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Originally Posted by youtalkfunny
The gun is sucking nails out of the board??? Even rapid fire, Penn is able to precisely line up the gun with the already-sunk nail?
I'd imagine the nail holes are drilled out beforehand so the nails aren't stuck in the board very tightly, with just enough friction so that they'll stay up when the magnet has pulled them up. But this also means they'll come up without much resistance even if he's not absolutely precise in how he lines up the "gun".
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It's amazing how wild people's imaginations get when they don't know something (none of us "know" how the trick is done), and they can't stand not knowing, and they'll believe the wildest things, because believing the illogical isn't as discomforting as "not knowing".
(This isn't another post slamming religion, is it?)
You're right that we don't know for sure what the exact mechanism is. But if you watch the video carefully you can see the nails move up from within the board, they don't go down into it. The only reason people don't see this is because the familiar looking setup has conditioned them to expect the nails to travel into the board because "oh look, that's a nail gun and we all know nails come out of a nail gun, not into it". So to some extent people see what they expect to see, something magicians rely on all the time. Our perceptual expectations serve us well in 99.9% of situations but magicians will exploit this.