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I've just been having a little nose at the responses on the Tech Savy thread and isn't it really interesting that, apart from me, everyone else seems to come from a scientific background?!

I've always considered magic a performing art, similar to music, theatre, dance, etc. Magic seems to be the only one that I've ever come across that appeals so heavily to the scientific types where with the others, you'll find more people from an arty, creative background. I don't really know where I'm going with this, just thinking aloud really but it is interesting that magic seems to attract a very different type of person.

Not a scientific background per se, more scientific and logical mindset.

I personally feel that for a performer arty, creative types are better suited than us logic monkeys as we are characteristically anti-social.

I agree with A_n_t; consider myself to have a logical/scientific/academic mindset, but have always studied subjects in the realm of the humanities and currently researching and teaching with the drama department of my university

Most of my knowledge and education is in the Arts and I don't know nuffink about science nor teknolidgy so bang goes that theory.

I'd agree with both Lady of Mystery and ANT, I am both a logical person and scientific (currently studying Computer Science at uni).
I am pretty much your bog standard geek.

Not techy at all. Very creative & imaginative. A day-dreamer. Not remotely interested in the real world. Likely to be found climbing through mirrors or wandering somewhere over the rainbow.

But then I'm not a magician.

themagicwand wrote:But then I'm not a magician.

Oh snap

@Lady of Mystery: perhaps it might help to ask what attracted people to magic/mentalism? As stated before, I would consider myself as analytical and have done coding and other 'techie' stuff in the past, but was drawn in by the performing arts aspect (staging/framing/audience) rather than science.

The tech savvy thread is not statistically significant. The people who have responded are a "self-selecting" group and I think that people who are comfortable dealing with formulae and understanding technical articles are more likely to reply than people who are not.

There have been only half a dozen responses to that thread, so I am going to put on my "real world" hat and suggest that this is might indicate that the magicians that come to this forum are often not from technical backgrounds (and/or can't be bothered to fill in such surveys). I thought about adding my answers, but weird things like medical skills being grouped with emotions and counselling, rather than science and logic, put me off. I also didn't understand the dividing lines between some of the possible replies. Hell, I didn't understand some of the questions - what is a "technical article" anyway? A doctor of medicine might struggle to follow a piece on how to construct a large hadron collider, for example.

Part-Timer wrote:The tech savvy thread is not statistically significant. The people who have responded are a "self-selecting" group and I think that people who are comfortable dealing with formulae and understanding technical articles are more likely to reply than people who are not.

There have been only half a dozen responses to that thread, so I am going to put on my "real world" hat and suggest that this is might indicate that the magicians that come to this forum are often not from technical backgrounds (and/or can't be bothered to fill in such surveys). I thought about adding my answers, but weird things like medical skills being grouped with emotions and counselling, rather than science and logic, put me off. I also didn't understand the dividing lines between some of the possible replies. Hell, I didn't understand some of the questions - what is a "technical article" anyway? A doctor of medicine might struggle to follow a piece on how to construct a large hadron collider, for example.

I agree, not a very scientific survey but I am only interested in getting a feel for the level of detail that should go into magic books. Are priniciples such as Galbraith explained in too simplistic a way for most magicians, or do we prefer the full technical paper with pages of scientific formulae ?

I also agree that any conclusions based on the few responses so far are NOT statistically significant.
However, I do have the suspicion that most magicians have a very strong grounding in maths and logic. The recent code breaking thread shows that we do have some very clever thinkers, but does that quality necessarily make us a good magician ?

There is the danger that is is only the magicians who use forums and respond to surveys and understand maths that will respond to the survey to confirm they have a good understanding of maths.

At the risk of getting this thread closed and permanently banned..[as happens with any discussion on sexism].. is it the male magicians who have the strong grounding in maths and the female magicians who are more artistic ?
[note: anyone who wants to develop that point in a non-scientific sexist way should be warned that Lommy kicks shins first and asks questions later... lol]

Have there been any scientific studies on the background and psychological make up of magicians ?
I often wonder what qualities we magicians all share and in which areas we all differ ?

I have a foot in both camps. I have a degree in biology and a diploma in cartooning. Hobbies include programming and crafts. So you'd better chalk me up as "undecided".

I agree that the "Tech Savvy" thread is rather self-selecting. The title sounds like it will be asking for help on a technical matter, and people who aren't interested or don't consider themselves capable of providing advice aren't likely even to open the thread and have a look.

I could enthuse about the cross pollination of ideas all day.

History is littered with the evidence that the greatest innovations happen at the interface between disciplines. Progress in is evolutionary, not revolutionary, though it may look that way. For example, I went to a SciBar lecture recently where the lecturer, who discovered that some dinosaurs had stripes, told us us that he'd never have made the breakthrough unless he'd been working at Manchester Uni. That's because it's organised in a deliberately loose faculty structure, so if you're talking to someone about their work in another area and they have a technique you realise might be useful to you, you're encouraged to collaborate across disciplines. In his case palaeontology and trace metal detection, which in turn yields useful information about how to safely store nuclear waste for millions of years. Genius!

This is why I know that people who desperately want to keep the subtypes of magic separate are just plain wrong. the most satisfying entertainment is always a blend. Though people can come up with new directions alone, it's generally when they get together, chat, collaborate and innovate that wonderful new effects happen. It never happens when people desperately try to stop that cross pollination happening.

I come from a firmly scientific background - physics and maths. That does not make me technically adept - I don't use technology as a rule, and live without DVDs, iphones, etc. I always felt that magic attracted nerds, which is why it would be of interest to those with a scientific background. This applies particularly to that breed of close-up performer who knows every move, and performs them without personality or humour.

Tomo wrote:I could enthuse about the cross pollination of ideas all day.

History is littered with the evidence that the greatest innovations happen at the interface between disciplines. Progress in is evolutionary, not revolutionary, though it may look that way. For example, I went to a SciBar lecture recently where the lecturer, who discovered that some dinosaurs had stripes, told us us that he'd never have made the breakthrough unless he'd been working at Manchester Uni. That's because it's organised in a deliberately loose faculty structure, so if you're talking to someone about their work in another area and they have a technique you realise might be useful to you, you're encouraged to collaborate across disciplines. In his case palaeontology and trace metal detection, which in turn yields useful information about how to safely store nuclear waste for millions of years. Genius!

This is why I know that people who desperately want to keep the subtypes of magic separate are just plain wrong. the most satisfying entertainment is always a blend. Though people can come up with new directions alone, it's generally when they get together, chat, collaborate and innovate that wonderful new effects happen. It never happens when people desperately try to stop that cross pollination happening.

I completely agree.

I'd also want to add that there is a distinction between people who use/study science and those who DO science. The latter, to be done properly, requires extreme creativity and curiosity. That is, doing science is a creative act and the more interests you have, the more creative opportunities you are exposed to.

Secondly, a good scientist has an insane curiosity for how stuff works, better yet for how the universe work. So it's not much surprising the appeal that magic has on scientific minded people: it stimulates our curiosity and poses a challenge. The exalted spirit that A_N_T felt after solving Ted's coding challenge is exactly what makes my job worth to be done: you can spend countless hours thinking about a difficult problem that you know (that's when intuition comes into play) you are going to solve. And when you finally succeed, the sensation is priceless. How different is that from having a first intuition of what effect you want to obtain and then spending your time actually trying to figure out how to reach that effect?

Then we could talk about reproducibility: if you are not able to reproduce an effect after you did it once, then that first time it was due to mere chance and you cannot claim you can do it. Am I talking about scientists or magicians?

The only real difference between scientists and magicians I can think of is a good dose of showmanship. But then, that's also what tells apart bad magicians from good magicians, isn't it?

Summing up: don't think that "scientific people" are not creative, they just apply their creativity in a different way (and not all of them: I myself have been in a classical choir, taken choir directing classes, attended theatre courses, studied literature, write a blog...). And I can tell that what appeals to me of my job as a mathematician is exactly that creative process and the challenges that it poses to my mind. I mostly blame the schools and bad teachers for the image of aridness that mathematics have. And in my opinion the reason for which people with a scientific mindset are attracted to magic is their perpetual struggle to understand to which extent they can push the limits of what human being can do and what the human mind can know.

I close this too long post with the third of Clarke's laws, which I think applies well to science in general:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

TonyB wrote:. I always felt that magic attracted nerds, .

I think that's pretty much hit the nail on the head there. Magic really requires obsession so obsessed people are drawn to it. Arty people are drawn to the performance of it whereas your more scientific techy people are drawn to the puzzles.

We should celebrate that it creates this delightful cross-over of two things which are often viewed as being opposed to each other.

MiKo wrote:Summing up: don't think that "scientific people" are not creative, they just apply their creativity in a different way (and not all of them: I myself have been in a classical choir, taken choir directing classes, attended theatre courses, studied literature, write a blog...). And I can tell that what appeals to me of my job as a mathematician is exactly that creative process and the challenges that it poses to my mind. I mostly blame the schools and bad teachers for the image of aridness that mathematics have. And in my opinion the reason for which people with a scientific mindset are attracted to magic is their perpetual struggle to understand to which extent they can push the limits of what human being can do and what the human mind can know.

It's at this point I feel compelled to quote the lovely Jacob Bronowski on science:

Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known. We always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgement in science stands on the edge of error and it is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.

Einstein also played the violin and piano, Feynman played bongos in a strip club and later painted just to see if he could do it, Borodin was a chemist who also wrote beautiful music, William Herschel and his sister ground their own telescope lenses and discovered a new planet when he wasn't playing a church organ in Bath. Creativity is creativity. The guy who discovered the structure of benzine (can't remember his name) had a dream about snakes eating their own tails. Fred Hoyle wrote sci fi. James Clarke Maxwell wrote terrible poetry. Paul Erdos was an itinerant with a taste for amphetamines. Turing used running as a meditation and laid the foundations for the computer, for artificial intelligence, and even evolutionary biology.

None of these people worked in isolation, and neither do creative magicians. When ideas cross pollinate, amazing things happen, because ideas are subject to evolution. You can't insist that knowledge stays in individual boxes and use words like "magician" as a term of abuse to try to reinforce those boxes. That's foolish and wrong. It is the way of huge reading lists designed to put people off, and of needing to control something one does not own, rather than of revelling in the progress being made. Play, experiment, explore, and publish. Bad ideas fall by the wayside; good ones augment (not replace) the existing good ideas and we all move forward. The essential mutation needed for evolution comes from other, unrelated knowledge you already have, happy accidents, and even misconceptions, so it's never a game of diminishing returns. Darwin was right: evolution scales.