The Groove Issue 81 - How To Use Magic To Expand Your Creative Mind
HOW TO USE MAGIC TO EXPAND YOUR CREATIVE MIND
If you’ve ever been to a magic show, you know that magicians have one job: to create wonder for their audiences. I myself have been fascinated by the concept of magic and set out to do some research on how magicians can stimulate creative thinking, regardless of your area of expertise.
Create Cognitive Dissonance
Francisco Goya, Witches in Flight, 1797-8.
Good magicians defy expectations and perform tricks that seem impossible and illogical. This triggers “cognitive dissonance” in the spectator, which is explained as the perception of contradictory information. Remember when David Copperfield “disappeared” the Statue of Liberty? How could that have been done?
What this does to you, if you are open to the experience, is encourage you to think beyond what’s possible, which in turn expands your imagination. This was proven by a study conducted in 2013 where the participants were exposed to counter-stereotypical people and then reported coming up with better ideas.
A different series of studies showed that children who watched fantasy movies like Harry Potter scored higher on originality tests than those who didn’t. Watching magical content helps develop novel and counterfactual solutions to a problem.
But this didn’t stop with kids. Through in-class magic performances and studying tricks, Tong Li teaches graduate and undergraduate students to leave behind all their preconceived notions and think outside the box. It generally works, as creativity is all about seeing things differently and then acting on those perceptions.
Add Mystery
Hilma af Klint, Altarpieces: Group X, No. 1, Altarpiece (1915).
Adrian Westaway is a successful designer and consultant with clients like Google, Nokia and Lego. He was first a magician and then an engineer. He has said that he uses the thought process of magicians as a way to design the experience around the products his agency creates, and that it’s rather important to conceal the inner workings so that the user can focus on the experience at hand the way magicians do.
Mystery is one of the most important elements in magic; a magician never discloses how things are done and they keep adding new tricks to their repertoire.
Companies that continue adding new offerings and showing the best of their products to the world without having to go into all the nitty-gritty details of how things happen internally, always outperform and outlive their competitors. Think of Tesla - Elon Musk has sworn to never file a patent for the electric car as he knows it will be copied.
Dissolve The Boundaries of Reality
Remedios Varo, The Juggler (The Magician), 1956.
Artists have always been alchemists and magicians, turning blank canvases and raw materials into the stuff of dreams. But so are marketers and creative directors who are trying to sell their products to a consumer who is both overwhelmed and jaded in an overly saturated market.
Remedios Varo, the Spanish-born surrealist painter who was also deeply into science and magic, did this with her work.
She collapsed many of her interests like those contained in a 1960 book called The Morning of Magicians in her paintings: “Modern science has shown that behind the visible there exists an extremely complicated invisible. A table, a chair, a starry sky, are in fact radically different from our ideas of them.” There were no boundaries for Varo. That’s how she was always able to amaze her collectors and her audiences even years later after her death.
If you are able to create surprise and wonderment with whatever you do, in the way a magic show does, you have already created an opening to catch people’s attention, which is the most difficult thing to do these days.
By the same token, keeping your inner child alive with movies, books or shows that delve deeply into magic scenarios have been proven to provide much more than just entertainment and should be taken seriously as gateways for creativity in business and art.
My book was nominated for The Next Big Idea Club!
If you don’t know them, you should! The Next Big Idea Club is the most important nonfiction book club in the US.
Every year, out of 100,000 nonfiction books that are published in this country, they choose a few to highlight to their community of readers and subscribers. This is really a true honor and a win and I’ll be developing some content for their podcast and website in the next few days.
If you have enjoyed The Groove you will really love my book, and if you have already finished reading it, please consider leaving an honest review on Amazon even if you didn’t buy the book there.
This is truly important for authors as reviews on Amazon are read by professors, libraries and other readers and definitely helps with discoverability for other readers too.
Thank you so much!
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.
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