Illuminated

Continuing on the Imp talk from yesterday, I’ve recently found a good one for use in the Spectator as Magician/Mindreader plot.

I’ve long argued that this premise needs some added element to it, or it’s just transparent to people. When we tested that notion, that proved to be the case.

And of course that’s the case. When they give the football to the Make-A-Wish kid and he scores a touchdown, he might feel he accomplished something, but that’s because he’s seven. An adult wouldn’t be like, “Well, I guess I’m now great at football!”

Similarly, if you tell someone, “You’re going to read my mind,” and do a trick with that premise, they’re not going to think, “Well, I guess this nice young magician just showed me that I have a power I’ve never exhibited before and never will again.”

I mean, that’s fine if you’re just looking to dress up the trick a little. “I’ll read your mind, then you read mine.” If you’re just using it as a throwaway premise, you don’t need to put much effort into it. (But also don’t expect to get too much out of it.)

If we want to genuinely mess with people’s minds a little and get them to at least consider the idea that they did something truly out of the ordinary, then they need to be subjected to something that will seemingly affect them in some manner. Something on the edge of plausibility.

Thomas H., recently wrote me about an app called Lumenate. This is a “light therapy” app where you sit in a dark room and hold the phone up to your closed eyes and the flashlight of your phone flashes in such a way that… well… here’s how the makers of the app describe it:

Lumenate uses research-backed light sequences from your phone's flashlight to neurologically guide you into an altered state of consciousness between that of deep meditation and classic psychedelics.

That may all be horse-shit, but I will say that using this app you definitely get a sense of: “This is different.”. It produces a kind of psychedelic-kaleidoscopic light show on the inside of your closed eyelids. And whether or not it actually has any effect on your brain, it certainly seems reasonable that it could.

You can get the app for free. There’s paid plans, but you don’t need them for our purposes.

Now, what you don’t want to do is tell people you have this secret technology that’s going to affect them in some particular way. You don’t want the chance of them saying “Oh, is this the Lumenate app?”

The approach I take is to tell people there’s an app that uses rhythmic light flashes to affect brainwaves. And I have a “friend” who has discovered a way to “hack” the usage of the app so that it can produce some interesting results. I then have them use the app, but I hold the phone for them and I move it nearer and close to their closed eyes at set times. The idea being that changing the distance of the light source in some predetermined manner can help “tune” the person’s brain for a particular ability (heightened intuition, photographic memory, etc.)

I don’t make them go through a full session on the app, which is 10 minutes. And I don’t have them listen to the audio from the app. I just do it for a few minutes and talk through it with them myself. You want to make sure it’s not too intense for them. And, of course, if they have some sort of sensitivity to flashing lights, you would never do this for them.

Altogether, it makes for a perfect little interaction. The Lumenate app will be a new experience for most people, followed by (ideally) some sort of amazing happening. And because—as you explain to them—the abilities they gain will wear off after a few minutes, they are no loose ends for them to pick at later on. They can assume it must have all been a trick. But they can’t ever quite dismiss the possibility that maybe for a few minutes they had telekinetic powers (or whatever ability you endowed them with).