A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.

Edward de Bono

One of my favorite activities lately has been attending magic shows with laymen friends. I get to pick up a few new performance ideas and get my finger on the pulse of the art as it’s actually being performed (as opposed to what’s being pushed by magic retailers and in Facebook groups) and I also get to vicariously enjoy that feeling of astonishment by seeing my friends react to what’s happening.

But since they are my friends, I can then directly solicit their opinions for an outside perspective on magic and hopefully attenuate my judgement of what works, what kills, and what falls flat. What good are theory tomes written by magicians if they aren’t backed up by at least some empirical data. I’m “doing my own research” as a person who insists on building and launching his own rocket to take pictures before accepting the Earth is round might say.

You might be able to guess what I’ve been asking about lately given the content of my last post. I want to get a grasp of what aspects of a magical performance are memorable. What sticks with the audience one week, one month, one year after the fact? Having decided what sorts of things we want to be remembered, how can we make sure that they stick in memory as long as possible?

What do we want an audience to remember?

Do we want the audience to come away remembering a specific effect? A moral or narrative? Or just the general impression that they were astounded and flabbergasted?

It is far more important for the audience to remember the performer, the artist, than it is for them to remember the tricks!

Gary Kurtz

My discussions have revealed that the number one thing a spectator will recall is how showmanship was deployed. What were the elements of the experience as a whole? And how did the magician interact with audience members? What kind of a person, what kind of a personality did the magician bring to the show? These are the very first things that come to mind even just minutes later, a month later, a year later. What Gary Kurtz said an audience should remember is at least half of what they will remember if they remember anything at all—in the context where he intended it to apply.

This fact is generally applicable to the artist who is likely never going to see this audience again. What they leave an audience with at the end of the show is the most they will ever have and the impression they give of themselves is entirely what was conveyed in that hour they were together. Such a magician should be looking to directly engage with as many audience members as possible and to engage as many of their senses as possible in as many novel and unexpected ways as possible. To paraphrase Gary: the individual effects don’t matter nearly as much as the atmosphere and attitude of the experience as a whole. How to do that could be the subject of an entire article on its own. Shoot me an email if that kind of thing is of interest to you.

But let’s say that you’d rather your audience remember a particular effect or the narrative surrounding it. You want to center the possibility of a magical world rather than yourself, the artist presenting it. What can you do to keep those kinds of memories alive?

Take A Picture—It’ll Last Longer

We’ve already discussed the best kinds of physical mementos that help in this regard, and my discussions have confirmed that those principles do actually apply to lay audiences. So let’s get into other things that stretch the forgetting curve.

The first, most obvious, possibly most important one is the one to which many magicians are the most opposed to the extent that it’s expressly forbidden in most magic venues: allowing audiences to take pictures and videos of the performance. People who want to remember exactly what happened have no better way to remind themselves what happened than to look up a photo or video they took of the event. Of course, big-time stage magicians aren’t going to allow that because they might want to one day sell a video of their performance, and they can’t do that if social media is already flooded with such videos. And people who do sleight-heavy stuff that requires carefully orchestrated direction of attention don’t want to allow video since the camera never looks away.

But if you want someone to remember the events as they actually happened, allow them—no, encourage them or even force them—to record a video. If the constraints of the method make video an impossibility, incorporate photo-taking into the performance at least.

Try this experiment yourself: perform something for someone and let them record it. Come to them a few months later and ask them if they remember what happened that day. See how long it takes them to start bringing up the video on their phone. Don’t prompt them to do so. Just ask them to describe what they remember and watch them dive into their phone’s archive on their own.

Setting the Scene

Studies show memories of events are pinned to specific stimuli, and the more unique a stimulus is to a particular event, the easier it will be to recall. Memories can be tied to certain sounds, pieces of music, and smells, but most of all, they can be tied to a complex of sensations—a physical space. This is the reason seeing a place you’ve only been to once before can immediately call to mind a memory of a significant event that’s happened in that place. Meanwhile, the rooms in your own home do no such thing. Too much of your life, too many events, have passed there, so no one of them stands out as being associated with that space.

So how can you exploit this fact? Do whatever you can to make the space you perform in stand out, to look, feel, smell, and sound like no place your audience has ever been. Use unique set pieces, dramatic lighting, custom music. Perform next to an enormous sculpture and incorporate it into your performance. If you’re performing in your own house, temporarily redecorate—in a manner that is “required” for the performance, of course—so that the room has a completely different vibe than it ever has or ever will again. Fill it with unique and eye-catching things, fun or perplexing. Make it clear that this is the only time the audience will ever get to see this. Let them take pictures of the space even if you don’t want them taking pictures during the performance.

The space itself becomes a hook in their minds, and if the objects in the space played a part in the effects, memory of those objects will also be reminders of the effects themselves. If you explain how the features of the space connect to the narrative you are weaving with your performance, they will serve as a reminder of that world you have built.

The Long Con

Now, supposing you’re performing for someone that you expect to perform for again, you have a significant advantage for fostering memorability. You can perform several related effects for the same people over a period of time, each one serving as a reminder of the ones that have come before. Use a narrative and theme to connect them so as to justify specifically bringing up and rehearsing the events that came before. We have suggested already at least one framework you can use to this end: The Forgotten Library. Once you’ve used this prelude to set up an effect, you can later tell your victim that you just got a new page translated and want to try it out. And then again with something harder. As many times as you like.

But I’m not suggesting you try to follow up on something you did a year before out of the blue. At that point, you’d likely just be telling someone what happened as they have already forgotten most of it. If you’re trying to tell a story about real magic that has happened to both of you, it may even be weird that you remember what happened so well. After all, a year after seeing a performance is long enough for someone to say “Oh, yeah, remember when Mac King ate his hamster?” even though Mac King definitely performs with a guinea pig.

Research into spaced repetition shows that each reminder of something flattens the forgetting curve slightly. What this means is that your first reminder needs to be fairly shortly after the events—maybe a week at most—and then again in a month, again a few months later. Each reminder can be later than the last, but the first few have to be pretty soon after.

Here’s a possible sequence of events you could use to foster the memory you want your mark to have:

• 2 Days Later: Call your mark casually with a question about the effect they saw. “I’m working on the thing you saw again and trying to get it to happen more quickly. About how long were you holding it before it finally vanished?”
• 2 Weeks Later: Text your mark a video of you trying to perform something slightly more difficult than what they saw and not quite succeeding. “I tried to do it with a bigger coin. It shrank down a lot but refused to vanish all the way. Not sure what the problem is. Should I give up and work on something else?”
• 4 Months Later: Invite your mark over again and show them something else, but ask them to remind you exactly what it was you showed them last time. “Oh yeah! I remember. I think I’ve gotten a lot better since then. I don’t like the way that version looked with the… [insert details that they seem to have forgotten]”
• 2 Years Later, at a house party with others listening: “Oh yeah, you were the one who helped me figure out how to do that thing. Maybe you can explain to these guys what happened? I don’t want to bore you making you listen to me tell them stuff you already know.”

And even maybe that much reminding is overkill. If you’ve gotten all the other details for memorability right, you’ll likely only need a couple of reminders to get it lodged in their memory forever.