It happened at a pharmaceutical conference in Vienna, about eighteen months ago.
I was performing during the networking segment of the event, doing close-up work at tables before my keynote slot later in the evening. I sat down with a group of four executives — two from the host company, two from partner firms — and performed a mentalism piece that involved one of them thinking of something personal. Without getting into the specifics, I revealed something that I could not possibly have known.
The effect itself — the moment of revelation — took about eight seconds. Maybe ten if you count the spectator reading what I had written.
The reaction lasted four minutes.
Not four seconds. Four minutes. I know this because I had a camera running for review purposes, and I went back and timed it. From the moment the spectator saw the revelation to the moment the group finally calmed down enough to have a normal conversation, four minutes and twelve seconds elapsed.
During those four minutes, the woman who had been the spectator could not speak. She kept shaking her head, looking at what I had written, looking at her colleagues, looking back at the paper, covering her mouth, uncovering it, trying to form words and failing. Her colleagues were asking her what was on the paper, she was trying to show them, they were reacting, they were looking at me, they were looking at each other, someone from the next table came over to see what was happening, and that person brought two more people, and suddenly there was a cluster of nine people around a table having a collective experience that I was no longer directing.
I just sat there and watched. There was nothing to do. The reaction had taken on a life of its own.
And sitting there, watching it unfold, I realized something that fundamentally changed how I think about what I do: the trick is the match. The reaction is the fire. And the fire is always more impressive, more memorable, and more valuable than the match that started it.
The Ratio That Matters
After that evening, I started tracking something I call the reaction ratio. It is simple: how long does the reaction last compared to the effect that produced it?
Some effects have a ratio close to one-to-one. The effect takes thirty seconds, and the audience responds for about thirty seconds — applause, some vocal reactions, then they settle back down and wait for the next thing. These are perfectly fine effects. They work. They entertain. But they do not set rooms on fire.
Other effects have ratios that are wildly asymmetric. The effect takes ten seconds and the reaction lasts two minutes. The effect takes five seconds and the reaction produces a story that gets retold for the rest of the evening. These are the effects that change the temperature of a room. The ones that turn a corporate event from a scheduled networking obligation into something people actually remember.
The highest reaction ratios I have ever produced come from mentalism pieces — effects where something personal, something private, something that should be unknowable is revealed. And the lowest ratios come from effects that are visually impressive but emotionally neutral. A card that changes color gets a reaction that lasts about as long as the change itself. A prediction that reveals something meaningful about a spectator gets a reaction that outlives the event.
Derren Brown writes in Absolute Magic about the difference between the experience of being fooled and the experience of genuine wonder. Being fooled produces a short-lived intellectual response — “how did that happen?” — that fades as soon as the next topic of conversation arises. Genuine wonder produces an emotional response that persists because it has touched something deeper than curiosity. It has touched the spectator’s sense of what is possible.
The reaction ratio is a direct measure of which experience you have created. If the ratio is low, you have fooled them. If the ratio is high, you have moved them.
Why Long Reactions Happen
I have spent a lot of time analyzing what produces these extended, self-sustaining reactions, and I think there are several mechanisms at work.
The first is what I call the reconstruction loop. When something truly inexplicable happens, the spectator’s brain enters a cycle of trying to reconstruct what occurred. They replay the moment in their mind, looking for the explanation. They cannot find one, so they replay it again. Each failed reconstruction produces a fresh wave of astonishment, and each wave produces a fresh visible reaction. The person shakes their head again, says “no, but how…” again, looks at their hands or the props again. The reaction sustains itself because the brain keeps failing to solve the puzzle.
Research on memory and magic from Gustav Kuhn and Alice Pailhes at Goldsmiths University describes how spectators reconstruct magical events after the fact, and how that reconstruction is itself shaped by suggestion and framing. The key insight is that the reconstruction is not a neutral, objective replay. It is an active, creative process that can amplify the impossibility of what happened. When the spectator replays the event in their mind and discovers that their reconstruction makes the effect even more impossible than they initially thought, the reaction intensifies rather than diminishes.
The second mechanism is social propagation. When the initial spectator has a strong reaction, other people notice and want to know what happened. The spectator attempts to explain, fails to convey the impossibility, and the listeners lean in further. Someone says “wait, what?” and the spectator tries again, each retelling amplifying certain details and dropping others, and the growing cluster of people generates its own energy. The reaction has become social. It is no longer contained within one person’s experience — it has become a shared event.
The third mechanism is the emotional aftershock. When an effect touches something personal — a thought, a memory, a private decision — the spectator experiences not just intellectual bafflement but emotional vulnerability. They have just had something deeply private revealed in a public setting, and the combination of impossibility and exposure creates a complex emotional state that takes time to process. The reaction is long because the feeling is complex.
The Practice Implications
Understanding the reaction ratio changed how I practice. I used to practice effects until the execution was flawless, then move on. Now I practice effects until the execution is flawless, and then I spend additional time rehearsing what happens after the effect.
This sounds strange, but think about it. If the reaction is four minutes long and the effect is ten seconds, then ninety-seven percent of the performance time is reaction management. And I was spending zero percent of my practice time on it.
What does it mean to practice reaction management? It means practicing the pause. The silence after the revelation. The stillness that gives the spectator permission to react without feeling rushed. It means practicing how I look at the spectator when the moment lands — not with expectation (“be amazed!”) but with genuine interest (“what are you experiencing right now?”). It means practicing the physical discipline of not moving on to the next piece while the current reaction is still alive.
Scott Alexander writes about the importance of pauses in his lecture notes, and about not stepping on the audience’s reaction. The principle is straightforward: if you keep performing while the audience is still reacting, you are essentially telling them to stop reacting. You are communicating that their response is less important than your next bit of material. And they will comply — they will suppress their reaction and pay attention to what you are doing, and you will have sacrificed the most powerful four minutes of your show for the sake of your schedule.
I practice this by rehearsing specific effects and then deliberately sitting in silence for thirty seconds after the climax. At first, thirty seconds of silence felt unbearable. I wanted to fill it. I wanted to say something. Every nerve in my body screamed at me to keep the show moving. But over time, I learned to breathe into the silence and watch. To trust that the reaction would fill the space without my help.
The Hotel Room Experiment
One night in a hotel room in Klagenfurt, I set up my camera and practiced a piece from start to finish, including the imagined reaction. I performed the effect for an invisible spectator, and then I sat in silence for two full minutes, practicing what I would do with my face, my body, my attention during the reaction time.
It felt absurd. I was sitting in a hotel room at midnight, staring at an empty chair, practicing doing nothing. But the next time I performed that piece at a corporate event, I knew exactly what to do during the reaction. I knew where to look. I knew how to breathe. I knew how to let the moment grow instead of cutting it short.
The reaction at that event was one of the longest I have ever produced. Not because the effect was better. Because I had finally learned to get out of its way.
Evaluating My Repertoire
The reaction ratio became a filter for evaluating my entire repertoire. I went through every piece I perform and roughly estimated the ratio for each one based on my performance records and memory.
The results were revealing. My technically most demanding pieces — the ones I had spent the most hours practicing, the ones that required the most skill — had some of the lowest reaction ratios. The audience appreciated them, applauded them, and moved on. My technically simplest pieces — effects that were almost embarrassingly easy to execute — had some of the highest ratios. The reactions were volcanic and self-sustaining.
This created an uncomfortable question: was I spending most of my practice time on the effects that produced the least audience impact? The answer, I had to admit, was yes. I was optimizing for the wrong variable. I was spending hours perfecting execution that produced seconds of reaction, while neglecting presentation and spectator interaction choices that could produce minutes of reaction.
I did not abandon the technically demanding pieces. Some of them serve important structural purposes in my shows — they demonstrate skill, create variety, and build credibility. But I stopped treating them as the centerpieces. The centerpieces are now the pieces with the highest reaction ratios, regardless of their technical difficulty.
The Metric Nobody Talks About
In the magic community, performers tend to evaluate effects based on three things: how impossible the effect is, how clean the method is, and how original the presentation is. These are all valid criteria. But they are all performer-centric. They describe the effect from the magician’s perspective.
The reaction ratio is audience-centric. It measures the one thing that actually matters: what happens in the room after the magic is done. And by that measure, some of the most celebrated effects in magic are mediocre, while some of the simplest, least discussed effects are extraordinary.
I have started asking a different question when I encounter new material. Instead of “how impossible is this?” I ask “how long will the reaction last?” Instead of “how clean is the method?” I ask “will the spectator still be talking about this at dinner?” Instead of “how original is the presentation?” I ask “will this produce a reaction that other people in the room want to be part of?”
Because the trick is over in seconds. The reaction is what remains. And the reaction — the genuine, sustained, self-propagating emotional response of a real person to something genuinely inexplicable — is the only thing that was ever really the point.
The match burns out. The fire is what lights the room.