Name: Secrets of the mind and free will -- revealed by magic tricks | Alice Pailhès
Uploaded: 2020-10-23T20:24:37.000Z
Duration: 8 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'd like to start with a small imagination exercise.

Participle clauses

Imagine you're sitting at this table, facing me right now.

Now, I'm going to ask you to push one of these cards towards me.

So please imagine yourself pushing one of these cards towards me.

OK, so take the number matching the card you pushed

and remember it -- it's important for later.

Now, I'm going to flip through this deck of cards

and ask you to choose a card that you will see in the deck.

Alright, now that you have your card in mind,

add the value of your card to your previous number.

For example, if you chose the six of clubs, add six,

So please take the item matching your final number.

There are going to be a lot of people watching this video,

and you all have different quirks with different preferences.

the vast majority of you right now is thinking about a kiwi,

or, if you're left-handed, probably a corn on the cob.

which is not only a place where we make assistants vanish,

but where we use magic tricks to study psychological processes,

such as attention, perception, deception and free will.

I am fascinated by the subtle factors that influence our choices,

and how understanding our flaws can give us back some power.

Magic tricks provide a powerful tool to investigate this,

First, we humans tend to go for the easiest decisions.

most people tend to choose the card that I want them to choose,

because I'm presenting it a bit longer than the others.

And it becomes the easiest option for your brain.

the majority of you probably chose the ten of hearts, right?

And a lot of other tricks are based on this principle

that our brain, not to say "we," tends to be a bit lazy.

The exercise we did with the four cards is also a good example of this.

It's based on another trick I investigated,

where I ask participants to physically push

We found that around 60 percent of people choose the third card from the left,

they typically chose the second card from the left.

This is based on the easy-option principle again,

is the most easy to reach by the dominant hand.

would end up with one of these two numbers,

the two most probable things you would end up with.

It's also about how we are influenced in our day-to-day lives.

play with your mind as well, all the time,

because they also know that we tend to choose and like

choosing a bottle of wine or a bag of rice

only at the ones that are on the shelves in front of your eyes, right?

Did you know that many brands actually negotiate

to be at eye-level on grocery store shelves

And this is a tactic that many politicians use.

When information is right in front of our eyes on social media,

and it absolutely affects our voting behaviors.

Political outcomes, such as the Brexit referendum

were heavily influenced by targeted advertising,

disproportionately easily accessible and visible to specific audiences

Some simple factors have an impact on how influencible we are.

In an experiment using the trick with the four cards,

we found that explicitly informing participants

can actually lead them to make more deliberate decisions,

as opposed to behaving in the way we are trying to make them behave.

I either simply asked participants to push one of the cards,

the percentage of people who impulsively chose the most reachable one

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Secrets of the mind and free will -- revealed by magic tricks | Alice Pailhès

perception

subtle

instinct

present