Many years ago I was talking with a couple of managers from a client company. They had recently been at a weekend conference of the company’s managers. On Saturday night they had entertainment – a mentalist.
The managers I talked with were very impressed with the act. The entertainer had a small group of managers on the stage with him. He’d ask one of them to think of something like a type of car, he’d write it down, then ask what they’d thought of. Almost invariably he got it right!
I asked how the managers on the stage were selected. Well, he’d had everyone stand, then he’d ask them to think of something like a color. If they didn’t think “red” he’d have them sit down. This went on until there were only six people left standing. Clearly he was selecting people who always thought of the most common example. So when he’d ask for a type of car and he knew that 70% of people would say “Chevrolet” he knew there was a really good chance that’s what the person he asked would say.
No, the two managers I spoke with weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Another time I saw a comedian/“magician” perform. He selected someone from the audience and asked her to think of a four-legged animal. Some stage patter asking her to think really hard. He picked up a pad of paper and scribbled something on it, then set down the pen and asked what animal she’d been thinking of.
He then turned the pad around, and there was a stick figure of a four-legged animal… “Amazing, ladies and gentlemen!”
No this is just a slightly updated line of patter since few these days believe in spirits and mind reading as such. So 21st C “magicians” have started calling themselves “mentalists” and giving everyone a line about microexpressions etc because it sounds more scientificy. They are just doing stage tricks.
There are lots of ways of doing this illusion. Almost certainly details were left out when you were told about it. None of them have anything to do with mentalism.
The way I learned it, after the country, you ask for an animal whose name starts with the LAST letter of the country. Then you ask for a color whose name starts with the last letter of the animal. This is more impressive because you’ve apparently guessed three random choices rather than two.
Given the K in Denmark, almost everyone picks “kangaroo” for the animal and then “orange” for the color. There are fewer animals starting with K than with E, I think.
I fear magicians, and I include Mentalist in that category, as much, if not more, as the Illuminati, Military Industrial Complex, the Catholic Church, our reptile overlords, etc.
How do they keep all this a secret? It is 2021, there is a you tube video about everything. Yet I still sit here like an idiot wondering where the red ball went.
A girl assistant, in as brief a costume as the carnival could get away with back in nearly antediluvian 1941 and barbaric Ohio, circulated through the audience, while Cagliostro, youngish and handsome for this racket, sat blindfolded on the stage.
“Now what am I holding?” she would ask when somebody handed her a watch.
“I get the image of a timepiece … yes, a wristwatch,” the magician intoned.
“What do I have in my hand this time?” The answer was a locket.
“Can you tell me what this object is?”
A wallet photo.
Driving back to Yellow Springs, the students fell into a debate. One guy from the psychology department gave a long spiel on Rhine and parapsychology and scientific data for ESP, which convinced almost everyone. Babbit was the exception. He was not only a chemistry major but a leading firebrand for the Atheist Club on campus and he knew damned well that ESP was pseudo-scientific balderdash and hocus-pocus.
He spent the next day, the twenty-third, in the library, researching stage magic and, in a biography of Houdini, he found the answer. A simple substitution code. Now what = watch. What do I have = locket. Can you tell = photo. And so forth. Fraud, pure and simple, like everything that goes under the name of religion or magic.
Sirius shone very bright that night in the southern sky and Mounty Babbit was back at the carnival, loaded for bear. When the girl approached his part of the audience, he handed her a prized and illegal possession: a dragonheaded Japanese condom.
“Tell me what I have been given by this person.”
That wasn’t in the Houdini code but neither was a condom, with or without a dragon head.
“It’s against the law in this state,” Cagliostro intoned somberly, causing heads to turn. “And I would advise the young gentleman from Antioch to restrain his sense of humor in the future.”
Houdini code: For a trick, he would ask an audience member to whisper a number between 1 and 999 in his wife’s ear. Beforehand, he’d worked up a code with his wife, who assisted him on-stage, whereby several normal English words would represent numbers: 6 represented “Please,” 9 represented “Look,” 3 represented “see,” and so on. Soif some whispered “693” in her ear, “she would shout out something like ‘Please look inside your heart and see this number.’ And Houdini would know the number 693.” (quoted matter from Joe Posnanski’s recent book on Houdini.)
No that is merely anny_m’s assumption about how it was done. Her assumption seems clearly wrong because for a start if there were six managers, and he “guessed” their choices serially based on common car types, how would he know which common car they would guess, while being almost always right? No way. Far too likely to bomb out. As I and others have said, the whole “mentalism” thing is a fraud. It’s just the latest cover story for the old tricks.
Without the exact details it’s impossible to say, because as others have said the devil is very much in the detail when trying to figure out such tricks but the description of the trick sounds very like a candidate for some variation on the “one ahead” trick (look it up).
There’s statistically likely answers, like pick a number from 1 to 10, and you can be sure that most of the time people pick 7. That’s just psychology and culture.
What comes to mistakes they are often just acknowledged and then followed by the true reveal. It’s just human to make mistakes but it’s magic that you can correct the mistake.
No you can’t “be sure” at all. It’s a myth. This would result in you failing about 70% of the time. These myths circulate because they sound interesting, and because they support the goals of “mentalists” who want you to believe they are doing clever mind tricks.
Once again, these things are usually done simply by the same ol’ trickery, sleight of hand etc, which is far more reliable than hoping someone won’t be one of the 70% of people that will not say “7”.
Professional magicians* and mentalists don’t use stooges. The volunteers from the audience are always unconnected to the act.
Card tricks are nearly always forces, and the force is used in other contexts, too, like some mentalist acts. Penn and Teller used one on their TV show back in March with Marilu Henner back in March.
The old-fashioned mentalist act used a code that the assistant would use to tip off the mentalist.
I was in Vegas a few years ago watching Piff The Magic Dragon, and he asked an audience member to think of a card, any card…and the mouth-breather yelled out something like “Queen of threes!”. At first we all thought he was joking but, no, that was the card he was staying with.
He’d freely admit that a lot of the stuff that mentalists (including his friend Derren Brown) get up to are straightforward trickery (like messing with cameras) rather than actual cold reading, but there’s still a lot of actual technique to mentalist acts, “psychics” and so forth that the book describes.
You might be forgetting that he selected the 6 people on stage by determining that they always picked the common answer in the selection questions. If 70% of all people will answer “Chevrolet” then it’s a good bet that someone with a very strong tendency to give the common answer will say “Chevrolet.”
I have no idea how likely it is that someone who almost invariably gives the common answer to a group of questions will give the common answer to another question, but I’m pretty sure it’s way higher than the percentage of people at large.
I’m constrained by the job: it was a hook to teach algebra, and the “trick” was that everyone would start with a random number, and through a series of operations that canceled out their number, would end up with “5.” They’d turn their final number into a letter and think of an animal that began with that letter.
I didn’t want to make it too complicated, just complicated enough that I’d hide how it was done, and they could spend the rest of the lesson figuring it out.
Is cold reading not straight trickery? It’s typically presented as a person reading your mind or communicating with dead loved ones.
When I was in my early / mid 20s I went to a Halloween party where the hosts had hired a fortune teller to give everyone a session. I was a proud skeptic and knew all about cold reading, so I went in to mine determined not to give too much away. I gave simple yes or no answers to her questions like a defendant on the stand, or if she said she was getting a dead relative whose name started with ‘B’ I’d be all like “eh, doesn’t ring a bell”.
Still, she surprised me with a couple things like “you have a court case coming up”. I did! ( just a citation for playing music too loud and disturbing the peace). And she said “you have too many irons in the fire. You need to simplify your life”. True!
But when most of us had had our sessions and compared notes, it turned out she used the “upcoming court case” line on several of us, and if you didn’t have a court case coming up, she’d say, be careful in the future, then. And she used the ‘too many irons in the fire’ line a lot too. It became clear she had a set list of possible circumstances that would be likely for our 20s age group.
Not a mentalist thing, but still mystifying. Stephen Fry did a trick on QI where he pours milk from small glasses to larger glasses to full capacity. Then he pours from the largest glass into each of the smaller ones to their limits.
My theory was that each glass had a partition that he was actually pouring into, and the patterns on the glass exteriors was helping to hide them. After watching again however, the milk looks to be pouring from fully open containers. I also thought there might have been transparent glass rods embedded at each base, but I didn’t see any dollops or beads dripping from them. Maybe Fry is really good at controlling the way he pours. Magicians are capable of physical feats that way.
My guess would be a solid cylinder in the middle of each of the cups (except the smallest), and another thin-walled cylinder just inside the edge. So each cup has two separate chambers in it, and all of the inner chambers are the same volume, and the outer chambers have a much lower volume, all of which add up to the volume of one inner chamber.
The cups might have been treated in some way to make them less likely to hold on to droplets, and the liquid might also not have actually been milk, but something designed to cling less to the surface.
