Usually, 'magical thinking' is a reference to fooling yourself into believing something that isn't possible,  but Mark Mason suggests that solving the mystery of how magic tricks work can help you think more effectively.  He's running team building sessions where he performs tricks, then helps those present work together to uncover how the trick was performed. Mark says that he reveals mental techniques that will let you solve pretty well any trick you’ll see in the future - and that these techniques can be applied to problems you’ll encounter at work and in life more generally. As I know there are a lot of blog posts out there that are really paid adverts, I ought to stress I'm not being paid to publicise this, and I only know Mark as a reader who contacted me previously about my book Inflight Science .  What interested me here was that in the period between working in Operational Research and computing in British Airways and becoming a full time writer, I ran crea...

I have always been fascinated by magic, whether in its use in fiction or beliefs about magic. As I read more popular science than anything (and because I was sent a review copy) I had got it into my head that this was a book on the practice of and attitude to magic from a scientific, analytical viewpoint - looking at what was believed and why they believed it. However, the actual book was very different from this, and I suspect it will only appeal to a very narrow readership. What Brian Copenhaver does is to take a series of texts: biblical, medieval and renaissance (but no modern ones) that reference magic in some way and gives us a brief commentary on each (usually just one paragraph) before quoting the document at length. I am sure from a scholastic viewpoint this is useful and may even be important, but I really can't see why it is being published by Penguin in a manner that implies it is for a general readership, because it certainly isn't. So unless you have the pat...

So  Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is finished and it's hard not to add 'thank goodness'. It was never bad enough not to stick with it, but it came close. The trouble with adapting an over-long book that is intriguing and irritating in equal measures is that unless you take liberties with the script you end up with exactly the same kind of TV show. And they did. The series could have been condensed from 7 hours to 3 without significant loss. The good news for those of us who hung on to the end was that the last episode was by far the best - far more engaging than some of its predecessors. In fact, there was a lot in principle to like about the show. The CGI was surprisingly good, and the actors universally did an excellent job. There were striking set pieces throughout - it's just that for a lot of the episodes there was far more exposition and repetition than there was any real progression to the plot. The other big problem was that the two most interesti...

James Randi Over the years, magicians like Harry Houdini and James Randi have shown time and again that they have ideal skills for spotting and debunking fraudulent claims of magical abilities and mental powers. In the Telegraph yesterday , though, Will Storr had a go at 'debunking the king of the debunkers', demonstrating that Randi himself, now 87 (according to his article, or 86 according to Wikipedia), was not all he seemed. For me, this was a wonderful example of entirely missing the point. Storr makes three main accusations. That Randi has at some point been doubtful about the science behind climate change, that he was intolerant to drug users and that he had lied about replicating Rupert Sheldrake's dog experiments, in which Sheldrake claims to have shown that at dog was able to predict when its owner would return home. The first two, frankly, are hardly worth considering as they are classic type failure errors. Being good at debunking fraudulent psychics doe...

I'm currently reading Philip Ball's new book Invisible for review (you can find out more about it at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com ) and there is a very interesting, if slightly pointed remark about magic books in it. Ball says: 'Magical books thus acquired the same talismanic function as a great deal of the academic literature today: to be read, learned, cited, but never used.' I did rather enjoy the dig at poor old academics, though there is an element of truth to make that dig stick. But I was also interested in the idea that these kind of books weren't really meant to be used. I was familiar with some of the early versions, as Roger Bacon was fond of one of the many (now known to be fake) books over the years called something like 'Secret of Secrets', usually claiming to be the wisdom of some ancient seer - in Bacon's case of Hermes Tresmegistus , a fabled mystic who seemed to combine Ancient Greek and Ancient Egyptian wisdom in one soggy whole...

In my book, Extra Sensory , I describe how the magician James Randi reproduced a trick that Uri Geller did on the Barbara Walters show in the US. The source I had, involved Randi carefully not telling us how he did the trick, so in the book I speculate how he might have done it. In the trick, Walters draws a picture and seals it up. Randi concentrates, then appears to draw on a pad, then puts his pen down. Walters opens up her envelope and shows it to the camera. Randi then, almost immediately shows a similar drawing. Here's what I said: What we see when watching the show is Randi apparently drawing his copy of the picture on a pad using a ball pen, before Walters reveals her picture. It is possible, even using the technique I’m going to suggest, that Randi did do a little drawing at that point in the proceedings – if so, what he produced was probably a basic box, which he could adapt later for whatever was needed. It’s equally possible that he didn’t draw anything, but merely ...

Blogs traditionally suffer from a fair number of spam comments, which try (feebly) to look like real comments, but are really just there to include a link to their own website. I didn't realize just how much this happened until I changed the www.popularscience.co.uk website into a format that allowed comments on each page and got absolutely inundated - probably at least 10 spam comments a day. So I signed up to a spam blocking service that's well-integrated with the WordPress environment I now use for that website. For months, all those comments were slammed into a holding area by the blocking service and I could see them building up more and more. But then they just stopped coming. For weeks now there hasn't been a single one. Somehow, the spam fairy is catching them before the blocker gets its hands on them. I thought initially that this was down to a change of approach by the blocker, simply trashing the spam rather than displaying its trophies. But now I'm not ...

I really thought I'd seen the back of Feng Shui with my posts decrying Heart FM's support for this nonsense and getting advertising on it from Facebook . But no, I really can't leave it alone after the latest coverage on Heart. The scenario is this. A single presenter from the Heart breakfast show wants to get some love life. So as a test, a Feng Shui 'expert' has been brought in. She is working the magic on his room and they will see if things get better. Obviously not scientific, but it won't stop them saying how wonderful Feng Shui is if the presenter gets a girlfriend. Okay, so what's the first thing the Feng Shui expert says? Tidy up (the place was a total tip), clean and declutter. Then they add in all the magic woo like crystals, statues and orientation. But hold hard there. Of course it's going to work if you tidy up, clean and declutter. This isn't Feng Shui, it's a Kim & Aggie Shoe-in. It's hardly a surprise someone will ha...

In my previous post I looked at why I don't like the way organic food makes dubious claims for its products. In this I want to uncover the way its rules are based more on magic than sense. There is no doubt that organics had a flaky origin, based more on mysticism than any real understanding of agriculture. In itself this isn't disastrous. Medicine's history is also flaky, based more on mysticism than any real understanding of how the body works, and we've shaken that off (mostly). But organics has kept too much of its mystical past, buried in the rules and regulations that organic farmers have to follow. Here are four examples. The EU tried to ban the fungicide copper sulphate, which is known to be more environmentally damaging than many alternatives. The ban was postponed because of lobbying by organic groups – they like copper sulphate because it’s traditional . All too often organic standards are not about what's best, but about what we've always don...

I was determined not to jump into the explosion of blog comments on Derren Brown 's lottery prediction trick - but something I heard yesterday has persuaded me to make the leap. For non-UK readers, Derren Brown is an illusionist, who last week 'predicted' the lottery results on national TV - then a couple of days later, explained that he had got these results by having a group of people guess them, averaging the results, and reiterating the process. Allegedly, as the group got to know each other, the results got better. I'm not bothered about the trick itself. Let's be clear - he didn't predict the lottery results, he showed them after they had already been broadcast, using a totally spurious legal argument as to why he couldn't show them before. So all the trick came down to was 'how did he transfer a set of numbers onto some balls quite quickly without us seeing?' - basic stage magic, nothing to do with seeing into the future. What really irritat...