seemingly impossible feats are happening. By the end, not only will you be able to do them yourself – you’ll also see the world from a slightly different angle.
‘The perfect team-building exercise – like an escape room but without the need to move around, like Sudoku but with cards and coins. We had a fantastic time.’ MR, City of London insurance broker
‘How have you done that then?’ Jonathan Agnew
'That is great.' Michael Vaughan
'Jesus!' Phil Tufnell
BBC Test Match Special team
‘Wonderfully entertaining. After the session I went home and did the “book” trick on my children. They simply couldn’t work out how I knew which word they were thinking of, even though they hadn’t written it down or told anyone.’ AN, senior executive at major multinational
Speaker(s):
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Mark Mason
Author
Spectator
Location
London Chamber Of Commerce and Industry
33 Queen St
London
EC4R 1AP