After working with Wes for a while, I decided to seek out the man widely regarded as the world’s greatest card cheat. I was inspired by a story I read about Wes’s own teacher, Dai Vernon. Back in 1932, Vernon had traveled to Missouri in pursuit of a grifter named Allen Kennedy who had reputedly mastered the center deal—that is, secretly dealing from the middle of the pack. At the time, many magicians, including Vernon, considered center dealing to be the holy grail of gambling sleights—the reason being that if you can deal from the middle, you never have to worry about the cut. After a lengthy search, Vernon caught up with Kennedy and traded some of his A material for the move. (Vernon was pathologically secretive, so he must have wanted the information very badly.) Years later, Vernon bequeathed the Kennedy center deal to members of his innermost tribe. The man I sought was one of them.
His name was Richard Turner, and as luck would have it, he was scheduled to give a closed-door lecture for the Society of American Magicians in New York. Though unknown outside the realm of magic and gambling, Turner was said to be a card handler without equal, a man whose prowess with a deck bordered on the supernatural. No less a technician than Vernon had singled him out as the most gifted card mechanic he’d ever encountered in his eight-decade career—better even than Kennedy himself. “Richard Turner does things with cards that nobody else in the world can do,” Vernon once said.
I wanted to know what made Turner so good, and maybe pick up a trick or two in the process. I also wanted to see if he measured up to the hype. The stories that circulated about him were far-fetched, to say the least, and as I had learned early on, the world of magic is filled with half-truths and hucksterism—or what Jeff McBride calls “fakelore.” (The word famous in a magician’s title means about as much as it does when attached to the name of a New York pizzeria.) But what most raised doubts in my mind was the astonishing fact that Richard Turner, the greatest living card cheat and quite possibly the sharpest card handler of all time, was blind.
WITH HIS BLACK STETSON HAT, lizard-skin boots, and wide Doc Holliday moustache the texture of dried tumbleweed, Richard Turner looks like a saloonkeeper from the Badlands, a Victorian-era cowboy, or a ghost town tour guide. When I first saw this apparition the night of the lecture, as he came striding into a sterile auditorium in the back of the Mount Sinai Medical Center on Madison Avenue—the SAM’s new bat cave—I checked his hip for the holster and six-shooter, seemingly the only things missing from his getup. Nope, no holster, just a solid gold belt buckle in the shape of a five-card poker hand—three aces and two eights, a strong full house.
Still, Turner is licensed to carry a firearm. Nearly three decades ago, when the top organized crime families in New York and overseas were pursuing him relentlessly, offering him millions to work for them and threatening to kill him if he declined, he was armed for his own protection by the head of the San Diego SWAT team.
What the mob wanted so badly—what they were willing to kill for—was Richard Turner’s sense of touch. It’s an underappreciated sense, really, in this audiovisual age, but within the rarified domain of the professional cardsharp, a finely tuned sense of touch is everything. In Turner’s case it almost got him killed, and after witnessing a demonstration of his Midas-like abilities the night of the SAM lecture, along with a dozen or so other local magicians who’d come to watch him perform, I understood why.
“Do as I do,” Turner opened, in a warm antebellum drawl, flashing a bandit’s grin as he offered a deck to the volunteer he’d chosen from the crowd, a blonde woman in her mid-thirties with light, freckled skin. “When you play poker, blackjack, bridge—whatever your game—you wanna make sure the cards are very evenly mixed. Let’s start with some simple cuts. Takes no skill to do this.” Turner started to cut the cards, gradually speeding up as he spoke while his volunteer did her best to keep up. “Now alternate it. Now try a flying three-way. Now try a one-two-three-four-five-six-seven way. Or strip cutting, as in the casino.” The audience chuckled as Turner’s hands moved in a blur and his volunteer tried in vain to follow. “No skill at all,” she cracked wryly, as Turner moved on to a series of shuffles, each one more intricate than the last. The woman stood haplessly by, no longer trying, a portrait of defeat. Ignoring her and addressing himself to the audience, Turner went on.
“Aaaright,” he said. “Now you’re ready for the way they shuffle in a casino. Just give it a closed riffle shuffle. Perfect. Now how ’bout the faro shuffle? Break ’em in half and lace ’em up every other card, then bridge ’em down.” There was more laughter as Turner split the deck exactly in half and zippered the two stacks with one hand, then executed an acrobatic one-handed flip-around cut. He paused. “Well, I’ve shown you half a dozen ways of shuffling and cutting,” he said. “The deck should be pretty evenly mixed, right?” He smiled triumphantly and spread the deck face up on the table to reveal the cards in pristine numerical order. “Does that look even?” Everyone in the room shrieked and clapped, a boisterous uproar that lasted close to a minute. As he waited for the clamor to subside, Turner fished a toothpick from his pocket, leaned back in his chair, and calmly began picking at his teeth.
This was only the beginning. Turner could do simultaneous perfect one-handed shuffles with a deck in each hand. His crooked deals—seconds, middles, bottoms—were the most deceptive I’d ever seen. His one-handed middle deal—the hardest of all the shady deals—looked legit from every angle. He even did an impossible Greek deal—a second-from-the-bottom deal used to circumvent the cut card placed underneath decks at casinos. He dealt blackjacks to another volunteer, the only other woman present, from a deck she’d shuffled and cut, his hands moving in slow motion so we could study his every move.
But the effect that destroyed every magician in the house that night may well have been the simplest. A spectator picked a card, replaced it in the deck, and shuffled, and yet somehow Turner was able to locate the card and control it to the top—a feat nobody in the world can explain, I have heard, and one that has baffled card experts, magicians, and casino personnel alike.
Not bad for a guy who’s legally blind.
Actually, Turner’s vision is six grades below the cutoff for blindness, the result of a rare degenerative tissue disease (called birdshot chorioretinopathy) that began ravaging his retinas at age nine. “The macula is pretty much dissolved,” he told me later, referring to the oval cluster of nerve cells near the center of the eye. “And the rest of the retina looks like someone took a shotgun with birdshot and blew it full of holes.” (Hence the disease’s evocative name.)
Most other people with this disease would probably have given up on the dream of becoming a world-class card manipulator, a goal Turner had set his mind on at age seven after watching an episode of the TV show Maverick. But Turner kept at it. He practiced day and night. He ate and drank and slept with cards in his hand. He still sleeps with his cards, and five years ago, when forced to undergo hernia surgery, Turner clutched a deck while on the operating table. To hear Turner tell it, his abilities are not something he developed in spite of his disability, but rather because of it. “I have to do it all by touch,” he says. “Which is a real blessing.”
Watching Turner baffle a roomful of experts put me in mind of what is often said about people who lose one or more of their primary senses: that their surviving senses compensate by becoming sharper. We now know that this compensatory response is rooted in a phenomenon known as brain plasticity, whereby neurons regenerate and reorganize themselves in response to trauma or a change in the environment. Once viewed as a calcified mass of unalterable circuitry, the human brain turns out to be surprisingly supple, even in adulthood, and the study of brain plasticity has become a central theme of modern neuroscience.
Indeed, what Turner lost in vision he seems to have recouped in an almost superhuman tactile ability. It’s as though he sees with his fingers. Give him a pile of cards, and he can tell you exactly how many there are by running his index finger along the edges. Turner is so good, in fact, that he consults for numerous casinos as well as for the United States Playing Card Company, the world’s largest card manufacturer.
His title: Touch Analyst.
THE NOTION THAT BLIND PEOPLE develop enhanced nonvisual abilities to make up for their lack of sight goes way back, to a time long before we knew anything about neuroplasticity. In the realm of semimyth, Homer was said to be blind, as was the prophet Tiresias. The Talmud references the memory feats of the blind and the trust placed in them by rabbinic scholars as reliable authorities on obscure passages. In his eighteenth-century Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See, the French philosopher Denis Diderot describes a blind man capable of recognizing voices with astounding accuracy. Throughout history, blind musicians have been mythologized as miracles of sensory adaptation, a view that is still common today, and which is given credence by the likes of Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and Andrea Bocelli.
Until recently, however, the evidence was mostly anecdotal. Only in the last decade or so have scientists systematically matched up the blind and the nonblind in head-to-head tests, peering into their brains to see what, if anything, is different. The results, even after discounting for the accumulated wisdom of history, have revolutionized the way neuroscientists think about the human mind.
Consider, for starters, how much better blind people can hear compared to most. As has now been shown in dozens of studies, the blind beat the nonblind on virtually every measure of acoustic ability. Blind people are better at speech recognition, sound identification, and auditory localization, even with one ear plugged. They hear changes in pitch that are ten times smaller than anything a seeing person can manage. (This is why some of the best piano tuners are blind.) Perfect pitch—the ability to identify notes without external reference tones—is three times more common among blind musicians than among those who can see, and this is true even for blind musicians who begin their musical training later in life. And when it comes to memory, the Talmud is right. People who lose their vision early on have exceptional short- and long-term memories, for words as well as for sounds. Studies have also shown that their brains are unusually immune to false memories.
Where tactile sensations are concerned, the blind not only read with their fingers—using the Braille alphabet—but they can recognize and remember raised letters and embossed pictures by feel with remarkable precision. They are able to sense minute differences in texture that are imperceptible to most people. Their fingers can feel, for instance, the difference between a single groove and a pair of parallel grooves, even when the two grooves are separated by a fraction of a millimeter. Such extraordinary sensitivity to size, gradations of shape, and texture has allowed the blind paleontologist Geerat Vermeij, one of the world’s foremost experts on mollusks, to trace the evolution of several new species that had gone overlooked by his colleagues, simply by turning the shells over in his hands and feeling subtle differences in their forms. Turner has the same kind of hypersensitivity. “When I feel a card, it’s like those cards are a quarter of an inch thick,” he tells people. “The cards multiply in size.” He says a similar thing about typing on his BlackBerry. “It’s like I’m looking at something that’s about two and a half feet across.” And when he types, he moves his head from side to side, because the letters appear on a giant screen in his mind.
Armed with fMRI machines and PET scanners, neuroscientists recently zoomed in on the brains of blind subjects to see what was going on under the hood during these amazing perceptual feats. What they found came as a shock. As expected, Braille reading and other touch-related tasks engaged the somatosensory cortex, the zone of gray matter that processes tactile sensations. This was true of everyone, not just the blind. But when the blind participants read Braille, something unexpected occurred: the visual cortex, the part of the brain dedicated to vision, lit up as well. Even though they lived in total darkness, the inner eye of the blind subjects was firing on all cylinders, exhibiting all the features of cognitive engagement—increased blood flow, a cascade of metabolic activity, and a shower of electrical impulses—that one would normally observe in a seeing person whose eyes are glued to a book or a baseball game. The story these scans told was unmistakable: the blind subjects were seeing with their fingers.
Not only that, but the visual cortex was found to be the driving force behind their superior abilities. Performance on nonvisual tasks was directly correlated with the level of activity in the visual cortex—the more active it was, the better they did—and temporarily disabling the visual cortex with a Marvel-esque machine called a transcranial magnetic stimulator, which beams a magnetic field into select brain regions, rendered them unable to read Braille and identify embossed letters. Playing the same prank on people who can see, meanwhile, has no impact on their sense of touch; it hampers only their vision. A parallel strand of research has found that people who are born blind lose the ability to read Braille if a stroke damages both hemispheres of their visual cortex, even if their tactile system remains unharmed. Perhaps this is why blind people such as Turner frequently speak of touch in visual terms. “When I touch something,” he says, “I’m seeing it in front of me in full scale. If I touch a pen, instantly I see a pen. If I touch a comb, I see a comb.” More than just fanciful metaphor, this language hints at the underlying neural correlates at work.
This apparent crossover between the visual and tactile channels took neuroscientists by surprise in part because the vast majority of them had long believed in a fixed division of labor between major brain regions. Each primary cortex was thought to handle a single sensory modality. The visual cortex dealt exclusively with vision, the auditory cortex dealt exclusively with sound, and so forth. If for whatever reason the optical feed were severed, the visual cortex would forever lie fallow, sealed off from the world. Cross-modal plasticity, in which one higher-level brain region takes over for another, was thought to be impossible, an assumption that seemed reasonable enough given that signals from the optic nerve travel to the brain along distinct pathways, separate from those of the other senses. But time and again we find that the brain is full of tricks.
“NAME ANY FOUR OF A kind.”
I looked at the cards spread out on the table in a long ribbon. “All right,” I said. “I’ll choose the nines.”
“Take out the nines,” Turner said.
I extracted the nines from the spread and held them in my right hand.
“Close up the deck, and put your nines on top.”
I did as I was told.
“Now cut the deck and square it up real nice and clean.”
I cocked my head to one side. If I cut and squared, how could he possibly know where the nines were? Turner was unfazed.
“All right,” he drawled, picking up the deck. “Your cards are somewhere, depending on where you cut them, right?”
I nodded. Then I remembered he was blind. “Yes, that’s right,” I said.
“Now, what poker games are you familiar with?”
“Well, I play Hold ’Em a lot,” I said.
“Okay, give me a number of players.”
I paused for a moment to think. “Six players.”
“Okay, in Hold ’Em we have what are called the pocket cards,” he said, dealing two facedown cards to each of the six imaginary players, counting them off out loud. “And we have the board.” He dealt three faceup cards in the middle of the table. One of them was a nine. Turner burned a card off the top and tabled another one face up.
“What’s that card?”
“A nine.”
“There’s a burn, there’s a turn,” he rejoined, dealing another. “What’s that?”
I heaved a puzzled sigh. “A nine.”
He then turned over his pocket cards to reveal that he had the fourth nine, giving him four of a kind. A crushing hand.
Although I had no idea how Turner had located the cards, I knew this was the famous middle deal, the sleight Vernon had traveled to Missouri to learn from Allen Kennedy.
“That’s a tough move, right?” I asked, knowing full well what the answer was.
Turned nodded. “Oh, it’s a very tough move,” he said. “But it’s not the toughest.”
I shrugged. What could possibly be more difficult?
It was just after noon and we were sitting in Turner’s kitchen. After watching him floor everyone at the SAM, I’d asked Turner if I could pay him a visit in San Antonio, where he lives with his wife, Kim, and their teenage son, Asa Spades. Turner had invited me to spend the day with him at his home—a two-story, four-bedroom brick abode in the brushwood hills on the outskirts of town, not far from where I went to high school.
The house was crammed with antique furniture, workout equipment, photographs of magicians, and trophies and plaques Turner had won either at cards or karate. (He’s a sixth-degree black belt.) A backyard swimming pool hemmed in by an enormous teak deck was visible through the sliding glass doors in the kitchen. It was a sparkling day, clear blue skies as far as the eye could see.
Turner grew up in San Diego, California, the eldest of five children. His father was a welder from Tennessee who worked in factories, while his mother, a Michigan native, stayed at home with the kids. Turner was seven when he started playing cards with his four younger siblings, two sisters and two brothers. They played poker, rummy, gin rummy, crazy eights, hearts, spades, war. The games changed, but one thing stayed the same—Turner never lost. “I would start coming up with ways to make sure I always won,” he told me. “And it kept perpetuating itself. I started getting a reputation. My sister Lori never trusted me. I would catch her hiding cards under the throw carpet.” When his family wasn’t available to play with him he would stack aces against an imaginary opponent. “I would shoot him with my toy gun after he called me a cheater,” Turner joked.
On the first day of ninth grade, Turner’s English teacher caught him doing tricks for the boy sitting next to him. She confiscated his cards and sent him to the back of the room. But the punishment didn’t take. Before long he was hustling his classmates at poker and gin and paying other students to do his homework with the winnings. He even hatched a game he called massage poker, which he used to score rubdowns from female classmates. “There would be a thirty-second ante,” he explained. “You could bet between fifteen and sixty seconds, and at the end of the hand the winner would get a massage anywhere you wanted.”
By the time he was old enough to drink, Turner could deal middles and bottoms and run up a stack during the shuffle, moves very few people in the world knew how to do. “I would think of it in my head,” he told me. “I’ve read two books in my life: Erdnase, and it was from an audiocassette version, and then somebody read to me from a book called Seconds, Centers and Bottoms, by Marlo. That was it. That was the only reading I ever did.”
Turner met Dai Vernon when he was twenty-one, at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles. Impressed with Turner’s abilities and his pathological work ethic, Vernon took Turner under his wing. The two became close friends and worked together for seventeen years. “He would share with me things that he didn’t share with anyone else,” Turner recalls. “I was very, very fortunate.” Turner and his wife threw Vernon his ninety-eighth birthday party, two months before he died.
By the early eighties, Turner had gained enough notoriety as a card handler to attract the attention of the world’s top crime syndicates. First to come calling was R.D., a New York Mafia kingpin who offered Turner $2,000 a day to cheat for him on the LA circuit. “We played cards, and he was a good second dealer and a good mucker,” Turner recalls. “Then I started showing him what I could do, and he said, ‘You can do by yourself what it takes four of my mechanics to do together.’ ” R.D. followed Turner around for six years. Then one day, Turner heard R.D.’s name on the nightly news. The FBI had raided a mob operation in San Diego, and R.D. was being carted off to jail.
After that came the Saudis, with million-dollar offers to play for oil money. But Turner knew better. “A situation like that, and you’re a hundred percent used,” he said. Translation: “They kill you when they’re done with you.” Scarier still was a diamond merchant from South Africa who wanted Turner to brace games outside Sun City. More than a quarter of a century later you can still hear the faint echo of fear in Turner’s voice as he recalls a cross-country flight on which he found Mr. Diamond, as he calls him, sitting across the aisle. “Hello, Richard,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about doing a little business together.”
“This guy knew about me in ways he shouldn’t have,” Turner remembers. “I’d be on the road performing here and there, or doing shows, and he would know where I was. He would call me up in my hotel room, ‘Richard, I’m downstairs. Let me buy you dinner.’ ” Mr. Diamond offered Turner hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, a five-carat diamond pinky ring worth $70,000—“I knew if I took it, then he’d have me”—and a spot on The Tonight Show. After Turner refused, Mr. Diamond made one last bid. “If you ever want to have your wife or anyone else killed,” he said, “I can arrange that for you. It’ll be an accident. An explosion. No one would know.”
Fearing for his family’s safety, Turner handed Mr. Diamond’s business card over to the captain of the San Diego SWAT team, a man named Charles Curtis, who one year earlier had helped track down Texas serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. Curtis armed Turner with a Walther PPK (James Bond’s gun) and taught him how to handle it in tight situations. Turner keeps the pistol stashed away in a thick vault in his living room.
Scorning mob money, Turner continued to earn a living legally—performing gambling demonstrations aboard riverboat casinos, lecturing, and consulting. From 1979 until 1984, he performed aboard the Ruben E. Lee, then moved to Fort Worth to work at a nightclub named Billy Bob’s. In 1991, the same year he met his second wife, Kim, he spent another brief stint on the water. They married the following year, in a small ceremony in San Diego. Vernon was one of the guests. A painting of the two, embracing like brothers-in-arms, hangs above the mantel in Turner’s living room.
Turner’s relationship with the U.S. Playing Card Company began in 1988, when he noticed that something was off about the Bicycle cards he’d been using for almost two decades. “The cards had really gone down in their quality,” he told me. “And I said, ‘Hey, you guys are screwing us. This is not the same card you’ve been making.’ ” He was right. Earlier that year the USPCC had begun subcontracting their paper. As a result, their cards were being printed on cheaper stock. Five years later, the USPCC made another change to their production cycle, this time to the way they cut the paper. This didn’t escape Turner’s notice, either. “I said, ‘You guys are changing the way you’re cutting your paper. You’re not cutting the same way you’ve been cutting them for a hundred years. These are not traditionally cut.’ ”
Traditionally cut means the blade goes through the face of the card rather than the back, leaving a rounded edge on the face and a rough edge on the back. Shuffling facedown is easier when the rough edge is on the back, and most people, including all casino dealers, shuffle facedown. If the rough edge is on the wrong side, the cards tend to bind up when they are shuffled. Turner illustrated this for me using my cards, which were not traditionally cut.
“Are these faceup right now?” he asked.
I paused for a moment, then remembered that he couldn’t see. “Yeah, those are faceup.”
He meshed them together. “See how nicely they shuffle when they’re faceup? Do it facedown and they don’t go anywhere. You have to force them.”
I tried to interlace the cards facedown, and sure enough, they refused to cooperate.
When Turner brought this issue to the attention of the USPCC, the company’s executives didn’t believe him at first. At the time, they had no idea that changes to the production process had affected the quality of their cards. “We didn’t know that we’d changed anything,” Lance Merrell, the company’s director of R&D, later told me. “This wasn’t even on our radar.”
Rather than make an enemy of Turner, the USPCC gave him a job and a title. “Once I learned that he had a heightened sense of feel,” Merrell recalls, “I realized we could use that to fine-tune our process.” Turner’s job as touch analyst is to test-drive decks from different runs, rate them on a scale of one to ten, and report back on any irregularities he finds. Like Vermeij with his mollusks, Turner does it all by touch. His caliper-like fingers can sense the thickness of the paper stock to within a thousandth of an inch. He can detect tiny fluctuations in the level of embossing. Using his fingernail as a stylus, he once counted the number of embossed ridges on a card and sent the result to Merrell. “I didn’t even know how to count them without a microscope,” Merrell told me. “I had to go to the manufacturer of the embossing product and ask how many lines per inch he used. And Turner was right.” Turner can even pick up subtle variations in the moisture level of the paper and the ink, along with changes to the chemical composition of the coating used to block out mold. “His touch sensitivity is incredible,” says Merrell. “I don’t even know how to describe it. He’s like Rain Man.”
For his personal use, Turner has the USPCC make cards to his own specifications, punched the old way, but with mandolins on the backs instead of angels, because the company jealously guards the integrity of its trademark. (Bicycle decks are the most recognized cards in the world.) As part of his compensation, Turner has received a lifetime supply.
When he handed me one of his decks and I shuffled them, I could feel the difference immediately. They were smoother, sturdier, and the edges meshed together with ease.
“Oh, wow, these just go like butter,” I rhapsodized, unaware of how ridiculous I must have sounded to Turner. “So nice.”
“It’s like having an instrument,” he explained. “A better instrument’s going to play nicer.” Turner has his Mandolin decks delivered to his house by the gross and is allowed to sell them online at a premium, another perk of his relationship with the USPCC. “The top card men, they all use my cards,” he said.
IT WAS TIME FOR ANOTHER trick. Once again using my deck, Turner spread the pack facedown (as if it mattered), and I plucked out a card—the ace of hearts. Turner squared up the spread and asked me to call out “stop” as he cut small blocks of about five cards each onto the table.
“Okay,” I said, after a while. “Stop.”
“Drop your card.”
I placed my card onto the stack, and Turner continued dumping cards on top, burying it in the middle of the deck.
“Square ’em up,” he said. “And cut ’em.”
I cut the deck.
“Cut ’em again. Give it a shuffle.”
“Really?”
Turned nodded, and I shuffled the cards.
“Give it another cut, finish it, and hand me the deck.”
I cut one last time and pushed the deck toward him. As he searched the table with his hands for the cards, I mentally reviewed what had just taken place. I’d dropped the ace into the deck, cut twice, shuffled, and cut one final time.
“You can’t ask for any tougher sets of circumstance,” he said, as if sensing my thoughts. “I’m just going to try cutting the card right out of the middle.”
I hunched over and trained my eyes on his hands, close enough to smell the lanolin-and-mango lotion he applies three times daily to keep his skin moist and supple. With his fingers on the edges of the pack, Turner slowly cut the deck without lifting it off the table, and a lone card swiveled out from the center. There was no need to turn it over, but I did anyway.
“Oh, man!” I screamed, unable not to. “I don’t even know where to begin with that.”
Turner let out a big bowlegged laugh. Then he grew quiet. “I fooled Vernon with that one,” he said, his cloudy blue eyes staring off into nothingness. “I fooled everybody across the world with it.”
WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF us? Can anyone learn to see with his or her fingers? To a certain extent, we already do. Most of us just don’t realize it. Experiments have found, for instance, that the brain’s representation of nearby objects depends on their location with respect to the hand, and that amputation of a hand distorts spatial perception, hindering one’s ability to locate objects.
As with most skills, practice helps. In a recent experiment, neuroscientists at McMaster University set out to determine whether blind people have a keener sense of touch because they can’t see or because they rely heavily on their fingers in their daily lives. The researchers measured tactile sensitivity in the fingers and lower lips of blind subjects and in normal-sighted adults. As it turned out, the blind had extrasensitive fingers, but their lips were no different from those of the nonblind. Not only that, but finger sensitivity was greatest among the most experienced Braille readers—and only in their reading fingers; sensitivity was average elsewhere on the hand. The scientists concluded that practice alone can supercharge one’s sense of touch.
Besides learning Braille—which is extraordinarily difficult to do, especially as an adult—there are a number of more practical ways you can develop your tactile skills. You can practice identifying common objects by feel. You can teach yourself to navigate your home with your eyes closed. Children can be taught to hone their touch through tactile recreation—playing with textured objects, identifying raised letters and numbers by feel, running obstacle courses without looking. (This sort of play is an integral part of the Montessori method.) “Finger sensitivity is much like the sense of hearing,” notes vision impairment expert Maureen Duffy. “Over time, you will gain awareness and learn to use your sense of touch to distinguish items and features of items.”
In Turner’s case, sheer obsession probably played as big a role as anything in the actualization of his talents. He started going blind relatively late in life, and it was a gradual process. At age fourteen he still had minimal peripheral vision, about 20/400, and for several years after that he could still tell the color of a card by holding it off to the side of his face.
But Turner’s devotion to a pack of playing cards is without equal. When he’s in the car or at the movies, he shuffles on a small felt-covered plastic support in his lap. He regularly falls asleep while shuffling and palming cards on his living room sofa. “Hell, I’ve done that once or twice,” Jason England, one of Turner’s close friends, told me. “Richard does it once a week.” At the grocery store, he shuffles on the plastic ledge at the checkout counter. When he goes to church, he shuffles an inconspicuous blank deck (white on both sides), which his wife holds for him in her zippered Bible. On the rare occasion that she fails to bring them, he shuffles the donation envelopes. And if you take away his cards, he shuffles nothing—as if playing air guitar, except with an imaginary deck of cards instead of an imaginary axe.
Apparently one of the few times he will put down the cards is if he’s doing karate. (A hardcore fitness buff, Turner, now fifty-eight, wears the same size pants he did in high school.) “But notice both things [cards and karate] involve his hands,” England pointed out. “It’s not that he can’t put the cards down, it’s that if he puts the cards down, something else has to come up. He just can’t sit still and not do something with his hands.” Turner, it seems, has been addicted to tactile sensation his entire life. Touch has become his primary connection to the world. “It’s all he knows,” England told me. “Seventeen hours a day since he was nine.”
By his own estimates, Turner has logged more than 135,000 hours of practice—the equivalent of 24-hour days for 15 years. He’s performed his signature second deal more than 5 million times in front of a live audience. (Imagine a basketball player shooting that many free throws.) “In practice, I stopped counting at forty-three million. Now I just estimate that it’s somewhere between fifty and sixty million. That’s why nobody else has ever been able to do this. Who’s gonna sit there and do it 18 thousand times in a row each day and then do that year after year?”
I sure wasn’t. But after hanging out with Turner, I decided it might be a good idea to step back for a moment and focus on my hands. Next to the brain, the hand is the most important evolutionary adaptation in human history, our main interface with the world. Hands shape not only our environment but also the way we perceive it. Would we ever have adopted the decimal system, for instance, if we didn’t have ten fingers? Unlikely. Most anthropologists think that the base ten numbering system, developed some five thousand years ago, caught on in large part because our ancestors counted on their fingers. Our hands, with their seventy-odd muscles and fifty-four bones (more than any other part of the body other than the spine), are astonishingly versatile. Concert pianists can strike the ivory at a hummingbird-like rate of twenty keystrokes per second. Experienced mountain climbers grip rock fissures with their fingertips, at pressures of eighty pounds per square inch. No other organ system performs such a wide range of functions. “It is in the human hand,” wrote Charles Bell, the Scottish anatomist, “that we have the consummation of all perfection as an instrument.”
Like pianists and competitive table tennis players, magicians live by their hands. (It’s called sleight of hand, after all.) “You have to transform your hands, to break them in,” wrote Arturo De Ascanio, the patriarch of Spanish close-up, “and that requires practice.” Magic requires strong fingers, delicate motor skills, and ample flexibility in one’s tendons. Not surprisingly, big hands tend to be an asset in most cases, although there are exceptions. One notable exception is the fake deal (seconds, middles, bottoms), where long fingers can get in the way. To circumvent this problem, some early cheats would amputate the ends of their own fingers. As a result, one finds a number of “missing finger deals” in the literature.
I wasn’t quite ready to cut off my fingers, but I did want to make them stronger and more dexterous. Some hand abilities are genetic. Only about 60 percent of people, for instance, can bend their little finger at the first joint without moving their ring finger. But mostly it’s practice, so I began a daily exercise routine for my hands, called Finger Fitness, developed by a former musician from Cincinnati named Greg Irwin. Finger Fitness, as I learned from Irwin’s training manuals, is like calisthenics for your hands. It consists of a series of movements—some of which, quite frankly, look hilarious—designed to isolate your hand muscles and increase strength, dexterity, finger independence, and overall range of motion.
It starts with stretches and warm-ups that look a bit like jumping jacks—you cross and uncross your fingers in alternating pairs. Then you steeple your palms prayer-style, but with your fingers splayed out, and fold down the index fingers of both hands so that your right finger is closest to you. After that, you switch the fingers so that your left first finger is now closest to you. You then repeat this motion with your middle finger, ring finger, and pinky. Once you’ve folded all four fingers, you reverse the motion and go the other way, back toward the index finger.
Eventually you do this with all your fingers, up and down the hands, in various patterns—two at a time, three at a time, every other finger. As you build up speed, it starts to look like your fingers are dancing a can-can. The Finger Fitness program also includes a series of taps and folds, bends and splits, finger push-ups, finger shuffles, and variations on the Star Trek Vulcan V salute, all of which can be linked together into a total hand workout. Irwin has even choreographed the moves into a musical number he calls Finger Ballet, which he’s performed on The Tonight Show and at the Magic Castle in Hollywood.
Even without the tiny tutus, Finger Fitness can help just about anyone who works with their hands. Typists type faster. Guitarists shred more like Slash. A number of surgeons have embraced the program. Pending the results of a controlled study on Irwin’s exercise routines, Winston-Salem University may soon make Finger Fitness a standard part of their dental school, as many aspiring dentists lack the necessary fine motor skills.
Finger Fitness has also shown promise in helping those who suffer from repetitive strain injuries (RSI)—an umbrella term for symptoms of discomfort and disability caused by prolonged, repetitious use of the hands. RSIs account for roughly half of all workplace illness, costing U.S. businesses $20 billion annually, more than back injuries. Carpal tunnel syndrome, the most frequently diagnosed RSI, affects millions of Americans and has become the most commonly reported work-related medical problem in America. Operations to treat carpal tunnel syndrome are now among the most frequent surgical procedures, with some 260,000 operations performed each year.
But by far Irwin’s most vocal enthusiasts are magicians. The first time I saw his finger routine was at a lecture by card pioneers Dan and Dave Buck, otherwise known as the Buck Twins, whose finger-blistering Extreme Card Manipulation (XCM) system puts incredible strain on the hands. Thanks in part to Irwin, finger manipulation has carved out its own little niche within the world of so-called Extreme Hand Sports—a subgenre of magic that includes XCM, pen spinning, cup stacking, and ring manipulation, and which has its own conventions and online forums and championships.
In the end, Finger Fitness is designed to make your hands more efficient at learning new skills. “I look at finger fitness as like jumping jacks or sit-ups or push-ups,” Irwin explained to me over the phone. “None of those is football, but it’ll certainly help you play football better. And what’s great about finger fitness is that you can incorporate it into your daily schedule.” (When Irwin and I finally met, at the 2009 World Championships in Beijing, and we shook hands, he uncurled his digits one by one in a graceful, if somewhat creepy, finger flourish.)
In addition to doing Finger Fitness, I designed a workout to help me with palming. Take a coin, press it into the center of your palm, and hold it there by a slight contraction of the muscles at the base of the thumb (the thenar). This is the classic palm, the most important concealment in all of coin magic. (According to J. B. Bobo’s Modern Coin Magic, the coin worker’s Bible, “This is one of the most difficult of all concealments to master but one of magic’s finest secrets. The layman cannot imagine it possible to conceal a coin this way.”)
I’d palm coins in both my hands and squeeze them repeatedly: three sets of one hundred reps, every day. I’d whale on my thenars until they were bruised stiff, then practice rolling a coin through my fingers to loosen up the tendons and increase my agility—that, and it looked cool. (Turner, incidentally, holds the world record for coin rolls: eight coins at a time in one hand.) I practiced with rings. I worked on speed and evenness and tried to synchronize both hands in one unbroken ten-finger roll.
As time went by, I could feel the difference in my fingers. Little by little, my palm muscles grew larger. My hands began changing shape, adapting to their new abilities. (I was also bitten by a radioactive spider around this time, but I don’t think that had anything to do with it.) People complimented my increasingly confident handshake (then asked me to let go), and I felt like a stud flexing my pinky finger in front of the ladies.
I began noticing that I would pick up new moves more quickly, and that manual tasks unrelated to magic—like writing for long hours on the computer or playing stretchy chords on the guitar—became more manageable. I felt more in tune with my hands, more aware of the area surrounding them, what psychologists call the action space. As a result, I became less accident-prone (though I’m still a klutz) and more ambidextrous.
To further sharpen my sense of touch, I started blindfolding myself during practice sessions. Studies have found that visual deprivation causes almost immediate changes in the brain. In one study, blindfolded adults picked up tactile cues in their visual cortex after just five days. Another group of researchers has shown that people become more touch-sensitive after ninety minutes of sitting in a pitch-black room. Under the right conditions, anyone can learn to see with their fingers.
In fact, touch is a powerful and precise sensory tool. It’s our first sense to develop—we enter the world through touch—and the cornerstone of the infant-parent relationship. The skin is the largest organ of the body, about the size of a twin mattress when spread out, comprising more than 15 percent of the body by weight. The tiny whorls and ridges that make up our fingerprints likely evolved for two reasons: to improve our grip and to aid in the perception of texture. (“Texture information plays a huge role in our ability to identify objects by touch,” observes Sliman Bensmaia, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago.) The density of nerve endings in the fingertips is higher than anywhere on the flesh, with the possible exception of the male foreskin, and baseline laboratory measurements reveal that the average person can quickly and accurately identify hundreds of objects—the buttery leather of a broken-in baseball glove, the bristles of a toothbrush, the roughness of an emery board, the softness of a sweater—by feel alone.
Even more striking, touch can convey subtle nuances of meaning. In 2006, psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, and DePauw University discovered that a five-second touch on the arm of a blindfolded stranger can signal highly specific emotions, including love, fear, anger, disgust, sympathy, and gratitude. Accuracy rates were comparable to and in some cases better than those seen in studies of facial expressions and verbal communication. The researchers concluded that “the tactile signaling system is just as differentiated, if not more so, than the face and voice.”
In the complex grammar of touch, the meaning of an action depends on subtle variations in velocity, pressure, location, abruptness, and duration. When stroking someone’s arm, for instance, a few extra seconds can turn a show of sympathy into a gesture of love, while a slight variation in pressure can mean the difference between anger and fear. Despite all this complexity, the language of touch is remarkably universal. Like magic, it transcends culture, age, and gender, and often bypasses the rational side of the brain.
Minor tactile cues can exert a measurable influence on our judgment, our perception of people and places, our decisions and social behaviors, even our willingness to part with cash. Waiters and waitresses who casually touch customers on the hand or shoulder for a second or even less at the end of a meal earn bigger tips and boost their restaurants’ ratings, as measured by exit surveys. A friendly pat on the shoulder from a broker makes clients less risk-averse. The chance that a grocery store shopper will agree to sample a new treat increases by 28 percent when the product demonstrator touches them lightly on the upper arm during the request. Shoppers who’ve been touched leave the store later, spend more, and rate the store more favorably on average. A slight, unobtrusive tap on the arm makes random strangers more willing to participate in mall intercept interviews and street surveys and predisposes them to bum you a smoke or comply with marketing requests. By promoting group cohesion, interpersonal touch also improves the performance of sports teams and enriches family life.
Even an act as simple as holding a warm drink can make a difference in how we perceive others. In a study at Yale, psychologists found that we tend to see strangers in a kinder light, and are more giving ourselves, when holding something warm. In an analogous vein, a study at the University of Toronto found that volunteers who were asked to recall a time in their lives when they’d experienced rejection felt five degrees colder than those who summoned memories of acceptance and approval.
Cognitive scientists think these results stem from the fact that rudimentary material concepts like warmth, hardness, heaviness, and roughness—which we learn during infancy, when touch is our primary scaffolding to the world—form the basis for abstract psychosocial concepts like warmhearted, hard bargain, weighty matters, and rough times. That the language of emotion, or feeling, is so often cast in tactile terms—“my hands are tied,” “a touching story,” “can’t handle the truth,” “between a rock and a hard place,” “the gravity of a situation”—is also telling.
These figurative links are embedded in our brains at the cellular level. The fact that people conflate physical warmth (holding a hot cup of coffee) with interpersonal warmth (generosity and caring) aligns with recent studies implicating the insular cortex—a small chunk of gray matter in the midbrain—in the processing of both physical temperature and emotional warmth, especially trust and compassion. The same cluster of brain cells that springs to life when the sun warms your skin, in other words, also lights up when you feel affection toward a friend or loved one.
The picture that begins to emerge from this research is one of mind and body working in concert as an integrated system. This idea is central to an emerging field known as embodied cognition, which seeks to redefine the relationship between the body and the brain. Embodied cognition does away with the Cartesian view of a disembodied consciousness—the brain in a vat, so to speak—in favor of a model wherein abstract thoughts and physical sensations are inextricably linked.
Embodied cognition helps explain, for instance, why slouching tends to make you sad, or why people who reflect on their own misdeeds feel physically dirty. In the embodied viewpoint, your body actively shapes your mind-set. High-level concepts are grounded in the flesh. Feedback from our muscles helps us process information and regulate our emotions. Our hands, meanwhile, are intelligent devices, extensions of our consciousness.
After doing my exercises awhile, I could feel my own hands becoming more intelligent. I was able to detect the subtle ridged milling around the edges of coins and the wearing of the patina. I became more conscious of the edges of cards. I could sense the humidity in a deck from the way the cards bent. (Cards are like barometers, highly sensitive to weather conditions.) I could estimate the size of a block of cards to within three or four cards, just by feel. Eventually I got to the point where I could reliably cut the deck exactly in half most of the time—and I could tell if I was off by just one card.
Turner’s tactile sensitivity was of course sharper than mine by several orders of magnitude, allowing him to cut straight to any card one-handed, but this minor breakthrough nonetheless helped me realize how little I had appreciated my sense of touch. In a world swamped by vision, touch is an undervalued commodity, a second-class sensation. But for Turner, it has brought the world to him. I recalled his parting words, when I asked him if he thought of his blindness as a gift. “You bet,” he said, smiling. “The mind can adapt in so many ways. And the thing is, you can apply that to so many other areas. I think we totally discount the power of the mind.”