How do mentalists do what they apparently do?

[Chanakya]

There are several tricks. I like the following two YouTube videos - and there are several more:
This one's fairly simple and yet almost impossible to figure out if you aren't already familiar with the principle:
Mind Reading Trick Explained (4:17 min)

This one's more complicated and requires sleight-of-hand skills:
The Perfect Mentalism Trick Tutorial. Easy Mind-Reading Revealed by Spidey. (14:14 min)

Both these tricks were cool, thanks! Absolutely, I can see these tricks being very successful, if performed with enough confidence and showmanship (and of course, in case of the second one, practice of the "technique" itself).

That's exactly what I was looking for, one or two examples of exactly how it is done, clearly explained. The broader principles of it as well, sure, but those in any case I was aware of, sketchily at any rate. (But thanks, everyone, for your inputs here. They did help, absolutely.)

Although, I don't know, I guess "mentalism" tricks that are based off of cards are kind of ...more straightforward? It might be interesting, and instructive, to see some similar example of actual mentalism tricks involving merely thinking of something and then having the mentalist reveal what it is. That is, sure, I get it, combination of everything, the cold reading, the throwing out educated guesses, sometimes acquainting yourself with your target, putting in plants, all of that: but a similar concrete example of just one or two such tricks actually performed, and then explained, would be cool, if there's any out there. (I'll look around a bit myself, see if I can find any on YT. And if you dann, or anyone else here, are already aware of any such, then it would be great if you'd link it here.)

Actually, given the in-principle iffy nature of cold reading, I'm surprised that the kind of thing in the sketch Andy Ross linked to doesn't actually happen regularly! I suppose people are generally too gullible, or too polite, or too docile. And of course, when you've gone to see a magic show, you're there to have fun, not to take offense and punch out the magician. But absolutely, "psychics" pretending to actually channel spirits or God or some mindreading powers should have that done to them! (But then again, people who'd go to see such people perform are probably believers in any case, and wouldn't dream of assaulting the godly (or spirit-ly) personage.)

 

[Chanakya]

One key factor in all of this is people can

A) Teach themselves to cold read accidently and do it without knowing they are doing.

and/or

B) Start off knowing damn well they are faking it but over time start to believe their own nonsense.

That's actually very interesting, what you say there! ...Except, I'm not quite sure I follow, your second point I mean to say. I can see some nutjob believing God speaks to them telling them things, or the spirits, or some psychic powers magically telling them people's thoughts, sure. And I can see others buying into some trickster's tall tales. But how would someone who's themselves employing these techniques, these tricks --- deliberately or accidentally --- attribute their performance to some psychic powers or spirits or whatever (rather than the very tricks they're themselves using)? Not sure that makes sense. (Well, leaving aside extreme cases of maybe some mentally disturbed person who's given to imagining random things.)

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Both these tricks were cool, thanks! Absolutely, I can see these tricks being very successful, if performed with enough confidence and showmanship (and of course, in case of the second one, practice of the "technique" itself).

That's exactly what I was looking for, one or two examples of exactly how it is done, clearly explained. The broader principles of it as well, sure, but those in any case I was aware of, sketchily at any rate. (But thanks, everyone, for your inputs here. They did help, absolutely.)

Although, I don't know, I guess "mentalism" tricks that are based off of cards are kind of ...more straightforward? It might be interesting, and instructive, to see some similar example of actual mentalism tricks involving merely thinking of something and then having the mentalist reveal what it is. That is, sure, I get it, combination of everything, the cold reading, the throwing out educated guesses, sometimes acquainting yourself with your target, putting in plants, all of that: but a similar concrete example of just one or two such tricks actually performed, and then explained, would be cool, if there's any out there. (I'll look around a bit myself, see if I can find any on YT. And if you dann, or anyone else here, are already aware of any such, then it would be great if you'd link it here.)

Actually, given the in-principle iffy nature of cold reading, I'm surprised that the kind of thing in the sketch Andy Ross linked to doesn't actually happen regularly! I suppose people are generally too gullible, or too polite, or too docile. And of course, when you've gone to see a magic show, you're there to have fun, not to take offense and punch out the magician. But absolutely, "psychics" pretending to actually channel spirits or God or some mindreading powers should have that done to them! (But then again, people who'd go to see such people perform are probably believers in any case, and wouldn't dream of assaulting the godly (or spirit-ly) personage.)

I suggest you learn more about Derren Brown. He is the World's preeminent mentalist but does not claim it is anything psychically magical. Everything he does has a natural explanation that he "explains" at great length but is beyond my understanding (I bought one of his books and am still having trouble).

Here he is at a TED Talk: Mentalism, mind reading and the art of getting inside your head | Derren Brown

And an article in the New Yorker that tells you more about him than you ever could want to know.

How Derren Brown Remade Mind Reading for Skeptics

 

[Chanakya]

I suggest you learn more about Derren Brown. He is the World's preeminent mentalist but does not claim it is anything psychically magical. Everything he does has a natural explanation that he "explains" at great length but is beyond my understanding (I bought one of his books and am still having trouble).

Here he is at a TED Talk: Mentalism, mind reading and the art of getting inside your head | Derren Brown

And an article in the New Yorker that tells you more about him than you ever could want to know.

How Derren Brown Remade Mind Reading for Skeptics

Proof of mentalism, right here:

These last five minutes or so, I'd been searching around in YT for "mentalism explained", "mentalism debunked", and similar search strings. And clicked open, on adjacent tabs, some four or five promising looking videos. I checked out the first one, found it quite good, bookmarked it, and, before moving on to seeing the rest, I thought I'd check out the ISF thread. And found your post there.

So, guess which was the video I have open on the first tab, bookmarked away already? I kid you not, the Derren Brown TED Talk.

Now if ever there's ever been a bona fide example of mentalism, or psychicism, or telapathy, or whatever, then this is it! (In other words, if this isn't an example of divine psychic telepathy, then divine psychic mentalistic telepathy isn't a thing!) ...Now the only thing to be decided is who is the one who's psychic: you, or me, or this Derren Brown guy.


-----

On a more serious note: Thanks for the link, it's a cool one, so far as a quick one-minute browse reveals. I'll check it out, absolutely. (It's true, though, I did happen to stumble on to it just before I saw your post.) And the article as well.

 

[Spektator]

Three of my own true experiences:

1. In high school one of my classmates was a big believer in telepathy. He used to test other students by having them sit across the table from him while he shuffled a deck of cards and went through them one at a time and having them guess the cards. When he tested me I correctly guessed 18 out of 25 cards and for the seven misses I got the correct colors but the wrong numbers and suits.

2. Later in college I told a dorm mate of my wife's, whom I did not know, that it would be better for her to admit that she, not her boyfriend , had damaged her car while it was in reverse. She was dumbstruck because no one had even mentioned the incident.

3. In my third or fourth year of teaching college, I demonstrated a billet-reading trick to a class (exactly like the mind-reading trick someone linked above). People were impressed, but every one of these had a mundane reason.

1-The student reading the cards wore big, rectangular, and reflective eyeglasses.

2-Hot reading. Cell phones were not a thing, but the dorm lounge had a bank of pay phones. I overheard the girl urgently trying to convince her boyfriend to lie for her and tell her dad that he had been driving when they backed into a sign. The next day I came to pick up my girlfriend for a date and saw phone girl nervously pacing the lobby, constantly looking out the door. I gave her my advice and she thought I was psychic.

3-It's the one-ahead trick. The class had 20 students. Each wrote something only he/she knew, folded the paper, and dropped it into a box. I correctly identified the information in each note, except for the first I said, "I know who wrote this and you should be ashamed," looked at the note, crumpled it, and tossed it. I then picked up the second note, gave the information from the first, rinse and repeat.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Asa a bit of an aside. I've seen Penn and Teller shows in person a couple of times and one of the things they like to do is do a mystifying trick, then explain it so you know exactly how it is done and then do it over again in a way that is obviously not in the same way as they explained it.

In the house of magic trickery there are many rooms.

 

[TragicMonkey]

I've seen in-person a pretty good variation of the one-ahead method, where the performer had fastened a bit of pencil lead or a snip of ink cartridge to his thumb and was quickly scrawling down onto the second piece of paper on a notepad what the target was saying as they said it, then revealing he'd "predicted it" when writing it with a pen earlier. I spotted how the trick was worked because I thought it suspicious he'd leave the first page of the notepad blank, and after that I was watching closely enough to see his hand moving under that page while the target was speaking. But still a pretty good trick, having it apparently written down by the performer instead of the targets was a neat variation, I thought.

 

[arthwollipot]

Asa a bit of an aside. I've seen Penn and Teller shows in person a couple of times and one of the things they like to do is do a mystifying trick, then explain it so you know exactly how it is done and then do it over again in a way that is obviously not in the same way as they explained it.

In the house of magic trickery there are many rooms.

Their Cups And Balls is fantastic. There are several renditions on YouTube if you can't catch them live.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

If you would like to read dice and have a few hundred bucks to find, there is this:

Electronic Dice | Mental Dice

If you follow the magic business (as I do in a sort of desultory,, non-professional way), you will be continually amused by how newly developed tricks you can buy at magic stores show up on TV as marvelous mentalism, mystifying TV hosts who are so credulous. They show up on Penn and Teller's TV show as well but P & T shop at the same stores.

400 bucks for something you can do if a 0 Level Cantrip ?
Heck, you don't even have to pass Wizard Exam to do that kind of Magic!

 

[ahhell]

Peter Popoff, for instance.

In popoff's case, he was telling the audience information they'd given him by filling out little cards as s they came in the room.

As I recall, John Edward in his TV series had the audience seated well before he came onstage. Microphones on long cables were arrayed over the audience so they could pick up audience chatter, including folks discussing what they would ask Edward about during the taping. There may have been shills planted in the audience to help elicit details that could be noted by Edward and staff backstage.

The audience members weren’t plants, as far as I could tell, and they produced genuine emotional reactions to Edward's “revelations”, some of them gut-wrenching. IMO the guy was/is scum.

Ever watch an epsisode of John Edwards old TV show, it was clearly cold reading and not very good cold reading. I'd be surprised if he actually had microphones in the audience it was so transparent.

 

[Darat]

...snip...

Ever watch an epsisode of John Edwards old TV show, it was clearly cold reading and not very good cold reading. I'd be surprised if he actually had microphones in the audience it was so transparent.

I agree - he isn't a very good cold-reader at all, if he was also hot-reading he was even worse! I think he was a case of right place at the right time, a handsomish face that with a bit of photoshop could look good on the billboards and hey presto he's a superstar psychic. They tried to same with Slyvia Browne but people kept crashing when they saw her 20-foot face.

(And yes that is singling someone out for their looks, she was as ugly outside as she was inside - a horrible predator preying on the grief and hope of her victims. )

 

[Spektator]

In popoff's case, he was telling the audience information they'd given him by filling out little cards as s they came in the room.

Not quite. The marks filled out a card specifying what disease or condition they wanted Popoff, a faith healer, to cure them of. Popoff wore an inconspicuous hearing aid that was actually a radio receiver. His wife, up in the control room, would relay information: "Redheaded woman to your left has gallstones, scared of surgery."

On stage, Popoff would tell the crowd, "Jesus tells me that a poor lady over on this side is plagued with gallstones ... her name ..."

Up in the booth, his wife radios him: "Naomi ."

On stage, Popoff says, "Jesus is telling me her name starts with the letter N ... Naomi? Where are you! I see you. Come up on stage and Jesus will heal you of gallstones!"

And so it went.

 

[theprestige]

My impression is that the baseline technique is cold reading, and that mentalists then use various techniques to "preheat" as much as practical.

 

[Spektator]

Duplicate post deleted.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

400 bucks for something you can do if a 0 Level Cantrip ?
Heck, you don't even have to pass Wizard Exam to do that kind of Magic!

Yeh. But if you screw up a real Magic spell you could grow horns or something by mistake. With the electronic dice the only downside is a buzzing in your underpants.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

And I just remembered why I had trouble understanding Rowland's explanation of how he does it. He's a believer in Neuro-linguistic programming^WP (NLP) which does not have a great deal of scientific support. I suppose that leaves open the possibility that he really does have psychic powers.

 

[Orphia Nay]

The medium visiting our town was selling tickets through his own website.

He also joined our town's local Facebook community group.

Both ways of getting names and/or hot readings.

 

[Pixel42]

Another documented technique is to keep the letters they get from believers giving details of the loved one they would like the "psychic" to contact, categorised by location. Every place they visit they send complimentary tickets to the ones who live there. That way they know exactly what to say to the people in those seats.

 

[Chanakya]

I suggest you learn more about Derren Brown. He is the World's preeminent mentalist but does not claim it is anything psychically magical. Everything he does has a natural explanation that he "explains" at great length but is beyond my understanding (I bought one of his books and am still having trouble).

Here he is at a TED Talk: Mentalism, mind reading and the art of getting inside your head | Derren Brown

And an article in the New Yorker that tells you more about him than you ever could want to know.

How Derren Brown Remade Mind Reading for Skeptics

Just watched Derren Brown's TED Talk. (It's on YT as well, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IFa0tqHrwE ---- in the computer I'm on now it his website didn't click open, maybe a firewall thing, I don't know.)

It was entertaining, but it didn't really explain anything. Actually, atypically for a TED Talk, it didn't actually do any explaining or enlightening or impart any knowledge. It was simply a performance of magic, is all, wasn't it? I mean, he does explain about concocting narratives, and so on, but while that may be true, but it was all very general, and seemed more like a spiel, a shtick, basically just chatter, than actual ...actual talk.

But I enjoyed it nonetheless. Cool show. And I liked how he clearly says, leaving no place for ambiguity there, that he's not channeling any psychic or supernatural spirits or forces or abilities or voodoo or whatever. It's great that he spells out, very clearly, that misdirection and magic tricks is all this is about.

 

[Chanakya]

When you watch one, count the number of times they're wrong and see how they react when they hit on something an audience member responds to. Also count the number of times they ask about problems everyone has. Everyone has some kind of problem with money from time to time. Everyone has lost a loved one. Everyone has been sick.

If your father from tells you from beyond the grave not to worry about the money, there is going to be some issue related to money your father left you with. You might be arguing with siblings about a will or who paid for the funeral or liquidating the estate. You might not have a lot of money. You might have a lot of money and other family members don't and that causes tension. The mentalist will look at me, figure I'm around 50ish, think there's a good chance my father or mother have died and know there is some issue in my life related to money.

Afraid I've still not gotten down to watching/ listening to those links I'd dug up!

About counting up times they're wrong etc, do you mean that there's hits as well as misses, and that the hits are focused on and the misses ignored? I guess that's a fair point, absolutely. ...Although, I don't know, at least in a show setting, wouldn't more than just one or two misses maybe end up ...spoiling the show, making a flop of it? (But overall, I agree this makes sense. If you look up horoscopes, or those star sign things, then the hundred or thousand times the predictions don't hit home you forget, but the one time it is bang on target you tend to remember, and, if you're gullible, latch on to as proof of astrology, agreed.)