Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

Alan Perlis

In Self-Working Coin Magic, Karl Fulves poses the following puzzle: Can you arrange six pennies on the table so that each coin is touching four others?

It’s not a particularly difficult puzzle. A mathematician might note “Ah, you’re describing an octahedral graph. So maybe we can model an octahedron in coins by flattening it!” They’ll pretty quickly come up with one of a couple of very simple solutions:

So, what was Fulves’ intended solution? Behold this abomination:

Welcome to the final post in our series on memorability. In the last post, Jerry referenced the “Magic By The Numbers” survey, and in particular, the open-ended question that was used to explore what magical audiences expect to get from a live show. While the raw responses are not available, the summary does not mention any pattern of people seeking to “create memories” or similar. Assuming this is not just an oversight of the researchers, it is reasonable to conclude memorability is a misguided goal that magicians pursue for no good reason.

Or is it?

As magicians, we recognize that a really good performance will be remembered, and we want our own tricks to be among those performances that stick with someone. In my last post on the subject, I explored the sort of tactics a magician could take if they were entirely focused on optimizing the memorability metric. But as Jerry has so clearly elucidated, that is not a particularly useful approach. And yet, the fact remains, we still want our performances remembered!

I’m not arguing that you shouldn’t care about whether or not your performance is remembered. If you, your tricks, the world you wrought, or the story you told sticks with your audiences, that is undeniably a good thing. I’m only cautioning against going all-in on optimizing for memorability. In particular, it should not be allowed to stand in the way of sacrificing the number one most important thing: giving the audience what it wants.

Let’s look a bit closer at what the survey found when it set out to find exactly what it is audiences want. To quote:

Twenty-five percent of people, in their own words, like the element of surprise best. People of all backgrounds, genders, and ages valued surprise more than they valued being amazed.

Joshua Jay

Survey participants listed things like amazement, mystery, curiosity, showmanship, and skill, but a plurality of them wanted, along with or before any of that, to be surprised. So ought we give up focusing on doing memorable things and instead focus on doing surprising things?

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?