Thinking Allowed

Going to Hell
by Jon Thompson

I’m going to Hell... apparently.

I run a Lulu.com storefront called Books By Tomo to distribute my work on Naked (prop-free) mentalism techniques and on the stripper deck. I sometimes receive some very interesting emails via the storefront. Here’s one:

“U R tooool a of satan man,” wrote one angry young Christian. At least, I’m guessing he or she considers they’re Christian. “Ur goin to hell for makin fools think there psyshic.” Charming, I must say. Someone else who regularly sends me a message simply writes, “SUFFER THY NOT A WITCH TO LIVE”.

“You Deny Your Lord Jesus Christ And Call Him Naked” says another rather confused correspondent, who took the trouble to capitalise every initial of every word in every sentence. His anger must be a reference to using Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawing “Vitruvian Man” on the front of Naked mentalism. The problem is, it’s not a picture of Christ. It’s a study of the heavenly proportions of the human body.

I get regular correspondence from psychics who’ve read the online introduction to Naked Mentalism and don’t like what psychology has to say about their abilities, but my favourite hate mail so far has to be the incomprehensibly muddled: “hey f*gg, peace off ni**er. i'm gonna kill you then r*pe you . f*ck you. peace off” Those are my asterisks, by the way.

I’d like to think that these people and others are jumping to conclusions after buying and reading my work, but alas, I suspect they’re simply enjoying a conclusion that makes them feel good about themselves, which is fine by me.

It’s fine because it’s predictable, and anything predictable is exploitable, but these responses also reveal the overwhelming flexibility of the human brain, how it conjures up the “ghost in the machine” and tells it what to think. The machine in question is an unbelievably complex organic system whose chief function is to imagine the world. It’s so complex that it has no problem whatsoever in imagining quite incredible things as utterly real. And yet, in evolving the overwhelming processing power it needs to do this, it’s also become incomparably efficient.

At a basic level, the human brain contains an average of 100 billion nerve cells of a bewildering array of types. Moderated by a rich set of neurotransmitters, these have evolved into sub-organs with highly specialised jobs. Around 1 million new connections grow between brain cells every second as new information floods in a rate of between 1 and 3 million new nerve impulses every second. So, this is a machine whose hardware is constantly being added to and upgraded as it adapts to a stream of experience. If you’re an adult, you may already have in the region of 500 trillion neural pathways connecting your mind together.

While the processing capacity of the average desktop computer currently stands at around 25 billion instructions per second, the human brain easily outstrips this by several orders of magnitude with the equivalent to 100 trillion instructions per second. Despite this, being massively parallel in what passes for its design, the brain’s basic building blocks run at only around 10 Hertz and the whole system requires no more energy per day than that contained in about 250 M&Ms. And yet, the brain has never touched, smelt, heard, seed or tasted anything. Everything it experiences, it does second-hand, just as the CPU in your computer has never felt you use the keyboard.

To explain this, I like to use the analogy of the human brain as a prisoner, born and kept in solitary confinement in a bone prison called The Skull. Five guards called the Senses keep the prisoner up-to-date with events in the world outside his cell. And yet, even this severely restricted flow of information allows the prisoner to create a richly imagined model of that world. He can infer new knowledge from what he already knows about that world, and by instructing the guards to act on his behalf, can test and use his understanding.

But the guards may be mistaken, or even worse, deliberately lying to the prisoner. How can the prisoner tell lies from truth? His only hope is to test the things the guards tell him against the only reference point he has – his model of reality. Unfortunately, this reference point isn’t real. It’s just an imagined model, and may contain mistakes.

I think this analogy provides a good model for what they’re up against if performers are to convince people that they really are the real thing, or anything else unusual for that matter. It shows how important it is to work with what the spectator’s “inner prisoner” already believes, not against it. That process, I think, starts with asking and listening, not concluding and insisting as my postbag suggests people are prone to do.

Jon Thompson