The Power of Forgetting (35 page)

If player 2 is stumped at this point, she would challenge player 1, who would state STAMMER. Player 2 now has to record a G. But if player 2 does think of STAMMER, she would say S-T-A-M-M-E. Now it’s player 1’s job to think of another word, because if he spells out STAMMER he will lose. Player 2 took control of the word. It’s strategy in action. So the name of the game is trying to outwit your opponent and get him to finish spelling the word.

Throwing a party this weekend? Then master the art of this one beforehand, and when people look like they need a new form of entertainment late into the evening, bring out a deck of cards.

To perform the following, have a full (without the jokers), newly shuffled deck of cards in your hand facedown.
Pick three people and have them sit across from you at a table. Each person will pull a card out of your deck and look at it (without showing you), and then you’ll place each card facedown in front of each respective person. You can even designate each person with their card: person 1’s card, person 2’s card, and person 3’s card. I’ll use this labeling system in describing the rest of the trick. Here’s what we have so far:

Player 1’s Card

Player 2’s Card

Player 3’s Card

Now you’re ready for the trick:

This trick is a lot easier than it plays out on paper here. To see a video of this trick in action, go to
www.MikeByster.com
and watch how it’s done. Then you’ll be able to remember the steps and do this trick yourself.

This game is great for a group of people. Position your friends in a circle. Designate someone as the starter (that can be you), who begins the game by saying the number “1.” Going around the circle, each person will call out the next number in sequence. So the second person in the circle will say “2,” the next person will say “3,” and so on. But here’s the catch: certain numbers cannot be said. The banned numbers are:

If one of the banned numbers comes up when it’s your turn to say a number, you say “Buzz” instead. If you say the banned number, you’re disqualified and must step out of the game. The goal of the game is to reach a high number, and the last person in the circle wins!

This game can be played at different levels of intensity and difficulty. For instance, you can up the ante and add another set of banned numbers; that’s where the “Bizz” part comes into play. You’ll say “Bizz” for certain numbers and “Buzz” for others. It all gets even trickier when you have to account for numbers that could go either way. For example, if you designate all numbers with a 7 in them as Buzz numbers and all multiples of 7 and digits that add up to 7 as Bizz numbers, then there will be times when your number meets the criteria for both kinds of banned numbers, in which case you say “Bizz-Buzz.” Once this game speeds up to a rapid-fire pace, you’ll be surprised at how many times the players happen upon a random number combo that they don’t catch as a Bizz-Buzz moment.

Did you know that there are 676 combinations of three-letter words with one letter in a certain spot? I know, it sounds impossible, but it’s true. According to the mathematical rule of combinations, the fact that there are 26 letters in the alphabet means that there are 26 times 26 different combinations—and potential words—that can be created if one letter remains constant in all of those combinations. Don’t panic if this sounds confusing. Once you go through the motions of this game—which gets your mind thinking
fast
—you’ll understand
what I mean as your mind spins through the combinations.

You need just one partner, a piece of paper, and a writing implement.

Below are two piles of “clues”:

What you’ll do is pick one letter from the top row and one number from the bottom row. Let’s say you choose the letter
L
and the number 1. Now you have to try to come up with as many three-letter words as you can that start with the letter
L
(in other words, that have
L
in the first position), as in:

Or let’s say you choose the letter
R
and the number 2. The list begins:

Ideally, this game is played with a partner and you time each other. The person who can create a comprehensive list of words from the same set of clues in the shortest amount of time wins!

The next trick I am going to teach you wouldn’t be complete without a brief tangential discussion of optical illusions (not that I want to give away my trick before explaining it!).

The following images illustrate that we cannot always trust our visual perception—what we see isn’t always what we get! The components of an object can distort the
perception
of the complete object. In other words, our brains can interpret what we see differently from what’s really there, for several reasons. For one, there can be design elements or background patterns that affect how our eyes see a certain image. Or we can be thrown off as a result of thinking about what we
should be
seeing versus what’s right in front of us. How we perceive things has a direct correlation to how we react. Games like bingo and poker provide only partial information, and the players have to make decisions based on their intuition. A hand can be perceived as either weak or strong depending on the strategies used to intimidate opponents, such as betting and bluffing.

Optical illusions have been studied for millennia. The ancient Greeks used a technique known as
entasis
, which incorporates a slight convexity in the columns of the Parthenon to compensate for the illusion of concavity created by parallel lines. Psychologists and artists alike have popularized many of the following illusions, which you’ll find at various Web sites that talk about optical illusions and how incredibly challenging they can be for the brain. For more of these, I encourage you to check out
www.scientificpsychic.com/graphics
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion
. And for an incredibly trippy optical illusion in action,
Google “the spinning dancer.” If you perceive the dancer’s foot touching the ground to be the left foot, she appears to be spinning clockwise; if you see the foot touching the ground as her right foot, then she appears to be spinning counterclockwise!

There are no curved lines in these figures. You can use a ruler to check it out. The diagonal patterns created by the tiny squares distort our perception of the figures.