Palmistry..... Aaaaaargh!!!!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I did a search on this, but didn’t come up with any satisfying posts, so here goes…

uh, before I ‘go’, I should say that inspite of everything, I’m still a skeptic. Anyways…

I’ve been to numerous palmists over the years (my mom dragged me, I swear!!), in several places around India. None of these guys have known me or any member of my family, and in most cases I hadn’t really spoken much with them before the ‘reading’ began.

In almost all cases (2 of them were waaaay off the mark), the palmists have very, very accurately told me how many siblings I have, how many relationships I’ve been in, what kind of person I am, and even what food I like!! They’ve correctly described the kind of person I am, the kind of company I like to keep, the kind I don’t like to keep, and even my profession. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Now the wierd part:

They have all (except those 2) told me exactly the same thing about what my future is going to be like. They’ve described where I am going to live, what kind of wife I will have, how many kids I will have, and how I will one day turn into a believer (God). Damn, two of them even gave me the first letter of the name of the girl I will marry - both of them said ‘S’!!

And then this latest instance: In May, a palmist told me that I will be going abroad to work, but that I won’t be able to leave until a few days before or after my birthday (which is in 2 weeks). In June, I was offered a job in Germany. The various permits I needed should have been processed and issued in about 6 weeks, and I should’ve been able to start work in August. But, due to a variety of unconnected circumstances (papers got lost, people went on holiday, changes required in my contract), I’m still at home. This Tuesday, I heard from my boss in Germany that it should take a maximum of two more weeks for my papers to be processed!!!

Now, I’m not about to live my life based on what these guys tell me, but all the same, I can’t help but think about it real hard. I mean, all of them couldn’t have been that lucky, right?!?!

2

D00d, these guys ruin the whole saying about the future.

“The only promising thing about the future is uncertainty”

Really d00d, don’t let these guys tell you about your future, you’ll either a.) Believe them and hope for the wrong thing. Or b.)they’ll be right, and they’ll ruin a great surprise that you already knew about.

3

Do another search on the subject “cold reading” and you may find something of interest, including discussions of how palmists and psychics and mediums in general use observation and amateur psychology to make fairly good guesses about a pigeon… err, client.

4

  1. What he said.

  2. You may like to think what scientific mechanism is behind ‘palmistry’.
    For it to work, the future must be predetermined at your birth (or indeed 9 months earlier), and everything relevant put into your hand patterns by a genetic mechanism.

Or it’s all bullsh*t. :eek:

5

What the hell, count me in :slight_smile:

Friend goes to palm-reader for a giggle. Comes out totally shocked that the person could guess they liked sports, specifically tennis, and that they were quite good at it (unusual guess in its self since said friend was rather plump, an obvious smoker, and tennis is not a very common sport where we lived). They also said that my friend was good with kids and well liked by them. She was pleased, 5 quid well spent. When she came out she told us what had been said and was astounded about the whole tennis thing. We grinned like maniacs and humoured her for a while before pointing out she was wearing a coaches t-shirt for the citys kids tennis training program. Bwahahaha!

Deciding I also wanted a giggle and with a fiver in hand I marched in a few days later. I was on the alert for not giving out any information, and preparing to leap on any wrong guesses. Truth be told I was probably being a PITA with my smirky attitude (I didn’t answer “How are you?” with “You tell me”, but that’s a close enough hint at the attitude I went in with), obnoxious I know, but I was 15. I was rather surprised to see that the palmist was a very cute girl in her early twenties instead of the mystic old crone I was expecting, but I rolled with it.

Girlie proceeds to check out my hand, starts telling my tale. She told me what I was like etc, and I seem to remember it fitting pretty well, but that could easily have been read from my physical self at that time. Leather and piercings and HUGE chip on my shoulder it would not have been hard to tell me what I wanted to hear.
I forget most of it, but for some key points. I was to meet and fall in love with a man a fair bit older than me. He would be foreign but we would not meet in my country or in his. We would have 2 kids I belive was the prediction. Now at the time and place we did this “reading” it’s not as if jet-setting was a common occupation. Of all my whole class at school and all my friends, I knew one person who had been outside the country, I mean sure the economy changed and all that, but at the time it would have been a lot safer guess to say I would meet this foreigner at home.

Well I jumped on that like a true smartass and said “Ha, I am a little baby-dyke, I won’t be hooking up with any foreign men, and there aren’t likely to be any babies out of the deal either!”. Palm-chick just shrugged and said more or less “Guy, girl, whatever. I see kids who knows where they come from.”. Very cool comeback, the wind was seriously taken from my sails so I shut up after that.

Anyhow, roll on 4 or 5 years. I am happily attached to the 7 year senior MrsIteki. Me being Irish and her being Swedish we met in France. No sprogs yet, but we keep on trying :wink:

Don’t know if it means anything, I am neither overly sceptical nor overly believing, “there are more thing on heaven and earth” sort of thing. Fun coincidence at the very least and I got a great anecdote out of it. On top of all that, the palmist was really cute. Five quid very, very well spent.

6

A dozen years ago I bought a big book on palmistry. I also bought a book on reading body language. I used that & my sales skills to meet a LOT of cute girls at parties.

It’s great, you get to sit very close to the girl, put your arm around her & hold her hand in your lap. You get to look right in her eyes and tell her about herself. If you’re any good at cold reading (and we all are) and can sugarcoat the truth you’ll be very good at palmistry. If you look good & smell good too, you can meet a lot of playmates that way.

Hmmmmmm, I think I’ll take out an ad in the paper!

7

It must be magic.

8

That’s so weird – and so true.

One of the people responsible for my ostensible upbringing taught me palm reading. The point now seems abundantly clear. They were looking out for my matrimonial prospects.

I actually had a GF who I got back together with years later try this on me. Amazing how seductive it is. Even knowing it’s BS.

gouda, the technique has been pretty thoroughly discussed on the board, and in Cecil’s columns, as I recall. One of our members wrote a book, described in this column:

boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=138548

I don’t know whether it’s the same book (I was meaning to ask him) but there’s a book called “The Semiotics of Fortune-Telling” which explains how to be a professional con, too.

9

I dunno… I find it kinda hard to simply dismiss it as bullshit and a con job, because of my said experiences with palm reading. And again, how could so many of them palmists have said exactly the same things about my future by just general observation and amateur psychology? I am not that easy!!

I read up cold reading (http://www.randi.org/library/coldreading/index.html), but from what I understood of it (asking questions and then feeling your way ahead), this was not the technique used by any of the chaps I saw. They were all about talking - they never asked any questions whatsoever. None of them used the cold reading technique as explained in the above site, not even the 2 who were wrong about what they told me. In fact, one of them even made me write down what he spoke, because he didn’t want to be interrupted during the reading!

Amen Jack@ss. I spent last year in Europe, and I’ve lost count of the number of women who’ve asked me to read their palms. They all assumed that my being Indian automatically made me capable of reading palms!!

BTW partly_warmer, I got the above link from a post by [B[Ianzin**, who I think wrote the book you were talking about.

So I’m still wondering… I know there are lots of conmen out there (heck, I suppose I was one with those very lovely European women!), and people I know have been taken for the proverbial ride. But I also know of a lot of people who put a lot of faith in it, and they wouldn’t unless they somehow profited from it.

10

Being a good observer can yield a lot of information before asking any questions. Things such as one arm significantly bigger than the other, callouses on hands, wearing crystals or any of that New Age stuff, and other things like that give away a lot of information about a person.

As for cold reading, a good charlatan will phrase it so the questions don’t come across as questions. Unless you are trained to spot them, you might not know what hit you.

11

gouda,

Definitely get your hands on one of the recommended books and give it a read. It’s hard to imagine how these things are done until they’re explained by the people who do them.

I had a class where one session (having warned everyone the week before) the professor debunked the examples students brought in of psychic behavior. We were stunned. He demolished almost every one. And the others (including a couple examples I had) . . . well, we had to wonder whether there wasn’t a natural explanation for those, too. (I don’t remember if he specifically addressed palmistry.)

There was an experiment where the subjects were told that they were evaluating a new advanced computer program that was based on far more accurate zodiac (I think it was) measurements than had been available before. A large percent of the people said the statements were amazingly accurate. Something like 75% + of the statements. The statements were actually random.

12

Will do. Thanks a lot, everybody… like I said in my OP, I’m still very skeptical. Amazed, but skeptical.

And I will be even more amazed if I do actually end up leaving for Germany within the next 2-3 weeks. :slight_smile: Sorry, couldn’t resist that!