on today's program we begin with a magic show because if there's ever a medium that's made for magic it's radio right hey guys how you doing the magician's name is alex stone okay let me start with something really simple uh maybe some of you have seen it maybe you haven't and then we'll go from there and maybe get a little more sophisticated and more complicated and the audience is kids a bunch of middle schoolers from is 318 in brooklyn i'm just gonna take a handkerchief here you wanna check it out make sure it's normal nothing weird i only blew my nose in it like just once that's okay with the thumb of his right hand stone stuffs a handkerchief into his left hand and then watch yeah you've seen this before it disappears but then he reaches behind one kid's ear and pulls out if i reach out there it is i think i can catch it did you feel like coming out of your ear um no where did it come from i don't know now they try to figure out the trick does anybody have any guesses his sleeve his sleeve sleeves are rolled up okay what do you got he probably has like on his hand he has like a pocket that he pulls it out i get warmer now they get warmer that's good thinking and then they get hot i'm gonna involve your thumb what's your name jennifer jennifer jennifer let's ever give everyone jennifer a round of applause stone reaches into his right front pants pocket check this out and pulls out a fake thumb yeah it's a fake thumb it's called a thumb tip one of the most valuable tools in magic there's a thousand tricks you can do with it and it's pretty darn obvious once you know it's there very obvious now it looks like but this isn't even just to prove how how no one knows sometimes i'll do it with a red one and that one no one knows you're not looking for a fake thumb right and that's how it works and then it's gone and then it's like that now we had also invited some adults to see this magic show how well did they figure out the trick uh i was with the sleeve theory but clearly that's wrong i was wondering if it could be related to the ring at all oh the ring totally can we see the ring for a second that's that's really the dumbest theory ever that's so stupid go home so we asked the kids why they seem to do better than the adults i think kids could think out of a box maybe adults are more serious than kids when you want to be adults you didn't have any clue because they're focusing on the handkerchief instead of the thumb none of this was surprising to alex stone he's seen it all before he says other magicians have too if you are a magician and your life depends on fooling an audience of adults versus an audience of kids you would choose the adults every time there's a sense that when a kid watches a trick they're asking a question every second they're really approaching it with this sort of constant sense of curiosity and constant sense of trying to understand what's going on and i feel like their brains are just always awake when they're watching it all right if kids tend to be more curious and more alert when it comes to magic what about the rest of life what about coming up with good ideas even solving problems is it possible that we'd all be better off if we could think like a child from wnyc this is freakonomics radio the podcast that explores the inside of everything here's your host steven dupner steve levitt is my freakonomics friend and co-author we've just published our third book together think like a freak hey levitt what's your favorite chapter in think like a freak so i'm gonna give you a childish answer to that question which is that my second favorite chapter in the book is to think like a child because most adults wouldn't answer any question by telling you what their second favorite thing is but that's the kind of thing that a child might do all the time and i think that the beauty of thinking like a child and the beauty of that chapter in our book is that sometimes doing things differently and simply and with a kind of joy and triviality leads you to a really special place that as an adult you don't get to go too very often let's talk about some of what we label the characteristics of thinking like a child like the good characteristics of thinking like a child that adults might want to smuggle into adulthood because they're productive so uh thinking small so when adults think about problem solving most of us kind of shy away from the little ones because we feel they won't look important or whatnot and the big ones really need our help so talk about the power of thinking small i think there's a temptation to try to be something special and to take on a big problem but it's actually getting into the realm of thinking about a tiny little question that maybe you come in and maybe once you learn the answer it'll actually tell you about a lot of other things you might be interested you might be able to generalize actually i'll tell you the best example i can think of my own research of thinking small was the research we did on the bagel man the bagel man is a guy named paul feldman he's a retired economist who started a business delivering bagels to different companies around washington dc he used an honor system payment setup a wooden box with a slot reap of the money in our first book for economics we analyzed the bagel man's payment data and wrote up the findings what the payment rates told us about honesty as it relates to the size of a company time of year company morale things like that and i'll never forget a seminar i gave at the university of chicago where one of my colleagues really smart colleague his name is luigi sancolos he came to the seminar and i said i'm gonna talk to you today about this guy who sold bagels and he blurted out oh this is ridiculous what could i possibly learn from one guy and what he does selling bagels and i said maybe you'll be surprised bear with me and i have to say at the end of the seminar luigi raised his hand he said i didn't think it was possible but i actually think i learned something general from what you just taught me about the bagel man and i was actually i would say of all i would say that ranked as one of the top 10 moments i've ever had in academics because i really believed it was true that by thinking small i had learned something from the bagel man and that others could do something else that kids do is they will state facts or describe something that's pretty obvious whereas adults we tend to think that well if it's obvious it indicates that we aren't thinking very hard talk about the power of acknowledging the obvious the best examples i've seen about stating the obvious have all come in a business context so i'll come in as an outside consultant and people in the company will think i'm the academic i'm gonna have these really complicated ideas and do complex economics and really the biggest values that i've ever added to firms comes usually the first day i'm talking to them when i know absolutely nothing and i ask a question i make a statement which is so dumb and so obvious that no reasonable person could ever propose it and a lot of times it's because it is so obvious and people who have been doing it for so long can't they think about it a different way and it would be embarrassing it would be embarrassing to ask the questions i ask and a lot of times it is embarrassing because it is such an obvious or dumb question but every once in a while it turns out that that obvious question is the absolute breakthrough it's the thing that once you step back and look at it through the lens of in this case a childlike ignorance it opens you up to seeing what the truth is okay so let's um kids spend a lot of time playing and otherwise having fun adults out of duty and out of necessity spend considerably less at least most adults um what's the advantage of keeping your eye on fun or injecting fun in your work even for something as you know serious ish as public policy why is fun something that's underutilized or could be utilized better video games are fun my son nick who's 11 years old can play video games for eight hours could nick work at a job stay at mcdonald's for eight hours no so it seems to me what you take away from that is if you could make a job as fun as a video game then you'd have all the 11 year old boys in the world and probably the 15 year old 20 year old even the 30 year old boys lining up at your door trying to take that job i think fun is so much more important than people realize and i've seen it in academics when i interview young professors and trying to decide if we should hire them i've evolved over time to one basic role if i think they love economics and it's fun for them then i'm in favor of hiring them and no matter how talented they seem otherwise if it seems like a job or effort or work then i don't want to hire them well persuade me that they won't just be nice to have around because they love fun but that having fun at what you do actually makes you better or different in some way that's positive enjoying what you do loving what you do is such a completely unfair advantage for anyone you're competing with who does it as a job because people who love it they go to bed at night thinking about the solutions they wake up in the middle of the night they jot down ideas they work weekends it turns out that effort is a huge component of success in almost everything we know that from practice and whatnot and people who love things work and work and work out it's not work it's fun and so my strongest advice to young people trying to figure out what they want to do is i always tell them try to figure out what you love okay and especially something that you love that other people don't love sure everyone wants to be a rock star everyone wants to be in the movies but that's terrible you don't want to compete head on find something if you love ants go study ants because no one else loves ants and you have a big advantage over the people who are just studying ants because they can't think of what else they do eo wilson crush continues yeah yeah eo wilson was one of my mentors in college and indeed that's what he did he loved ants more than anything and he became the world's greatest expert on ants and he had a great career and not just success but joy he got true joy i mean that was the thing that inspired me about eo wilson even as he was in his 70s and his 80s he loved what he did he loved coming up on freakonomics radio if you're a scientist studying the way kids think what do you learn it's exactly the opposite of what we used to think is an easy way to describe it and what else can we learn from that magic show well did you get this sense that every step of the way they're trying to understand and from the second they see it they're always coming up with theories you're listening to freaking on this radio from wnyc this is freakonomics radio here's your host steven dubner you will remember at the start of the show that we brought in a magician to do some tricks for kids and adults well my name is alex stone that's him and i'm a journalist author of a book on magic and science called fooling hadini and a lifelong magic enthusiast and performer so on the scale of um one to 10 of magic expertise with me being a zero let's say zero to 10 you're aware how good are you well that's a sensitive question a lot of magicians would get angry if i but i know that you're not that kind of magician um i'm probably somewhere in the 7.5 very good but not not an all-time great not a hall of famer i mean good i know a lot about magic one thing that magician does a lot that you did a little bit today is misdirection right so talk about that and how vulnerable kids are versus adults yeah you know what i find is that kids are better at paying attention to more than one thing their attention is more diffuse adults are really good at focusing on one thing and ignoring peripheral distractions whereas kids are really good at sort of shotgunning their attention all over the place which is a good way to learn it's good when you're first learning how things work and you're first exploring the world but in magic you really want the person to focus on one thing you want to direct their attention to one particular thing so that they'll like won't see what's going on you know in the shadows you want to seduce them so that you can trick them exactly i think it's also that they're approaching it with this curiosity and it's just like this sponge-like desire and that they're always making theories that's the other thing i feel like i don't feel like adults are like that i sort of feel like they watch it and they're waiting for the punchline and then they sort of see it and then they maybe go back and think about it with kids you get this sense that every step of the way they're trying to understand and from the second they see it they're always coming up with theories oh it was in his sleeve oh he had a fake thing in his hand and they come up with theories that you know adults just aren't doing that you're much more likely to be able to manipulate adult attention than you are to be able to manipulate children that's alison gopnik i'm a professor of psychology and philosophy at the university of california berkeley gopnik does not study magic what does she study young children's minds particularly how it is that young children can manage to learn as much as they do about the world as quickly as they do she's also written books about her research the philosophical baby was one the scientist in the crib was another gopnik's work reinforces what magician alex stone told us that children tend to see things fundamentally differently than adults they're not very good as we all know at just focusing on one thing they get distracted incredibly easily they notice anything that's interesting or that changes or that they might learn from in their environment and that makes them worse subjects than magic when i wrote my book i had a beautiful letter from someone who was actually a store detective and he said one of the things that he'd do was he'd perch up on top of the balcony up on the top of the store floor and then he'd look at what people were doing below him and he said what would happen is you'd see people walking along this floor and someone would be holding a hand to the three-year-old and then the three-year-old would look up and see him on the balcony and would wave and say hello and and the adults never did that it never even occurred to the adults to look up on the balcony and see what was there can you summarize what we've learned and a little bit about how we've learned about how children think and especially establish things like causal understandings yeah well it's sort of easy it's exactly the opposite of what we used to think so people used to think that children were illogical and what we've discovered is that even little babies are capable of making logical deductions a really dramatic one is that people have thought that even adults are terribly bad at understanding probability well it turns out that babies and very young children if you give them the problems in the right way are actually amazingly good at doing probabilistic inference let me give you one more example the conventional wisdom has been that children are eccentric and they can't take the perspective of other people and one of the really dramatic things we've discovered is that again even infants are capable of figuring out what's going on in someone else's mind and and figuring out how they think and feel about the world okay so you've given us a number of traits that children exhibit in much larger measure than we might have thought before what about the ways in which the old wisdom was right what are the ways in which children really are kind of a dormant or latent version at best of what they will become yeah it's interesting so the kind of conventional wisdom was really that children were sort of defective grown-ups so they were grown-ups but missing pieces with you know bits that hadn't developed yet but if you think about that from a biological or an evolutionary point of view it doesn't really make a lot of sense an alternative way that you might think about them is think of the kids as being like the research and development division of the human species and we are adults we're production and marketing so from the production and marketing perspective it might look like the r&d guys are really not doing anything that looks very sensible or useful they you know sit around all day in their beanbag chairs uh playing pong and having blue sky ideas and we poor production and marketing people who are actually making the profits have to subsidize these guys but of course one of the things that we know is that that kind of blue sky just pure research actually pays off in the long run so i can imagine that an adult listening to you say these things would say sure that makes sense that resonates with me i believe that children have these traits in maybe a different shape or dimension than the traits i have but i think it's probably hard for most adults to think about the idea that there are traits that are valued as in adults that children may actually be better at than adults so tell me a little bit about that are there some that would fit that category part of the reason why the adults are really good at learning things quickly is because we already know a lot about the world so when you look at how adults learn the way that we typically learn is we take all those things we've already learned and we already know and they weigh really really really heavily in our decision making and in the kinds of solutions that we're going to consider um and then maybe we have a little new evidence but most of the time we sort of ignore it we might just tweak a little bit what we already think but you know mostly the way our brains are is they're not broke so we don't want to fix them they are working just fine we'll just leave them the way they are and implicit in that is that we have a strong set of priors right prior beliefs that we act on and we also i guess implicit what you're saying is that we have a lot of heuristics we have a lot of shortcuts that we've learned work well enough and so we do them always, right? Exactly. Let me give you an example in the universities, for example. It's a good example.
My world, we have lectures and the origins of that are the days when there weren't printed books so that you had one manuscript and the professor was reading from the manuscript because the students didn't have books. It is literally a medieval instructional technique. But we've been doing it for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's kind of what you do when you're a faculty member.
And the fact that we have no evidence at all, and in fact we have some evidence to the contrary for this being a good way to get anybody to learn anything, doesn't keep us from doing it. We're mostly doing it because we've always done it. Right. The students aren't dying of boredom.
Exactly. They're not dying. And when you ask yourself the question of why do we do it? What does even a very smart person say?
How does a very smart person answer that question for themselves? Yeah, I think what they say is, well, we've kind of always done it and it seems to work okay and we're good at doing it. And I think here's the most relevant thing. It would take so much work to try and think through all the alternatives and try them out and see which ones work and which ones don't.
That would just be such an effort that even if maybe in the long run it would be a bit of an advantage in terms of my short-run utilities, and in particular just for me, it's not going to make a difference. I think the general picture, you know, when you talk about risks as adults, when we're trying to decide on a course of action, we're always balancing the risks and utilities, whether that's a risk to my reputation or my ego or my future interactions with other people or just a risk to, you know, my profit margin. And kids aren't in that world of, or at least if they're being taken care of properly, they're not in that world of risk and utility calculations. That liberates them.
That frees them to, as we say, play. And we just sort of take the ground, yeah, of course kids play. But what play means, what do you mean when you say someone's playing? You mean they're doing something without really having a specific goal, without having to worry about whether it's going to be productive or not.
So where do all these wonderful and productive, potentially at least, childlike traits go? Do they magically evaporate? Is there a switch in our genes that kind of clicks over at age 21 and we stop thinking this way? What happens?
What we're trying to figure out now is exactly the answer to that question. So one thing that could happen is just that we all have the same brains, but as we accumulate more and more information, and we know that this happens, that some of the pathways get strengthened and become more efficient, and then other pathways just are what's called pruned. They just disappear. So it could be that it's just a matter of as we get to know more and become more efficient, we lose the capacity for flexibility.
But it could also be that there's something about being a child, about having that particular childlike mind and brain, that is the thing that's letting you explore more and in some sense be more creative. And that there are things that we could do even as adults that put us back into that kind of state. A state that's kind of magical, maybe? We went back to Alex Stone.
What was your favorite moment of your magic show today? I love how quickly they figured out the card trick to double lift. I mean, that was just bam. And adults never figure that out.
I'm going to give the deck a shuffle. I don't know if you guys can hear it. Shuffle here. I'm going to give the deck a cut.
This trick is called the ambitious card. Alex Stone asks one kid to pick a card and place it back in the deck. Then Stone shuffles the deck. But somehow, the kid's card makes it back to the top of the deck.
Turn over the top card. Yeah, okay. This trick kind of tells a story. And the story is that no matter how many times you try to bury this card, it's kind of like a Houdini escape told in miniature.
No matter how many times you try to take this card and put it in the middle of the deck, it's ambitious. That's why it's called the ambitious card. It always wants to pop back up to the top. Always.
And you keep doing that. Every time you do it, it gets more and more amazing. Again, it didn't take long for the kids to figure out the trick. Wait, where'd it come from?
How'd it happen? Here's a different card on top. The ambitious card, like a lot of tricks, relies on a double lift. That's when the magician presents two cards as if they're one.
The kids figured it out. She just busted your whole action. Get the heck out of here! All right, good job.
How did I? You still don't know what I'm going to figure it out. You don't have to have experience. The grown-ups need more help.
So I'm curious if your observation that kids are more perceptive when it comes to magic has led you to consciously try to kind of engage or magnify any kid-like traits in your life as an adult? Yeah, absolutely. Like what, name some? Like, I love listening to the Bach Loot Suites.
You know, especially the John Williams guitar. And when I listen to that, or I like any kind of classic music that's sort of multi-voice, try to listen to the Loot Suites and always focus on the bass. Because the bass is always less, you're less conscious of the bass, right? Because the higher frequency notes are always the ones, they're the lead notes.
It's like, you know, when you listen to a song and there's a singer singing high, you're drawn to that. That's the flash of light in the magic. That's the hand that's waving handkerchief. So when you force yourself to sort of focus on the bass, what I find, at least, is that it kind of levels out everything else.
It kind of turns down the sort of middle voice and the high voice. And you end up sort of, I find, hearing everything sort of simultaneously. And it allows you to kind of divide your attention so that you're experiencing the piece as a whole. You're hearing all the voices more clearly.
And it's hard to do it at first, actually, because you're going to keep snapping back to the high voice. But if you kind of train yourself to do it, I think it brings out a richness in the music that's amazing, because then you really start to hear everything at once. And that's kind of the same idea as focusing on the hand that's not doing so much in the magic trick. Hey, podcast listeners, on next week's show, we replay an episode that is one of your all-time favorites, The Upside of Quitting.
If I were to say, one of the single most important explanations for how I managed to succeed against all odds in the field of economics, it was by being a quitter. Yeah, quitting can be hard, but it can also be really good for you. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions.
Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalski, Greta Cohn, Bure Lamb, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Bannon, with engineering help from Jim Brakes. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions.