I know a guy who is convinced this guy he knows can bend spoons. I can bend spoons too, and I’m just guessing here that you probably can as well. The difference, of course, is that this guy, the Guy Who Bends Spoons, does it with his mind. Just like Uri Gellar.
Of course, Uri Gellar was a liar and a fraud, but that’s beside the point. This other guy really can do it, I’m sure. I’m positive he would never, ever, ever play a trick on his unsuspecting and apparently rather gullible friends.
First of all, if you had psychic powers, and I mean… real psychic powers, the ability to move things with your mind, telekinesis if you will… wouldn’t you use them for something a little more impressive than bending spoons and doing card tricks?
The fact is that these sorts of things are parlor tricks. Sleight of hand, generally.
Point #1: If he really was bending the spoon with his mind, and not his hands, he wouldn’t need to touch the spoon. Maybe our magician would make the argument that he needs to have some sort of physical contact with the object in order to use his mind powers on it. I don’t buy it, but sure. Then he should be able to bend the spoon with his mind while laying one pinky on it.
Point #2: Just because you can’t figure out how it’s done doesn’t mean it’s magic. I have no idea how David Copperfield did his tricks, but I can be fairly confident that he didn’t actually make the Statue of Liberty vanish, and couldn’t actually fly. Just because I can’t catch the “trick” of the guy bending the spoon, doesn’t mean he’s doing it psychically. As Richard Feynman said,
“the weakest position to be in is to think that you are cleverer than the other guy, and that he can’t fool you. Because a good magician can do something shouldn’t make you right away jump to the conclusion that it’s a real phenomenon; you need a helluva lot more rigidity. And you’ll find out that 99.9 – 100 percent of the time it’s not something strange, it’s not something mysterious, but something ordinary, a trick! But it’s fun to find the trick, and the only way to find the trick is to be damn sure it’s a trick, and not to be ready to think that it might not be, because otherwise you slip too easy.” (You can read the rest of Feynman’s story about meeting Uri Gellar here.)
Point #3: I am pretty certain that ESP is not real. However, the argument I often hear is this one: “We only use 10% of our brain, therefore the brain must have all sorts of other abilities.” Uh, wrong. My stepdad has said, and I think this is a good point, that if you only use 10% of your brain, you should be able to cut out the other 90% and the only difference will be that you are suddenly incapable of ESP or other psychic powers. Who here thinks that’s really the case? I don’t know about you, but I’m not in a big rush to go lobotomize myself. Removing 90% of your brain would kill you, because the fact is — you don’t use 10%, 30%, 50% or even 90% of your brain — you use 100% of it. You need your brain. Saying “We don’t use most of our brain and/or we don’t know what most of the brain does… therefore, it could be capable of ESP” is not a justification for believing ESP. It’s an argument from ignorance, it makes no sense, and it doesn’t prove anything. You might as well say, “I don’t know what moon is made of, therefore it could be made of green cheese.” That’s an extreme example, but you see my point.
I have a strong suspecion that The Guy Who Bends Spoon is having one hell of a laugh at the expense of The Guy Who Believes Him. It’s a conjuror’s trick, it is not real. If you do a search on line, you can in fact learn how to do the trick. I kind of want to learn to do it, so I can demonstrate to The Guy Who Believes that it is what it is: a trick, sleight of hand. Not paranormal.
Related links: Feynman visits Uri Gellar, James Randi exposes Uri Gellar (YouTube Video).
