Fooling houdini, p.8
Fooling Houdini, page 8
Armed with fMRI machines and PET scanners, neuroscientists recently zoomed in on the brains of blind subjects to see what was going on under the hood during these amazing perceptual feats. What they found came as a shock. As expected, Braille reading and other touch-related tasks engaged the somatosensory cortex, the zone of gray matter that processes tactile sensations. This was true of everyone, not just the blind. But when the blind participants read Braille, something unexpected occurred: the visual cortex, the part of the brain dedicated to vision, lit up as well. Although they lived in total darkness, the inner eye of the blind subjects was firing on all cylinders, exhibiting all the features of cognitive engagement—increased blood flow, a cascade of metabolic activity, and a shower of electrical impulses—that one would normally observe in a seeing person whose eyes are glued to a book or a baseball game. The story these scans told was unmistakable: the blind subjects were seeing with their fingers.
Not only that, but the visual cortex was found to be the driving force behind their superior abilities. Performance on nonvisual tasks was directly correlated with the level of activity in the visual cortex—the more active it was, the better they did—and temporarily disabling the visual cortex with a Marvel-esque machine called a transcranial magnetic stimulator, which beams a magnetic field into select brain regions, rendered them unable to read Braille and identify embossed letters. Playing the same prank on people who can see, meanwhile, has no impact on their sense of touch; it hampers only their vision. A parallel strand of research has found that people who are born blind lose the ability to read Braille if a stroke damages both hemispheres of their visual cortex, even if their tactile system remains unharmed. Perhaps this is why blind people such as Turner frequently speak of touch in visual terms. “When I touch something,” he says, “I’m seeing it in front of me in full scale. If I touch a pen, instantly I see a pen. If I touch a comb, I see a comb.” More than just fanciful metaphor, this language hints at the underlying neural correlates at work.
This apparent crossover between the visual and tactile channels took neuroscientists by surprise in part because the vast majority of them had long believed in a fixed division of labor between major brain regions. Each primary cortex was thought to handle a single sensory modality. The visual cortex dealt exclusively with vision, the auditory cortex dealt exclusively with sound, and so forth. If for whatever reason the optical feed were severed, the visual cortex would forever lie fallow, sealed off from the world. Cross-modal plasticity, in which one higher-level brain region takes over for another, was thought to be impossible, an assumption that seemed reasonable enough given that signals from the optic nerve travel to the brain along distinct pathways, separate from those of the other senses. But time and again we find that the brain is full of tricks.
“NAME ANY FOUR OF A kind.”
I looked at the cards spread out on the table in a long ribbon. “All right,” I said. “I’ll choose the nines.”
“Take out the nines,” Turner said.
I extracted the nines from the spread and held them in my right hand.
“Close up the deck, and put your nines on top.”
I did as I was told.
“Now cut the deck and square it up real nice and clean.”
I cocked my head to one side. If I cut and squared, how could he possibly know where the nines were? Turner was unfazed.
“All right,” he drawled, picking up the deck. “Your cards are somewhere, depending on where you cut them, right?”
I nodded. Then I remembered he was blind. “Yes, that’s right,” I said.
“Now, what poker games are you familiar with?”
“Well, I play Hold ’Em a lot,” I said.
“Okay, give me a number of players.”
I paused for a moment to think. “Six players.”
“Okay, in Hold ’Em we have what are called the pocket cards,” he said, dealing two facedown cards to each of the six imaginary players, counting them off out loud. “And we have the board.” He dealt a faceup card in the middle of the table. “What’s that card?
I looked at it. “A nine.”
Turner burned a card off the top and tabled a second one face up. “What’s that?
“A nine.”
“There’s a burn, there’s a turn,” he rejoined, dealing another. “What’s that?”
I heaved a puzzled sigh. “A nine.”
He dealt one last card, and there were now four nines in a neat row on the table.
Although I had no idea how Turner had located the cards, I knew this was the famous middle deal, the sleight Vernon had traveled to Missouri to learn from Allen Kennedy.
“That’s a tough move, right?” I asked, knowing full well what the answer was.
Turned nodded. “Oh, it’s a very tough move,” he said. “But it’s not the toughest.”
I shrugged. What could possibly be more difficult?
It was just after noon and we were sitting in Turner’s kitchen. After watching him floor everyone at the SAM, I’d asked Turner if I could pay him a visit in San Antonio, where he lives with his wife, Kim, and their teenage son, Asa Spades. Turner had invited me to spend the day with him at his home—a two-story, four-bedroom brick abode in the brushwood hills on the outskirts of town, not far from where I went to high school.
The house was crammed with antique furniture, workout equipment, photographs of magicians, and trophies and plaques Turner had won either at cards or karate. (He’s a sixth-degree black belt.) A backyard swimming pool hemmed in by an enormous teak deck was visible through the sliding glass doors in the kitchen. It was a sparkling day, clear blue skies as far as the eye could see.
Turner grew up in San Diego, California, the eldest of five children. His father was a welder from Tennessee who worked in factories, while his mother, a Michigan native, stayed at home with the kids. Turner was seven when he started playing cards with his four younger siblings, two sisters and two brothers. They played poker, rummy, gin rummy, crazy eights, hearts, spades, war. The games changed, but one thing stayed the same—Turner never lost. “I would start coming up with ways to make sure I always won,” he told me. “And it kept perpetuating itself. I started getting a reputation. My sister Lori never trusted me. I would catch her hiding cards under the throw carpet.” When his family wasn’t available to play with him he would stack aces against an imaginary opponent. “I would shoot him with my toy gun after he called me a cheater,” Turner joked.
On the first day of ninth grade, Turner’s English teacher caught him doing tricks for the boy sitting next to him. She confiscated his cards and sent him to the back of the room. But the punishment didn’t take. Before long he was hustling his classmates at poker and gin and paying other students to do his homework with the winnings. He even hatched a game he called massage poker, which he used to score rubdowns from female classmates. “There would be a thirty-second ante,” he explained. “You could bet between fifteen and sixty seconds, and at the end of the hand the winner would get a massage anywhere you wanted.”
By the time he was old enough to drink, Turner could deal middles and bottoms and run up a stack during the shuffle, moves very few people in the world knew how to do. “I would think of it in my head,” he told me. “I’ve read two books in my life: Erdnase, and it was from an audiocassette version, and then somebody read to me from a book called Seconds, Centers and Bottoms, by Marlo. That was it. That was the only reading I ever did.”
Turner met Dai Vernon when he was twenty-one, at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles. Impressed with Turner’s abilities and his pathological work ethic, Vernon took Turner under his wing. The two became close friends and worked together for seventeen years. “He would share with me things that he didn’t share with anyone else,” Turner recalls. “I was very, very fortunate.” Turner and his wife threw Vernon his ninety-eighth birthday party, two months before he died.
By the early eighties, Turner had gained enough notoriety as a card handler to attract the attention of the world’s top crime syndicates. First to come calling was R.D., a New York Mafia kingpin who offered Turner $2,000 a day to cheat for him on the LA circuit. “We played cards, and he was a good second dealer and a good mucker,” Turner recalls. “Then I started showing him what I could do, and he said, ‘You can do by yourself what it takes four of my mechanics to do together.’ ” R.D. followed Turner around for six years. Then one day, Turner heard R.D.’s name on the nightly news. The FBI had raided a mob operation in San Diego, and R.D. was being carted off to jail.
After that came the Saudis, with million-dollar offers to play for oil money. But Turner knew better. “A situation like that, and you’re a hundred percent used,” he said. Translation: “They kill you when they’re done with you.” Scarier still was a diamond merchant from South Africa who wanted Turner to brace games outside Sun City. More than a quarter of a century later you can still hear the faint echo of fear in Turner’s voice as he recalls a cross-country flight on which he found Mr. Diamond, as he calls him, sitting across the aisle. “Hello, Richard,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about doing a little business together.”
“This guy knew about me in ways he shouldn’t have,” Turner remembers. “I’d be on the road performing here and there, or doing shows, and he would know where I was. He would call me up in my hotel room, ‘Richard, I’m downstairs. Let me buy you dinner.’ ” Mr. Diamond offered Turner hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, a five-carat diamond pinky ring worth $70,000—“I knew if I took it, then he’d have me”—and a spot on The Tonight Show. After Turner refused, Mr. Diamond made one last bid. “If you ever want to have your wife or anyone else killed,” he said, “I can arrange that for you. It’ll be an accident. An explosion. No one would know.”
Fearing for his family’s safety, Turner handed Mr. Diamond’s business card over to the captain of the San Diego SWAT team, a man named Charles Curtis, who one year earlier had helped track down Texas serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. Curtis armed Turner with a Walther PPK (James Bond’s gun) and taught him how to handle it in tight situations. Turner keeps the pistol stashed away in a thick vault in his living room.
Scorning mob money, Turner continued to earn a living legally—performing gambling demonstrations as a magician aboard riverboat casinos, lecturing, and consulting. From 1979 until 1984, he performed aboard the Ruben E. Lee, then moved to Fort Worth to work at a nightclub named Billy Bob’s. In 1991, the same year he met his second wife, Kim, he spent another brief stint on the water. They married the following year, in a small ceremony in San Diego. Vernon was one of the guests. A painting of the two, embracing like brothers-in-arms, hangs above the mantel in Turner’s living room.
Turner’s relationship with the U.S. Playing Card Company began in 1988, when he noticed that something was off about the Bicycle cards he’d been using for almost two decades. “The cards had really gone down in their quality,” he told me. “And I said, ‘Hey, you guys are screwing us. This is not the same card you’ve been making.’ ” He was right. Earlier that year the USPCC had begun subcontracting their paper. As a result, their cards were being printed on cheaper stock. Five years later, the USPCC made another change to their production cycle, this time to the way they cut the paper. This didn’t escape Turner’s notice, either. “I said, ‘You guys are changing the way you’re cutting your paper. You’re not cutting the same way you’ve been cutting them for a hundred years. These are not traditionally cut.’ ”
Traditionally cut means the blade goes through the face of the card rather than the back, leaving a rounded edge on the face and a rough edge on the back. Shuffling facedown is easier when the rough edge is on the back, and most people, including all casino dealers, shuffle facedown. If the rough edge is on the wrong side, the cards tend to bind up when they are shuffled. Turner illustrated this for me using my cards, which were not traditionally cut.
“Are these faceup right now?” he asked.
I paused for a moment, then remembered that he couldn’t see. “Yeah, those are faceup.”
He meshed them together. “See how nicely they shuffle when they’re faceup? Do it facedown and they don’t go anywhere. You have to force them.”
I tried to interlace the cards facedown, and sure enough, they refused to cooperate.
When Turner brought this issue to the attention of the USPCC, the company’s executives didn’t believe him at first. At the time, they had no idea that changes to the production process had affected the quality of their cards. “We didn’t know that we’d changed anything,” Lance Merrell, the company’s director of R&D, later told me. “This wasn’t even on our radar.”
Rather than make an enemy of Turner, the USPCC gave him a job and a title. “Once I learned that he had a heightened sense of feel,” Merrell recalls, “I realized we could use that to fine-tune our process.” Turner’s job as touch analyst is to test-drive decks from different runs, rate them on a scale of one to ten, and report back on any irregularities he finds. Like Vermeij with his mollusks, Turner does it all by touch. His caliper-like fingers can sense the thickness of the paper stock to within a thousandth of an inch. He can detect tiny fluctuations in the level of embossing. Using his fingernail as a stylus, he once counted the number of embossed ridges on a card and sent the result to Merrell. “I didn’t even know how to count them without a microscope,” Merrell told me. “I had to go to the manufacturer of the embossing product and ask how many lines per inch he used. And Turner was right.” Turner can even pick up subtle variations in the moisture level of the paper and the ink, along with changes to the chemical composition of the coating used to block out mold. “His touch sensitivity is incredible,” says Merrell. “I don’t even know how to describe it. He’s like Rain Man.”
For his personal use, Turner has the USPCC make cards to his own specifications, punched the old way, but with mandolins on the backs instead of angels, because the company jealously guards the integrity of its trademark. (Bicycle decks are the most recognized cards in the world.) As part of his compensation, Turner has received a lifetime supply.
When he handed me one of his decks and I shuffled them, I could feel the difference immediately. They were smoother, sturdier, and the edges meshed together with ease.
“Oh, wow, these just go like butter,” I rhapsodized, unaware of how ridiculous I must have sounded to Turner. “So nice.”
“It’s like having an instrument,” he explained. “A better instrument’s going to play nicer.” Turner has his Mandolin decks delivered to his house by the gross and is allowed to sell them online at a premium, another perk of his relationship with the USPCC. “The top card men, they all use my cards,” he said.
IT WAS TIME FOR ANOTHER trick. Once again using my deck, Turner spread the pack facedown (as if it mattered), and I plucked out a card—the ace of hearts. Turner squared up the spread and asked me to call out “stop” as he cut small blocks of about five cards each onto the table.
“Okay,” I said, after a while. “Stop.”
“Drop your card.”
I placed my card onto the stack, and Turner continued dumping cards on top, burying it in the middle of the deck.
“Square ’em up,” he said. “And cut ’em.”
I cut the deck.
“Cut ’em again. Give it a shuffle.”
“Really?”
Turned nodded, and I shuffled the cards.
“Give it another cut, finish it, and hand me the deck.”
I cut one last time and pushed the deck toward him. As he searched the table with his hands for the cards, I mentally reviewed what had just taken place. I’d dropped the ace into the deck, cut twice, shuffled, and cut one final time.
“You can’t ask for any tougher sets of circumstance,” he said, as if sensing my thoughts. “I’m just going to try cutting the card right out of the middle.”
I hunched over and trained my eyes on his hands, close enough to smell the lanolin-and-mango lotion he applies three times daily to keep his skin moist and supple. With his fingers on the edges of the pack, Turner slowly cut the deck without lifting it off the table, and a lone card swiveled out from the center. There was no need to turn it over, but I did anyway.
“Oh, man!” I screamed, unable not to. “I don’t even know where to begin with that.”
Turner let out a big bowlegged laugh. Then he grew quiet. “I fooled Vernon with that one,” he said, his cloudy blue eyes staring off into nothingness. “I fooled everybody across the world with it.”
WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF us? Can anyone learn to see with his or her fingers? To a certain extent, we already do. Most of us just don’t realize it. Experiments have found, for instance, that the brain’s representation of nearby objects depends on their location with respect to the hand, and that amputation of a hand distorts spatial perception, hindering one’s ability to locate objects.
As with most skills, practice helps. In a recent experiment, neuroscientists at McMaster University set out to determine whether blind people have a keener sense of touch because they can’t see or because they rely heavily on their fingers in their daily lives. The researchers measured tactile sensitivity in the fingers and lower lips of blind subjects and in normal-sighted adults. As it turned out, the blind had extrasensitive fingers, but their lips were no different from those of the nonblind. Not only that, but finger sensitivity was greatest among the most experienced Braille readers—and only in their reading fingers; sensitivity was average elsewhere on the hand. The scientists concluded that practice alone can supercharge one’s sense of touch.
