-I absolutely loved reading about Richard
Turner. Now, before you tell him his story
and about him as a person, just tell us a
little bit about the kinds of tricks that
he works on, and the skills that he has.
-Yeah, well Richard Turner's, uh, he's a card
mechanic, uh, which is-- He specializes in
cheating at cards. Gambling sleights. Uh,
he's not actually a cheater, he doesn't actually
do anything illegal, but he's probably the
world's best, or certainly one of the best
experts when it comes to the sleight of hand
techniques he would use to cheat at, say,
poker, you know. That includes things like
false shuffles, dealing from the bottom of
the deck or the middle of the deck, you know,
beating the cards, stacking the deck, and
there's sleights that conform to the protocol
of card games that you would play at the casino.
And the amazing thing about Turner is, you
know, he can do absolutely incredible things
with cards. Like, you can tell him exactly
any number of cards and he can just reach
over and cut off that many cards. He can do
two decks at once, he can do perfect shuffles
with one hand. His fake deals are literally
the best I've ever seen, and he's blind. The
crazy thing about it is he's completely blind
and he does it all by touch, by feel, and
he's sort of developed a very, very sensitive
sense of touch and tactile ability. He's so
good that the US playing card company, the
world's largest manufacturer of decks of cards
has hired him as their touch analyst, which
means they send him decks of cards and he
essentially does quality control and he feels
them and he can tell us if the paper is a
little thicker, you know, or the cards are
cut, you know, with a dull blade or whatnot.
-Yeah, well, what's astonishing is that he
can tell the weight of things and you mentioned,
you know, he can tell if there was a dull
blade used, and you, um, in working with him,
got curious about, um, his abilities and what
they say about the way the brain wires itself.
-Yeah, right, so, you know, one of the biggest
discoveries in neuroscience of recent years
is this idea that the brain actually changes
in adulthood. It used to be thought that,
you know, the brain was like our bones, basically,
that after a certain age, essentially after
adolescence, it was locked in and the brain
couldn't really change after that. And now
we realize that the brain can adapt in remarkable
ways, and this so called neuroplasticity has
become one of the common themes of modern
neuroscience. We've always heard this idea,
you know, that when you lose one sense, the
other senses, you know, compensate, and that's
certainly true, and I think Turner's an example
of this. He's lost his sense of sight and
his sense of touch has become so much more
refined. He's able to do these incredible
feats.
-It was remarkable to me to read that he says
he truly believes that, um, when it comes
to doing his magic, his blindness is an advantage.
-Absolutely. I once asked him, you know, how
do you do your blindness? Do you feel like
it's a disadvantage or whatnot, and he said,
"It's a gift." He views it as a gift, and
he actually, he almost feels sorry for people
who don't have that. He says "I have to do
it all by touch." You know, I think he views
it as why he's so good.
But another really interesting thing about
him is that he talks about touch in visual
terms. Like, he talks about how when he touches--
when he types on his Blackberry or whatever,
he sees the letters in his mind. And when
he feels the cards, he sort of sees them as
these bricks almost. These large objects.
And that has it's very interesting corollary
in neuroscience, because fairly recently they
started to look at the brains of blind people
when they execute a tactile task, like reading
braille or touching some grading or whatever.
And, um, they used a functional MRI to see
what parts of the brain were active, and they
found that the visual cortex, the part of
the brain that controls vision, the part of
the brain that lights up when a person with
sight, you know, looks at a, you know, watches
a movie or a baseball game, or whatever. And
that's striking because that suggests that
somehow they're seeing with their fingers.
That the part of the brain that controls vision
has somehow been recast to control and process
tactile sensations. And this is a form of
plasticity that really wasn't believed to
be possible known as cross modal plasticity.
It's one brain region taking over for another.
And that's something that really wasn't believed
to be possible, so this is really cool, I
think. You know, the brain is really full
of tricks.
