Thinking Like a Magician | Joshua Jay || Radcliffe Institute

In this performance-based lecture, the globe-trotting magician Joshua Jay pulls back the curtain on the way magicians think.

He explores how magicians create seemingly impossible feats and how to apply these same strategies to our lives and work. His demonstration and lecture explore how the techniques that undergird his effects—the guiding of attention, the framing of perception, and the staging of surprise—can give us fine-grained, practical insight into our own creative pursuits. And along the way, Jay mystifies us with some of his signature sleight-of-hand illusions.

0:01 Introduction by dean of the Radcliffe Institute, Tomiko Brown-Nagin
5:57 Reverse Logic
11:50 Misdirection (Hands)
16:47 Ring Revelation
18:43 Thinking Like a Magician
36:12 World Record Routine
41:41 Audience Q&A

This is a 2019–2020 Kim and Judy Davis Dean’s Lecture in the Humanities.

For information about the Radcliffe Institute and its many public programs, visit https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/.

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