Strange Powers - Some Hidden Benefits

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I know that in the last post I mentioned that it is pretty much impossible to explain to immature minds what the benefits of learning math or any other skill is.

But I assume if your a Math Mojo reader, you have a pretty mature mind. (Cool sentence, eh? I get to flatter both you and me at the same time!)

So here are a few examples of concrete benefits I have gained from using “strange powers of the mind.” These are not necessarily the same benefits you will have. Everyone will experience different benefits. (Mileage may vary.)

In the last post, I mentioned:

“For me, it’s a sort of warm-up exercise to get me into the creative, non-judgemental flow of opening my mind. This helps let answers come to me that my mind would otherwise have blocked out. It makes thinking less of a chore and more of a ‘party in my mind.’”

Write to me, baby

Years ago, when I was going through a rough patch in life, I spoke to a friend from San Francisco on the phone. She told me to try this: Get a pad and a pen, go to a quite place, take a few deep breaths, and write a letter from your “inner child” to yourself, using your non-dominant hand. (Yes, of course she was from San Francisco.)

Actually, the exercise helped. I should do it more often. That was a benefit, but it’s not something I recommend to everyone, because it is a little on the “airy-fairy” side, and I feel silly recommending New Age (rhymes with sewage) stuff to anyone, even when it works. That’s the old skeptic in my magician’s bones at work there.

“Pick a card…”

On a more concrete level, the benefit I got from the exercise was a magic effect. (”Effect” is the preferred word of magicians to “trick.”)

The trick I came up with was this: A spectator is invited on stage, and invited to ask his “inner child” to write, with his non-dominant hand, something on a pad of paper. She’s to close her eyes, take some deep breaths, and begin scribbling with her non-dominant hand on the pad for a minute or two. Not to try to write anything that makes sense, just to regress to her, say, four year-old self (before she learned how to write) and scribble with abandon.

After she does that, she places the pad face down on the table. At this point, she picks a card from a deck of cards, or thinks of a favorite song, the name of a special relative, or something of that nature, that the magician could not possibly know. She is to say it out loud, or not.

Then she is invited to look at what she scribbled. To stare into it deeply, and say anything strange that she notices.

At this point, a typical reaction from the spectator is that she screams. She at least gasps with surprise. When asked what she saw, she says that she saw that she clearly had written what she named.

Considering that at the time she wrote, she had no Idea what she would be asked to think about later, this is an amazing trick.

If I told you, I’d have to kill you

Of course I’m not going to explain how it’s done. (Explanations for magic effects are offered strickly on a need-to-know basis.)

My point is, by simply trying to do something “useless” (writing with my non-dominant hand) I gleaned a benefit that I could never have known I would get. It’s like the trick itself. The spectator does something that seems useless, only to find something amazing about it later.

“… and as you read this, you can relax, and wonder what you will learn…”

That was a paraphrase of one of Milton Erickson’s signature hypnotic induction lines.

Years after I developed the above-mentioned magic effect, I learned that Milton Erickson, the brilliant clinical hypnotist, used something very similar as a therapeutic technique. Naturally, he didn’t use (or even have to use) the “something extra” (read: “trick”) I used to accomplish my effect. His method was much more subtle and effective.

An Unexpected Math Benefit

Very early in my magic career, some time while I was still in high-school, I bought a book which is one of the great classics of magic. It’s called, “Close-Up Card Magic,” by the great Harry Lorayne. Yes, that’s the same Harry who is the guy who kicked off the memory-craze in the seventies with “The Memory Book.”)

In that book, there was an effect by the even greater Dai Vernon, which used a specific magic concept to create an impossible card effect. It was “elegant.” There was no “pick a card,” no perceivable sleight-of-hand moves, nothing suspicious at all. The magic just seemed to “happen.”

The concept depended upon a certain mathematical permutation of order of the cards. There was no “set-up,” or anything like that. It was pure, elegant math. I’d never seen anything like that before. I got totally involved with the concept, not in order to “learn math,” but in order to be able to do this amazing trick.

You can’t stop me, Teach!

Never in my life would I have thought that I would become interested in math for math’s sake. Of course, when I tried to bring this concept up to my high-school algebra teacher, she shrugged it off, because it was not part of the curriculum. She seemed to think that that was not a good enough thing for math to be used for. Fortunately for me my love of magic was strong enough to deflect my teacher’s ignorance of education. I became very good at using the concept of that trick to accomplish many other pretty cool magic effects.

And that lead (albeit very slowly) to my further interest in arcane math concepts to achieve seemingly impossible feats. (Someday I’ll have to write another book for magicians about this.)

So what’s the point? The point is, you could have never convinced me, at say, sixteen, that I’d ever need math for doing what I was interested in then. But if a teenage magician can end up using math for something that means so much for him, there’s obviously no telling what you could put math (or some other skill) to use for you to accomplish.

Math is an adventure. Math isn’t a test, it’s not about competition, it opens many possibilities that you never would have dreamed of before, and once those possibilities are opened, your life becomes even more of an adventure.

Work on some strange powers today. Warm up with some non-dominant-handed scribbling, then maybe open some math book that you’ve been avoiding, and try some examples. Better yet, hie thee to a bookstore and play around in the math section. Look for non-textbooks. Here are some names of authors to look for:

• Martin Gardner
• Ivars Peterson
• John Allen Paulos
• Keith Devlin
• John Conway
• Lancelot Hogben
• Theoni Pappas
• Isaac Asimov

Not necessarily in that order.

That should keep you busy till next time.

Hotcha!

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