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Magicians less prone to mental disorders than other artists, finds research
- xyzelement 3y agoThis tracks. A modern artist takes themselves very seriously - which is not that different than insanity. A magician on the other hand knows it's a trick all along.
- theGeatZhopa 3y ago... No wonder. They can make the mental disorders *puff* disappear.. just like me.. *puff*... *gone*
- pierat 3y agoNote: stage magicians, and not occult practitioners.
- lethologica 3y agoThat would be an interesting study though. For true occult practitioners I think you’re likely to see even less mental disorders since (if they are true students of the occult) they would understand that the mind (and indeed EVERY aspect of 3D reality) is simply a construct of belief systems.
- pierat 3y agoThere's some I've ran across that are much worse than average. The 2 I've seen are: 1. Magusitis: thinking you're some grandaster bla-de-bla, and that you can do anything. Basically, self destructive going to your head. 2. Divination paralysis : becoming so hesitant to live life, and instead doing tarot/pendulums/etc for any question, no matter how trivial. Those types do nothing out of FOMO, and therefore make the fear that they missed out, causing more of it.
- eru 3y agoAre True Occult Practitioners related to True Scotsmen?
- pierat 3y agoIf you work with the occult, then you're an occult practitioner. Where you are on that journey is your business alone.
- casion 3y agoAlternatively, most magicians are intimately familiar with psychology and more knowledgable on how to appear as they wish in a context where appearance is being measured... Since you know, that's their job.
- nilamo 3y agoIf that's all it was, then why magicians specifically? Wouldn't that apply to all performing arts (musicians, actors, sales representatives, newscasters, etc)?
- maxlamb 3y agoBecause the other performing arts don’t require a deep understanding of (some aspects of) human psychology to be good.
- krisoft 3y agoI am not sure if I should read your sentence as sarcasm. Because of its context i will interpret it straight. Acting requires a deep understanding of human psychology. If i would have to bet who can pretend to be anything better, an actor or a magician I would bet on the actor every time.
- eru 3y agoThough eg method acting tries to make the simulation less required?
- krisoft 3y agoI don't see how that changes anything? Actors pretend to be what they are not, and pretend to be in situations they are not. That is their job. Yes, method acting is one way out of many how they achieve this. Just so we are on the same page recap of the discussion: Observation: Magicians are less prone to mental disorders than other artists Hypothesis1: Maybe they are not less prone, but better at hiding their mental disorders. Follow on hypothesis2: Maybe they are better at hiding their mental disorders because they are more knowledgeable about psychology. Now, how you check for this hypothesis is that you design a study which weeds out the truth. So it must be understood when I write my counter argument that it is speculation. It is in the absence of hard data. If anyone has evidence pointing either way that should trump such speculation. Counterpoint to hypothesis1: There are other artist who we would expect to be just as good or even better to be pretending to be "okay". For example actors. So it feels unlikely to be just up to ability to pretend to be ok. This is where the conversation was before your comment. Then you wrote what you wrote, which I interpret as "but some actors method act!" Is that a counterpoint to the counterpoint? Is that an alternate hypothesis? If so could you spell it out please? Sorry if this sounds harsh, I'm just trying to understand the argument you are making.
- drooby 3y agoI’ve always found self-deception to be the true art of happiness. Something like, strategic ignorance. Or strategic re-framing.
- screye 3y agoI call it deliberate self-delusion. It's incredibly powerful.
- kukkeliskuu 3y agoYes, some researchers argue that depression causes people to see things more realistically. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/202002/positive-illusions-and-depressive-realism https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/202002...
- nemo44x 3y agoIt’s interesting that this also correlates with magicians being less likely to get laid than other artists.
- Eumenes 3y agoSomeone hasn't heard of Gob Bluth
- nemo44x 3y agoMichael: "So this is the magic trick, huh?" G.O.B."Illusion, Michael. A trick is something a whore does for money..."
- DonHopkins 3y ago"...or cocaine!"
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoNot an expert, but I feel like magicians are near the top. Sure they might lose out to musicians and actors, but they should at the very least beat out sculptors, painters, struggling authors, and those weird photographers that gather up random people off the street, photograph them naked and then call it art.
- j2kun 3y agoSmells like an instance of https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
- yieldcrv 3y ago[flagged]
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- swayvil 3y agoIt's because they focus on a broader and more varied medium (stagecraft, devices, sleight of hand, reading people...) vs other artists (sitting in a room for hours focusing intensely upon little dabs of paint/clay/sound/code/text...). That's my guess.
- autoexec 3y agoMagicians can spend just as many many hours sitting in a room focusing intensely on the skillful manipulation of small coins or playing cards, but they also have to constantly interact directly with their audiences, perform their shows publicly, and manage their career (advertising, booking shows, designing stage/street performances) so my guess is that magicians with major mental disorders are much less likely to be successful than other types of artists like a musician or a painter. If they're skilled enough and can still put out work painters and musicians can be pretty damn crazy, and are sometimes even expected to be a little eccentric, but a magician who comes off as mentally unhinged risks making people uncomfortable and they aren't going to get work. To be a magician you have to make people feel comfortable enough to approach you, or even let you put them into a box and saw them in half. A painter doesn't need the charisma it takes to pull in and hold a crowd.
- amelius 3y agoPerhaps it only seems that way because they are better at deceiving doctors and researchers.
- mikercampbell 3y agoBibbity Bobbity Boo No symptoms of depression for you!
- financltravsty 3y ago[flagged]
- nonethewiser 3y agoWhat would the advantage of that be? Seems like they wouldn’t have incentive to do that.
- danShumway 3y agoGP is likely joking; it wouldn't make sense for a magician to deceive a doctor, but the stereotype of magicians working tricks and illusions into random and/or inappropriate situations suggests a type of person that might characterize masking their depression as if doing so is a magic trick.
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- jph 3y agoAberystwyth University is a gem of a school on the Welsh west coast, and encourages interesting research like this. Here are more Aberystwyth innovation stories if you're curious... https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/rbi/research/aber-research/150-research-innovation-stories/ https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/rbi/research/aber-research/150-res...
- LewisVerstappen 3y agothis homestly sounds like the type of study that wont replicate when tried again
- geoffmanning 3y agoThis study starts with the baseline "There is a common perception that creativity is associated with psychopathy". Uhhhhh.... common to who? That's news to me. Most psychopaths i've met are lifeless corporate execs. I consider myself an artist and have a lot of friends who are also artistic. I've noticed no correlation. In any case, it's obvious that the study was colored by the belief that there is legitimately an association between creativity and psychopathy, so it was flawed from the start. It's also worth considering that there is quite an epidemic of "research papers" being published that haven't been peer reviewed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7683245/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7683245/ Link to referenced study, since i couldn't find it in the article itself: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-open/article/psychotic-and-autistic-traits-among-magicians-and-their-relationship-with-creative-beliefs/A404241D8126664D0EDD1989288F431D https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-open/article...
- Daub 3y ago> In any case, it's obvious that the study was colored by the belief that there is legitimately an association between creativity and psychopathy, so it was flawed from the start... ------------- Granted, the author's use of the term psychopathy was a bit crass. However, the association between artists and self-destruction is an ancient one. Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) was perhaps the first person to write seriously about artists. He states that most artists have inherited from nature... "...a certain element of savagery and madness, which, besides making them strange and eccentric, had brought it about that very often there was revealed in them more the obscure darkness of vice than the brightness and splendour of those virtues that make men immortal." > Piers D. G. Britton. “Raphael and the bad humours of painters in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists*”. In: Renaissance Studies 22.2 (2008), pp. 174–196 More recently, others have written about the significant impact that syphilis-related mania had on a number of notable artists of the late 19th and early 20th century, such as Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). > Julien Bogousslavsky and Laurent Tatu. “ ́Edouard Manet’s Tabes Dorsalis: From Painful Ataxia to Phantom Limb”. In: European Neurology 76.1-2 (2016), pp. 75–84 > Haroun Jedidi et al. “A brief history of syphilis. The disease through the art and the artist”. In: Revue medicale de Liege 73 (July 2018), pp. 363–369. Should an artist be unfortunate enough to have lived a trauma-free life, there is a chance that he might invent one. The German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) claimed to have experienced life-threatening injuries as a fighter pilot in the second world war which had influenced the form and content of his art. However, towards the end of his life it was found that these experiences were almost entirely untrue. > Benjamin HD Buchloh. “Beuys: the Twilight of the Idol; Preliminary Notes for a Critique”. In: Artforum 18.5 (1980), pp. 35–43. Significantly, this revelation did not particularly affected his reputation as an artist. What does this tell us about the audience/consumer's need for an artist to be accompanied (explained?) by a myth? Then of course, is the link between addiction and creativity. We all know of the positive and negative impact that drugs had on popular music. But did you know that the painter J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) was a morphine addict? And Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)? I could go on.
- keyle 3y agoThe money quote for me was "However, many magicians perform familiar tricks or variations of them without feeling the need to innovate.” It's true that in our field, at least mine, we automate everything that can be automated, and are left with the hard problems, requiring to question everything including ourselves, on a daily basis. We're feeding ourselves that not good enough, every day. At least that's the way I interpreted the article. Something to be said about executing something with perfection without thinking too hard about it.
- Alex3917 3y ago> "However, many magicians perform familiar tricks or variations of them without feeling the need to innovate." Which makes these magicians craftspeople, rather than artists. Clearly some subset of magicians are actually artists, but the real takeaway is that neither the researcher nor the article author understand what makes something art. I mean by this standard, you could write literally the exact same article about Subway Sandwich Artists.
- eru 3y agoThe article also says that magicians have less mental health trouble than the general population. As a null hypothesis, I would think that the Subway Sandwich Artist will score similar to the general population? Interestingly, the article says mathematicians also have less trouble. I guess they haven't looked into logicians, like Gödel or Russell or Cantor etc. This formal foundation of mathematics had a reputation for having mentally health challenged practitioners. Whether she attracts troubled souls or makes them, is not clear.
- defrost 3y agoWhy is it you feel that Bertrand Russell had mental health challenges? Georg Cantor may not have have been anymore mentally challenged than any other 40+ year old spending the last half of their life being loudly professionally mocked and called a charlatan, corrupter of youth, abomination in the eyes of God, etc. He copped a lot of flack for promoting unorhodox (at the time) thoughts about infinity. There are many many logicians and set theorists, only a few make the "whackiest intellectuals" list - I personally would class Russell as well balanced, Alonzo Church as quite sensible, Dana Scott as pretty solid, . . . etc.
- Daub 3y agoIt is true that artists are far more likely to have come from broken families than people who are not artists. I looked for the citation but could not find it, but I know it exists. From the same study it was shown that one or both parents of scientists are far more likely to have also been scientists.
- hilux 3y agoIn searching for the study you remembered, I found a study whose conclusion makes a lot of intuitive sense - at least in the US, artists are much more likely to come from rich families: https://news.artnet.com/news/wealthy-people-likely-become-artists-1529341 https://news.artnet.com/news/wealthy-people-likely-become-ar...
- Daub 3y agoThank you. That is a tasty study and is observably true.
- notahacker 3y agoI suspect magicians sampled are more likely to be self employed doing something they enjoy which pays the bills, and less likely to have dreamed that they would be doing something much bigger and better. For related reasons, I suspect contract programmers are less neurotic (etc) than founders
- cenazoic 3y agoTotal idle speculation: magicians are more likely to be skeptics, and therefore less prone to madness of crowds or self-deceit.
- torcete 3y agoDid they study a lot of professions? Just by chance one of them can incur into a type I error.
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoYeah it sounds like p-hacking to me. Would be nice if they had preregistered the study design. However, the article does say it was a "study of magicians", not a study of medical data from the general population.
- e63f67dd-065b 3y agoThe paper mainly concerns itself with a sample of magicians vs another of the general population (with matching age, sex, etc). The second part compares magicians with artists, actors, comedians, poets, musicians, and a general population. Personally the most suspicious part about this is the O-LIFE questionnaire; it tests for things like "unusual experiences", "cognitive disorganisation", "impulsive nonconformity", "Introvertive anhedonia", and a bunch of other things that are reminiscent of all the non-replicable personality research from a decade ago. O-LIFE was developed in 1995, well before replication crisis questions started popping up, so who knows.
- assimpleaspossi 3y agoI find this to be a very strange thing to study. Wouldn't the time be better spent on something else? Or were they just looking for something to do. Or was this to make better TV news headlines.
- eru 3y agoPublish or perish? Though for this specific study: understanding mental health might help us find ways to help people with mental health. Or at least might help us do less of the harmful kind of 'help' we might currently practice. It's hard to do controlled experiments on people, so we often resort to observational data and, if we are lucky, natural experiments. > The study suggests that mental health profiles for magicians are akin to those of mathematicians and scientists. Crasson said precision was an important part of magic. Which reminds me of Raymond Smullyan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Smullyan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Smullyan
- ReactiveJelly 3y agoIf it's causation one way, maybe teaching people magic could be a low-risk treatment for mental disorders. If it's causation the other way, we might wonder why more ordered people choose some careers or hobbies over others.
- nmstoker 3y agoMaybe it would look that way if you lack the context that supports it being a sensible progression from some nearby finding that raised questions along these lines.
- krisoft 3y ago> Wouldn't the time be better spent on something else? Studying what makes people feel better vs what makes them feel worse is in some sense the only important thing to study.
- jbverschoor 3y agoBecause they studied at MIT
- jbverschoor 3y agoMagicians Institute of Teaneck
- bluedays 3y agoBecause nobody is going to be a starving magician. I assume if you know sleight of hand you have the skills to feed yourself. ;)
- thenerdhead 3y agoA once in a lifetime headline and you go with the safe one?
- eru 3y agoWhat would be the other one?
- thenerdhead 3y agoMagicians pull sanity out of their hat. Magicians less likely to do mind tricks. Magicians are not disillusional after all. And for my next trick...mental well-being. Etc etc So many possibilities and they went with the most boring one.
- e63f67dd-065b 3y agoDirect link to study: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/A404241D8126664D0EDD1989288F431D/S2056472423006099a.pdf/psychotic-and-autistic-traits-among-magicians-and-their-relationship-with-creative-beliefs.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c... I skimmed through the paper, and I wish there was a nicer way of saying it, but this is the kind of bullshit non-replicable study that got kicked off the replication crisis in psychology. It really reminds me of the significant xkcd (https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/, if you test every colour of jellybeans/creative profession for p<0.05, eventually you'll find a jellybean colour/profession that's associated with acne/disorders). Select quotes: > A sample of 195 magicians and 233 people from the general population completed measures of schizotypal traits (Oxford– Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences) and autism (Abridged Version of the Autism-Spectrum Quotient), as well as the Short Scale of Creative Self. Magicians were also compared with other creative groups with respect to schizotypal traits, based on previously published data. One of the co-authors is a magician: > All magicians’ contacts were made by the third author, who served at the time as the Resourceress of the Society of American Magicians I couldn't find where they found the same statistics for other creative professions. Did they pull it out of another study? I can't tell. > Our study demonstrates that not all creative people are created equal. Magicians scored significantly lower than the general population and other vocational creative groups on most psychopathological traits, particularly those related to schizotypy
- dukeofdoom 3y agoWouldn't you expect a mind that is able to trick other minds, to be work better than at least average. It seems like it's self selecting. It's like saying marathon runners are less prone to obesity than other athletes. To be a professional marathon runner, you probably start with better than average genetics.
- astrea 3y agoPerhaps because it’s easier to “make it” as a magician. As a wannabe photographer, it’s exhausting trying to build an audience/clientele, manage your social media presence, get accepted into local art shows or crawls, etc. all while still building your craft and buying the gear. I don’t know what it takes to get to a satisfactory level of being a magician, but I imagine you can at least get a few shows with family/friends right away. As I was writing that (still going to keep for posterity’s sake), I’ve realized maybe it’s because there’s much more play in their art. It’s very whimsical.
- emmelaich 3y agoSome of the most sensible and (to me) sane famous people are magicians. Penn and Teller. James Randi (RIP). Derren Brown. There's something about being able to see through bullshit which is valuable for mental health.
- lacrimacida 3y agoAnother dubious study but something rings like common sense to me. Mentally struggling artists can go on at their craft alone and in isolation. Magicians need to be showpeople in addition to training a lot so any mental health problems would derail their careers. It’s also self selection at play as magicians need different skills than other creatives. Those skills such as being sharp, having laser focus, able at reading the audience don’t gell well with people who are struggling mentally. But I wouldn’t bet there are no magicians with mental health issues either…
- bawolff 3y agoI guess it would be interesting to compare them to actors
- just_boost_it 3y agoOr comedians..
- smokel 3y agoRecently discussed here, under "Sad clown paradox": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38198417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38198417
- nestorD 3y agoNote that the vast majority of magicians are to magic what cover bands are to music. Only artists in that they are performing in front of an audience, not creators in any meaningful way. (Source: I am a consulting mentalist, I am the kind of people mentalists, a very similar profession, offsource the creation to...)
- financltravsty 3y agoFascinating. I wasn't aware they outsourced it. I always assumed they came up with their tricks through trial and error. To paraphrase Norm MacDonald: how do you come up with your material?
- nestorD 3y agoThe vast majority of them do tricks designed by other people (passed down from a mentor if you come from a living line of performers, out of books/video that genuinely innovative magicians share with the community, or custom made for a particular performer, that's where I come in). My approach to creativity is to try and know all existing solutions to a problem (which can be tricky in a field that values secrecy but, as you develop original material and knowledge, you get noticed and start building a network of people with access to secret knowledge) then my brain tends to naturally pattern match and come up with new combinations of ideas. But it depends on the project, some things stem from the desired end result: an esthetic, an idea you want to have coming across, or a feeling you want to evoque.
- lisper 3y agoAmateur magician here. I think you're being a little bit unfair. An actor doesn't write the lines they speak. That doesn't make what they do non-creative. One of the things I learned the hard way coming up in magic is that the mechanics of the trick are a relatively small component of the overall performance. Being entertaining as a magician has a lot more to do with very subtle psychology than it does with gaffes and sleights. Inventing new tricks is more akin to engineering than it is to performing.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoA magician gets to stop being Xmo the Magnificent at the end of the show and be a normal person the rest of the time. An artist has no such separation between themselves as normal people and themselves as the artist. So if time as an artist isn't going well, it's pretty rough bearing it as a normal person.
- eru 3y ago> An artist has no such separation between themselves as normal people and themselves as the artist. Not necessarily. Eg I'm fairly sure Banksy can just go and enjoy a pint at their local pub without being an artist 24/7.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoThat's a good point, but he's also kept himself pretty secretive to allow for that. I have a feeling there are a lot more normal people artists than there are well known ones. For instance, my wife is an artist and suffers from OCD and anxiety. It affects her in both the art and life, but she feels affected as a person when her art has a "flaw" she missed. It kind of warps her sense of self because her art is "part of her" in a way, and I'm sure she's not the only artist with these issues.
- eru 3y agoWell, that seems more a consequence of OCD than consequence of being an artist?
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoPossibly, but the article is about magicians being less susceptible to mental disorders than "other artists" so a related question could be "Is my wife an artist because she has mental disorder conducive to creativity?"
- keepamovin 3y agoMaybe they’re just better at concealing it?
- flukeshott 3y agoMental Disorders or labels applied to distressed people who have no support system?
- eru 3y agoEither way, the research would be useful. If you can figure out why some people have more of a support system than others, that would also be exciting. (Or alternatively, why having a support system drives you to become a magician. Or perhaps there's a third factor that causes both? Or perhaps it's a spurious correlation that doesn't replicate?)
- flukeshott 3y agoUltimately if you want my opinion it is a matter of community and law reform in regards to certain things to be honest...
- eru 3y agoWell, that would be something to investigate. There's lots of stuff that sounds good when you say it, but it's harder to judge whether it'll work in practice or how well.
- layer8 3y agoThere must be some trick to it.
- JohnMakin 3y agopsychiatrists hate magicians for this one weird trick
- DonHopkins 3y agoMagical thinking FTW! "We Demand To Be Taken Seriously!" -The Alliance of Magicians https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/The_Alliance_of_Magicians https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/The_Alliance_of_... A Magician named GOB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmVp7QZAXbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmVp7QZAXbs
- asylteltine 3y agoI don’t trust any soft science research. Hard science had a replication issue too but it’s way easier to find issues and run numbers. Psychology especially as a field is full of nonsense that may as well be alternative medicine
- vasco 3y agoSame. This basically amounts to "one afternoon we got 200 people to answer surveys that were a tiny more like this than like that". The way to do this in my opinion would be to go over mental disorder demographics and see if any profession is underrepresented in actual cases compared to the prevalence of the job in the overall population. This is like finding the most dangerous jobs by surveying people instead of looking at injury rates at work.
- Talanes 3y ago>The way to do this in my opinion would be to go over mental disorder demographics and see if any profession is underrepresented in actual cases compared to the prevalence of the job in the overall population. I don't think that would get you any better data. Access to the care to get diagnosed in the first place isn't equally distributed, so some groups are going to be a much better sampling of their actual population than others.
- dang 3y ago"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- whatilearned 3y ago[dead]
- isaacfrond 3y agoHere is the paper: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-open/article/psychotic-and-autistic-traits-among-magicians-and-their-relationship-with-creative-beliefs/A404241D8126664D0EDD1989288F431D https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-open/article... To my surprise this passes my quick rule of thumb test for having to pay attention: the subject group larger than 60 (195 magicians not less).
- ogou 3y agoWho says magicians are artists? I have never heard anyone say that. But, I guess if we're calling people "prompt engineers" then these superlatives don't mean much anymore.