Normally, in interviews, questions go in one direction; in this one, they are not unidirectional: “Choose a card. Do you have it? Don’t show it to me.” And he gets it right, incomprehensibly. Magician Stigman, the stage name of Ignasi Stigman —yes, Stigman is his real surname— receives us in the room where he usually rehearses his magic, in Gràcia, with a deck of cards in hand, with many answers, and many questions. Because magic is also about asking, but in a different way.
“Behind magic there is a lot of neuroscience,” and that is what has to do with these questions, with distractions, with the surprise effect of illusionism. “Most people think that magicians are mostly skillful with their hands, but magic, in reality, is not about the manipulation of objects, like a juggler might be; what magic manipulates most is the spectator’s brain,” their perception and attention. “It’s pure psychology.” And this is precisely the career Stigman studied.
Now, psychology and neuroscience are, for him, working tools: selective attention allows us to look at one thing while another happens without us detecting it; memory can reconstruct what we have just seen, and even our decisions can be more predictable than we think. “Magic shows that human beings are very vulnerable,” he says. And it is precisely this vulnerability that the illusionist learns to know, to the point of knowing at what moment the spectator’s brain will look to one side while magic happens on the other. Or mathematics, since in many cases numbers have a lot to say, often with logical and numerical explanations that make the tricks even more interesting once they are known.
Some of these explanations are revealed in the book Magic for Every Day (Grup 62), with one objective: to bring magic down from the stage to turn it into a tool for educating, communicating, and connecting with others. Written with the journalist Carme Escales, the book brings illusionism to spaces where it is not usually expected, and invites us to look at communication and learning from a new, more magical perspective.
Thus, the book is presented as a practical guide that shows how magic games can awaken emotions, surprise, communicate, captivate the mind. With explanations of tricks and with magic as a common thread, Stigman captures in the book the experience and learning accumulated during decades of magic, and not only on stage, but also in educational and even professional environments.
The magician's fascination with this discipline came, precisely, in an educational environment. Stigman was 14 years old when a magician visited the school where he was studying musical theater, and he was captivated. That visit led him to want to know more and, at a time without online classes or Youtube videos, he began to devour books, especially from the specialized store Magicus. "Then the society of magicians was much more hermetic, and there was the idea that, if secrets and techniques were shared, illusionism would disappear."
From book to book, he learned, and also became more and more interested, until the manager of Magicus endorsed him to enter the association of magicians, a year later. Before, however, one must pass an exam, and not only that, but demonstrate that one does not want to enter out of gossip, curiosity or to reveal secrets, but out of genuine interest and to bring value to the society of magicians. While he explains it, he shuffles cards, up and down, down and up, with skill and precision: "Sometimes I do it without realizing it."
"Magic allows you to connect with the inner child we all have within"
This value, Stigman brings to the world of illusionism with the same fascination that captivated him on the first day. Not only for magic's ability to leave the spectator speechless, but for the emotions it is capable of generating, the surprise. "What I seek is for people to leave a show better than when they entered. Magic allows you to connect with the inner child we all have within." Even for those who enter only with the intention of finding where the trick is: "They come to discover how it's done, they believe that by paying close attention they will discover it. But it is studied that, after approximately 20 minutes without discovering anything, you let it go, and you just enjoy, and connect with that inner child. You assume that your brain cannot understand it and, instead of getting angry, you laugh, and I begin to enjoy, to let myself be surprised."
And this doesn't only happen on stage, but, as in the book, Stigman takes magic further, as a tool for communication and connection. Presentations, conferences, or marketing campaigns are some of the environments in which the magician has applied his knowledge and experience in the universe of illusionism and psychology. An example? A software company has hired him on several occasions for a conference at the CCIB, where Stigman initially pretends to be a company IT specialist who is a magic enthusiast, performing tricks for conference attendees as they stop at the company's stand.
Stigman also brings illusionism to corporate conferences, where he talks about motivation and human resources through magic. And also to schools, where he uses magic to explain mathematics and awaken interest in numbers and all the games they allow. In fact, his show Matemàgia starts from numerical patterns and probabilities to show students that behind an apparently impossible effect there can be a numerical structure.
Surprise is, in this sense, a pedagogical tool. Stigman has worked on this issue with David Bueno, a neuroscientist and author of the prologue to Màgia per a cada dia, exploring how emotion favors learning. “When transmitted with emotion, the message arrives with more force; if you have to transmit a message, the best way for it to arrive is with emotion. And in magic we use a very powerful emotion, which is surprise”.
It is this power of emotion that is applied on stage, and also in educational and work environments, as explored through the book, together with Escales. In the rehearsal room, the cards return to the deck, while Stigman talks about new (or old) tricks he has been recovering from old books. Now he is adapting them to change the mechanisms, without modifying the emotion they generate; always seeking that powerful surprise to excite and connect, and which the magician has brought to everyday life with Màgia per a cada dia.