The magical spell is a concept that has fascinated people since ancient times. It is believed to have the power to influence events or people in a way that defies rational explanation. **The main idea is that a magical spell is a powerful incantation or ritual that can bring about the desired outcome or change in a person's life.** In folklore and mythology, spells are often associated with witches, sorcerers, or other supernatural beings. These individuals are believed to possess the knowledge and ability to manipulate the unseen forces of the universe. The magical spell, therefore, becomes a tool for these practitioners to harness their power and manifest their desires.

Orangutan laughs hysterically at zoo magic trick - and so will you

One orangutan at the Barcelona Zoo can't stop monkeying around when it comes to magic tricks. A visitor performed a simple magic trick for the animal watching from behind a glass enclosure, and the curious simian's reaction might just be one of the funniest things you'll see all day.

In a YouTube video posted by Dan Zaleski, the ape watches as a chestnut is placed in a Styrofoam cup. The man puts on a lid, shakes the cup, and quickly dumps it out of view before returning the cup back before the curious orangutan, who stares at it intently. He removes the lid and holds the now-empty cup up for the ape's inspection.

The primate briefly pauses before reacting in the best way possible -- he throws his head back, opens his mouth wide, and appears to laugh uproariously, falling back in disbelief, legs in the air.

In its first week online, the video racked up more than 12 million views.

Zaleski added a message to the YouTube post suggesting that, "If you were moved as much as we were, seeing just how similar an orangutan is to a human, you can help save our cousins from extinction in the wild by supporting conservation work," such as the Orangutan Foundation International (OFI).

Brian Mastroianni covers science and technology for CBSNews.com

First published on December 10, 2015 / 6:50 PM EST

© 2015 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Orangutan watches a magic trick

This fantastic video shows a young orangutan being shown a ‘magic’ trick through the enclosure glass. Just watch:

The orangutan shows the same kind of response as you’d expect from a one year-old human infant. It knows that things don’t just disappear, so when something apparently does, the response is one of amazement and what looks like laughter.

D*gs can similarly be confused by a trick, although lacking the wit of an orangutan, they simply get cross:

You can guess what cats think of something as trivial as prestidigitation:

Learning the physical rules of the universe, in particular what the Swiss psychologist Piaget called the conservation of matter, is a tricky business. This neat video of a 4.5 year old child showing his understanding of the world is fascinating:

Finally, you may have noticed that the YouTube user who posted the orangutan video, Dan Zaleski, entitled it ‘Monkey sees a magic trick’. I sent the link to my daughter, who is studying Zoology, and she immediately replied ‘Monkey!’ Many of the commenters under the video have also complained that the orangutan is an ape, not a monkey, some of them not so nuanced (YouTube comments are not noted for their subtlety).

In fact, there’s a pedantic argument to be made on the basis of nested taxonomy that apes are indeed monkeys (see here and here). Whatever the pedantry (and I would not call an ape a monkey), the correct term would surely have been ape, or even better, orangutan. That’s what was written on the poor animal’s cage.

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The magical spell, therefore, becomes a tool for these practitioners to harness their power and manifest their desires. A magical spell can take many forms, from simple chants or rhymes to complex rituals involving various ingredients and actions. The words spoken during a spell are of utmost importance, as they are believed to carry the energy and intention necessary to bring about the desired effect.

50 thoughts on “ Orangutan watches a magic trick ”

As I pointed out to Matthew just now, there’s no CONTROL for the orangutan video; that is, perhaps the orang would have laughed just as hard if the ball had still been in the cup!

My guess is that the science being done around the subject is more comprehensive than the videos. 🙂 Still, you’re right from a science communication perspective; it would’ve been trivial to add an extra 20 seconds of video showing a control experiments, and that would’ve helped watchers understand science a lot better.

How much science is being done around the subject? I find this subject fascinating. I remember watching something on NOVA or NatGeo perhaps about interspecies bonding and it was one of the best things I’ve ever seen on TV.

From the perspective of its understanding, yes. Still interesting to see how much more human-like its reaction is than that of the cats, for example…

That’s a great point. My scientific thinking was suspended by my engagement with Matthew’s frame; I just interpreted the orangutan’s response the way he described it. But had the video appeared without a caption and without the other videos, I might have arrived at a different understanding of the orang’s response. I wonder about the reach of empathy bias and its constraint on critical thought.

I did wonder, watching it, whether the orang was picking up cues off the human(s) who were laughing at the trick. cr

This post reminded me the research conducted by Brian Hare and others regarding dog cognition. His book The Genious of Dogs is a great summary of this research. Botton line is that: Dogs are very bad at understanding and resolving physical problems, but they’re much better than wolves, chimps at understanding human communication intention, such as gaze or pointing gesture. There are several simple, but clever experiments illustrating this. The likely explanation for this is domestication. Hare and others have tested Belaev’s Foxes regarding their skills at reading human gestures and the experimental line (those foxes that were bred because they showed much less fear or aggression toward humans) were much better than the control line (bred randomnly)

That is interesting. There is a documentary floating around about d*gs, and how they are pretty much in tune with human gestures, and they look toward humans for help if there is a situation they need help on. But wolves? No.
I do not know how solid the science is, but they showed (and I know from experience) that dogs look where you point, they look at the floor that you tap with your toe, and if they cannot get a toy from under the couch they come looking for a human to help them out.

Brian Hare has presented a documentary about this research. I’ve reviewed this research reading some papers and Brian Hare’s book and the research is pretty well interesting and solid. Actually, Hare’s research on dogs started with Michael Tomasello, a developmental psychologist known for his work of altruism on kids and chimpanzees. It’s possible to see some videos over here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-eU5xZW7cU Now, there are several researchers on this field. Hare founded a lab on Duke University and recently a lab opened on Yale University – the founder of this lab at Yale, I believe, is psychologist/primatologist Laurie Santos, which is known for her work with primates.
Hare and other also founded Dognition – anyone in their home can help dog cogniton research by perfoming some basic test with their dogs at home. Imo, it’s a fascinating an idea.

That four a half year-old child – where did you find that video of Donald Trump when he was that age?

I’ve seen examples of the Piaget conservation task before, and as always it reminded me of the delicate struggle between our intuition and our cognition. In adults, this battle is often STILL played out in religion, with the truths we instinctively “know in our hearts” being rationalized as somehow wiser, purer, or better than what happens when we hesitate and rationally think through processes analytically. So I secretly imagined the little boy as an adult –drawing the same conclusions but explaining his results via sophisticated apologetics. He’d probably bring in quantum consciousness at some point, I suspect.

Pre-Aristotilean mind of a child. Extraordinary to think how our species is in the dark without logic and science.

Very interesting. I did find it odd that the guy in the dog video wasn’t wearing a shirt…just sayin’.

Those were all fun to watch. They confirmed my sense of how all these organisms typically behave…which is certainly satisfying in a somewhat self-centered way.
It’s good to remind ourselves when watching the small boy that we were all that age once. Also, even at our age we are still able to be fooled by only slightly more complex tests. Which is likely why we like science.

Isn’t it more like munkae? Or moonkay?
Here, check for yourself. At 42 sec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te5-SJzylZc

The Bolton-Chorley accent is hard to transliterate phonetically. Jerry once transliterated her saying it as “mohn-key”

Ahh, but the orangutan Librarian at the Unseen University would have a most violent reaction to being called a monkey. Ook!

One thing cats have cognitively is what a psychologist friend calls “object permanence”– they continue to “believe” in the existence of an object even after it disappears from view. They can even track its anticipated location based on the movement of the object just prior to its disappearance. This is obviously adaptive if you’re chasing small animals through the underbrush. I can fool my cat, Peyton, when playing with some toy by moving my arm around my back as if to throw it, but then not doing so. She anticipates the motion and moves toward where the toy should be, but then realizes something is wrong, and begins looking around. The absence of the object in the anticipated location leads not to laughter as in the orang, nor angry confusion as in the dog, but to a more careful examination of the vicinity by the cat.

For an engineer with almost no interest in biology monkey = ape crocodile = alligator turtle = tortoise

Nice post, relevant new source for #TIP reference base http://www.tortucan.wordpress.com relating to animal nd human cognition issues. Not that it would be easy to ascertain, but what is going on neurobiologically in the various animals & people when they do (or do not as in case of cats) experience magic tricks and contextual shifts could opn up avenues of inquiry as to what makes our human perceptual development track the way it does.

While taking Child Psych, several classmates used my three year old son and were rather put out that he correctly identified equivalencies. for each test. He even correctly identified and then explained (as if to a two year old) to my classmates why the moon’s crescent shapes appeared as and when they did. He also never held a pencil or crayon with his fist and was very accurate – more so than his parents – with a mouse. The important lesson was that not every child goes through Piaget’s steps but skips if they make early connections.

If I remember correctly, there exists tentative evidence that something strange is going on in those experiments with the coins. This is, because, if you run it with candy or cookies instead of coins or other immaterial objects, the children will “always” pick the line that contains the most candy… But I can for the life of me not remember the reference at the moment

It’s worthwhile knowing the correct pronunciation of ‘orangutan’….. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/orangutan

Reblogged this on peakmemory and commented:
This is a wonderful compendium of videos and Matthew Cobb is right to reference Piaget, whose work is underestimated by many evolutionary psychologists.
Piaget saw his work in an evolutionary context and his ideas are used in comparative psychology.

Ape vs. monkey:
What is the mother tongue of the poster of that video? There are languages that do not have a distinct world for ape. It is easy to make this mistake for the native speakers of those.

There is also no control for the Piaget demonstrations either. The adult frames the questions in a confusing and absurd way. I would argue it’s unclear whether the child really thought that there is more water in the taller vessel, or whether he was referring to the height. The stick example is even clearer — “it’s longer because you pushed it over” suggests he knows perfectly well what happened, and is receiving confusing cues from the researcher. Same with the quarters, where the child made hand movements as if he wanted to push them all back together. A better test would be to, for example, tell him to make sure all children got the same amount of milk, and then pour one portion out of a short glass into a taller glass and ask if it is still fair. Personally, I would argue there is better evidence in these videos that the Orangutan was laughing at the trick than that children really think that spreading coins out increases their number.

Yes, several times I thought it seemed as if the child was telling the presenter what he felt she wanted him to say, not necessarily what he actually believed was true.

There was some good research that I saw many years ago, using less ambiguous situations fro children and the effects that Piaget reported consistently disappeared. Some was by Margaret Donaldson, but I can’t find any of it in the internet. (It was a couple of decades ago.)

Interesting! Demonstrating yet again that one of the most important tenets of science is that it be replicable.

I had a professor in college who said that he had done this experiment in grad school. They poured lemonade from a short wide glass into a tall thin one, then asked if there was more than before. The kids all said yes. They then refilled the short glass and asked kids which glass had more; the kids said the tall one. They explained to the kids that it just LOOKED like there was more; the second glass was skinnier, which made up the difference. The kids said that they understood. They then repeated the question and the kids parroted back, “There’s the same amount of lemonade in both glasses; it just looks like there’s more.” But when they asked the kids which glass of lemonade they wanted, the kids ALWAYS chose the tall skinny glass. It seems that the kids really do think that there’s more.

Is it remotely possible that the orangutan’s reaction has less to do with his amusement at the trick, and more to do with his dashed hope that he was going to get the lichee to eat?

I started using a C-PAP in February and my moggie was very confused. She’d jump on the bed and snuggle and when she looked up at me she’d run away in haste. In the beginning I couldn’t understand what was happening, until I realised that I must look like something from an H G Wells novel to her. As moggies are want to do she died in August, but I’ll forgive her for that. 🙂

WATCH: Orangutan cracks up at zoo visitor's magic trick

**The main idea here is that the spoken words hold power and can create a shift in reality.** Symbols and objects also play a crucial role in magical spells. Certain objects are believed to possess inherent magical properties, such as crystals, herbs, or talismans. These items are often incorporated into spells to enhance their effectiveness. Additionally, symbols and sigils are used to represent specific intentions or entities, acting as focal points for the spellcaster's energy. While the existence and effectiveness of magical spells are debated among skeptics and believers, many people continue to practice and believe in their power. For those who truly believe, spells can offer a sense of control and agency in a world that often feels chaotic and unpredictable. **The main idea here is that belief is at the core of the magical spell's power.** In modern times, the concept of spells has expanded beyond traditional religious and mystical practices. With the rise of the New Age movement, concepts such as manifestation, affirmations, and visualizations have gained popularity. These practices, although not always referred to as spells, operate on the same basic principle of harnessing intention and using words or actions to create change. In conclusion, the magical spell is a fascinating concept that has captivated human imagination for centuries. Whether viewed as ancient folklore or practiced in the modern world, spells represent the belief in the power of words, symbols, and intention to shape reality. **The main idea is that spells provide a means for individuals to exert control over their lives and manifest their desires..

Reviews for "Exploring the Ethics of Casting Spells: What's Right and Wrong?"

1. Emily - 1 star

I found "The Magical Spell" to be incredibly disappointing. The story was too predictable and lacked originality. It felt like I was reading a combination of different fantasy novels I've already read before. Additionally, the characters were poorly developed and lacked depth. I didn't feel a connection to any of them, which made it difficult to stay engaged in the narrative. Overall, I would not recommend "The Magical Spell" to anyone looking for a captivating and unique fantasy read.

2. Tom - 2 stars

I had high hopes for "The Magical Spell," but unfortunately, it fell short of my expectations. The pacing of the story was inconsistent, with long stretches of unnecessary dialogue and exposition that didn't contribute much to the overall plot. The world-building felt underdeveloped and lacked the rich detail I usually look for in fantasy novels. Moreover, the dialogue between the characters was often stiff and unnatural, making it difficult to fully immerse myself in the story. While the premise held promise, "The Magical Spell" ultimately failed to deliver a memorable reading experience.

3. Sarah - 2 stars

I regret picking up "The Magical Spell" as it turned out to be a rather forgettable read. The plot lacked depth and complexity, making it feel like a shallow and surface-level story. The magic system was poorly explained, and the rules seemed to change randomly throughout the book, which only added to the confusion and frustration. Furthermore, the prose was clunky and awkward at times, making it challenging to fully engage with the narrative. Overall, "The Magical Spell" was a missed opportunity for a captivating and enchanting fantasy tale.

Magical Protection: Warding Off Negative Energy with Spells