There is a phrase from the Spanish master Juan Tamariz that has been rattling around in my head for months. He talks about creating “lagoons in the spectators’ memories” — deliberate gaps where details sink and disappear, leaving the audience with an unbridgeable distance between the method and the effect.
Lagoons. I love that image. Calm, still water where things vanish without a trace.
But the concept was not just poetic to me. It became concrete and actionable when I connected Tamariz’s metaphor to Darwin Ortiz’s rigorous framework for temporal distance in Designing Miracles. Ortiz builds the entire concept into an engineering discipline, with specific tools and strategies that any performer can apply. And when I layered the cognitive science of the forgetting curve on top of Ortiz’s framework, something clicked that fundamentally changed how I construct effects.
The parenthesis of forgetfulness. That is what I call it now — the gap of time between the secret action and the magical moment, during which memory decay does the heavy lifting. Not misdirection. Not sleight of hand. Time itself.
The First Time It Worked on Me
I need to tell you about getting fooled. Badly fooled. Because understanding how temporal distance works from the inside — as a spectator, not a performer — was the experience that made this concept real for me.
It happened at a magic convention I attended in London, one of those weekends where you spend three days watching performances and attending lectures. I was watching a close-up performer do a card effect that, in retrospect, was relatively straightforward. But at the time, it felt like a genuine miracle.
The performer had shown four cards on the table. He talked about them. He had me interact with them. He told a short, engaging story about a gambler who could never lose. Then, at the climax, the cards transformed into something impossible.
I was completely floored. No idea how it happened. No theory, no suspicion, no inkling.
It was not until days later, lying awake in yet another hotel room — this time back in Austria, in Graz — that a thought occurred to me. There had been a moment, early in the effect, where the performer had done something with the cards that I could not quite remember. Something unremarkable. Something that had seemed perfectly natural at the time. But in the minutes between that moment and the climax, a story had been told, questions had been asked, my attention had been directed to specific cards and specific ideas, and the early action had been buried under layer upon layer of subsequent experience.
By the time the climax arrived, the early action was gone from my memory. It had sunk into the lagoon.
That was temporal distance at work. I just did not have the vocabulary for it yet.
Ortiz’s Framework: The Critical Interval
Darwin Ortiz defines temporal distance as the separation in time between the secret action and the magical moment. The longer this separation, the less likely the audience is to connect the two — because humans are hardwired to link events that happen close together in time.
This is built on a cognitive principle called temporal proximity. Our brains assume that events close together in time are causally related. If you snap your fingers and a light turns on, your first instinct is to assume the snap caused the light. If you snap your fingers and nothing happens for ten minutes and then a light turns on, you will never connect the two.
The same principle applies to magic. If you do something with the deck and the magic happens three seconds later, the audience’s causal reasoning immediately flags the deck action as the likely cause. But if you do something with the deck and the magic does not happen for five minutes — during which other things happen, other information is processed, other events fill the spectator’s working memory — the causal link breaks. The deck action is no longer temporally proximate to the effect. It drifts out of the zone of suspicion.
Ortiz calls this principle forward time displacement — making the effect appear to happen later than the method. The secret work is done early. The revelation comes late. And the gap between them is filled with experience that buries the method.
The Parenthesis
Here is how I think about it now.
Imagine a pair of parentheses in a sentence. The parenthetical content — the aside, the digression, the extra information — sits between the opening and closing marks. When you read the sentence, your brain processes the parenthetical content, but it exists in a separate register from the main sentence. It is supplementary. Secondary. It fills time without being the point.
In magic, the parenthesis of forgetfulness works the same way. The method is the opening parenthesis mark. The effect is the closing mark. And everything between them — the story, the interaction, the additional displays, the questions, the comedy, the engagement — is the parenthetical content. It fills the spectator’s experience. It fills their working memory. And it pushes the opening parenthesis mark further and further into the past.
By the time the closing mark arrives — the magical revelation — the opening mark is ancient history. The causal link between them has been severed by time, by intervening experience, and by the natural decay of memory.
The parenthesis of forgetfulness is not a sleight. It is a structural design principle. It is something you build into the architecture of your effect from the beginning.
How I Applied It in Vienna
Let me give you a concrete example from my own work.
I was performing a mentalism piece at a corporate event in Vienna — one of those keynote engagements where I integrate magic into a presentation about decision-making and perception. The effect involved a prediction. I needed to establish certain conditions early in the sequence, and those conditions were the key to making the effect work.
In my original version, the conditions were established about thirty seconds before the revelation. Thirty seconds. That is practically simultaneous from a temporal distance perspective. The audience had a vivid memory of what had just happened, and when the revelation came, several people immediately thought back to the setup and started making connections.
It was not that they figured it out. But they were close. Too close. The effect registered as a clever trick, not a miracle.
So I restructured it. I moved the critical setup to the very beginning of my presentation — fifteen minutes before the revelation. Fifteen minutes of content, stories, audience interaction, and other demonstrations sat between the setup and the payoff. By the time the prediction was revealed, the setup was ancient history. Nobody connected the two. Nobody even remembered the setup in detail.
The effect went from “that was really clever” to “how is that even possible?”
Same method. Same setup. Same revelation. The only thing I changed was the temporal distance.
Ortiz’s Time Displacement Devices
Ortiz goes further than simply recommending distance. He describes specific structural tools for managing the gap — what he calls time displacement devices. These are techniques that allow you to show the initial condition apparently unchanged even after the secret work has been completed.
Think about what this means. You do the secret work early. But then you show the audience that everything is still exactly as it should be. They see the “before” condition, they are reassured, and they stop tracking. Then the parenthesis begins — the gap fills with experience and content. And when the revelation finally comes, the audience has a clear memory of the “before” condition (because it was displayed convincingly) and no memory of the method (because it happened long ago and was followed by a sea of intervening experience).
The time displacement device is the mechanism that allows you to separate method from effect without arousing suspicion during the gap. It answers the question: “If you did the work early, why didn’t the audience notice that things had already changed?”
Because you showed them that nothing had changed. You showed them the “before” picture again, after the work was done. And that display became their anchor memory — the thing they remember when they reconstruct the effect.
The Restaurant Principle
Derren Brown describes a moment in Tricks of the Mind that perfectly illustrates this concept in action, though he frames it through the lens of the offbeat and tension-relaxation rather than temporal distance.
Brown describes a restaurant performance where he needed to place certain items in certain positions. Rather than doing so through clever technique during the effect, he waited until the apparent climax had passed and the audience had relaxed. Then he simply and openly positioned the items while the audience was in the relaxation phase following the climax. By the time the final revelation came, the positioning was already in the past, and the audience’s attention had moved on.
When I read that passage, I recognized the parenthesis of forgetfulness. The method was the opening mark. The relaxation and redirection that followed were the parenthetical content. And the final revelation was the closing mark. The gap between them was filled with experience that buried the method completely.
Brown was not using temporal distance as a formal design principle. He was using it instinctively. But the mechanism is the same.
Why This Works: The Science
Here is where the cognitive science makes the principle airtight.
Temporal proximity is one of the four causal cues that Ortiz identifies — the instinctive triggers that cause the audience to connect one event to another. When two events happen close together in time, the brain assumes causality. When they are separated in time, the assumption weakens.
But it is not just about weakening the causal assumption. It is about the forgetting curve. Ebbinghaus showed that memory decays most steeply in the first twenty minutes. This means that the secret action is not just temporally distant from the effect — it is actively decaying. Its traces in the spectator’s memory are fading, detail by detail, while new experiences fill the gap.
By the time the revelation arrives, the spectator’s memory of the setup has been through the steepest part of the forgetting curve. The procedural details are gone. The sequence is blurred. The spectator may have a vague sense that “something happened at the beginning,” but they cannot reconstruct what it was in enough detail to connect it to the effect.
This is why temporal distance is not just a performance technique. It is a memory exploitation strategy. You are using the architecture of the human brain — its limited working memory, its steep forgetting curve, its susceptibility to interference from subsequent experience — to erase the evidence of your method.
The Design Checklist
Here is the practical checklist I use when designing effects with temporal distance:
Can the method work be completed early? If the secret action can be front-loaded to the beginning of the sequence, do it. Early work benefits from maximum forgetting time.
Is there a convincing time displacement device? After the work is done, can you show the audience that conditions are still fair? This cements their “before” memory and clears the suspicion that might otherwise linger.
Is the gap filled with engaging content? Empty time is dangerous time. The spectator’s mind will wander back to earlier events. But engaging content — stories, interactions, questions, humor — keeps working memory occupied and accelerates the displacement of earlier memories.
Is the gap long enough? In my experience, anything under two minutes is dangerously short. The memory is still vivid. The causal link is still strong. Five minutes is safer. Fifteen minutes is nearly unbreakable. The longer the parenthesis, the deeper the method sinks.
Does the revelation stand alone? The climax should make sense without any reference to the setup. If the audience needs to remember the setup to appreciate the effect, you have a problem — because they will not remember it clearly.
The Lagoon
I keep coming back to Tamariz’s image. Lagoons in the spectators’ memories. Calm, still water where the details of the method sink and disappear.
The parenthesis of forgetfulness is how you create those lagoons. You open the parenthesis with the method. You fill the space between with experience. And you close the parenthesis with the effect. The wider the parenthesis, the deeper the lagoon.
Darwin Ortiz gave me the framework. Ebbinghaus gave me the science. Tamariz gave me the poetry. And all three converge on the same truth: time is the magician’s most underrated tool. Not time in the theatrical sense — dramatic timing, pauses, rhythm. Time in the cognitive sense. The slow, relentless erosion of detail that happens in every human brain, every minute of every day.
I used to think that the most important moment in a magic effect was the moment of revelation. Now I think the most important moment is the one nobody remembers. The opening parenthesis. The action that sinks into the lagoon and is never seen again.
That is where the miracle begins. Not in what the audience sees. But in what they forget.