The Act, and the Laboratory That Tested It

The performance that made Geller famous was small in scale and enormously effective on television: a spoon or key held lightly between the fingers appears to soften and bend, a watch that has stopped begins to run, a drawing sealed in an envelope is reproduced. Between 1972 and 1973 he was tested at Stanford Research Institute, and the tests are documented, which is unusual for a stage psychic and is the reason he appears in a reference work of this kind at all. The published Nature paper reporting SRI work described results attributed to him on picture-drawing tasks and on dice prediction, and pointedly did not include the metal bending, which the authors declined to present as an established phenomenon.

Critics have made two separate objections that are worth keeping apart. The first is that the picture-drawing protocol as run allowed opportunities for ordinary information transfer that the experimenters did not close. The second is broader and was pressed hardest by professional conjurors: that a physicist observing a performance has no training in what to watch for, and that the entire act is standard mentalism performed extremely well. The two objections are independent, and a reader can accept the first without needing to reach a view on the second.