I put mentalist in quotes. He called himself a mentalist (though he also claimed to have the fastest hands in the world).
I assume all mentalists are magicians. No difference.
In any event, my point is that these were done from fairly close up and in a natural setting, without planted stooges, and to a highly skeptical audience (at least in my case) and he still pulled it off.
The first trick (word in book) is a classic mentalist trick. It is a highly sophisticated version of “subtract the number you first thought of” in that is is based upon mathematical properties that allows the mentalist to work out in their head what you have chosen.
Number 4 sounds a pretty classic mentalist trick variant as well. Pretty much anything involving numbers is.
The others are what seems to be a part of a mentalists usual SOP. Probably mostly classic magic tricks, but dressed up to be all about mental capabilities. A neat part of a mentalist’s show is the manner in which the distraction is not just from the mechanics of a trick, but from the entire nature of the trick, dressing it as a mental feat. We had a thread ages ago discussing this Derren Brown trick. The trick does not work the way Derren claims. That is a veneer over a far simpler classic magic trick. That is Derren’s forte and skill. Nice.
Look, Sherlock Holmes is a purely fictional character, and Arthur COnan Doyle gave him powers of obervation that are unrealistically accurate.
BUT… there’s a kernel of truth, in that certain people develop a knack for sizing up other people quickly and judging their personality types. In certain jobs, that’s a very useful trait. If a salesman or marketer is doing a presentation, it’s helpful for him to be able to judge his audience, figure out who the truly important people are and what they want to hear. If the salesman can tell by the way an audience member dresses, speaks, or carries himself/herself, “THAT’S the real boss, THAT’S the person who’s going to decide whether to buy or not, THAT’S the one I have to win over,” he’s at an advantage.
It’s helpful for a waitress to be able to read customers and judge whether this one will tip better if she flirts a little. It’s helpful for a teacher to be able to read kids’ faces and tell if one is up to mischief. It’s helpful for a con artist to be able to read his marks “How do I get to this guy? Appeal to his greed? To his vanity? To his kindness and generosity? To his insecurity?”).
Hardly anybody is as good at this as Sherlock Holmes or “The Mentalist,” but we’ve all met people who are very good at judging new acquaintaces in a few seconds.
It’s worth pointing out that no-one reads Sherlock Holmes for lessons in deduction, induction, and general logical thinking.
Conan Doyle did not take the stories very seriously, and most of the plots have more holes than a swiss cheese. There is quite a collection of commentaries that point out the flaws; it is customary to ascribe them to Watson’s illegible handwriting.
Apart from logical flaws, there are inconsistencies everywhere. One example:
In the The Affair of the Bruce-Partington Plans, Mycroft tells Holmes “Its importance can hardly be exaggerated!”
But while Mycroft may be a central figure in the British government, he is apparently unable to arrange for a simple search-warrant, so Holmes and Watson have to go burgling a spy’s house, with the clear implication they will be locked up if caught by the police.
Watson: “Could we not get a warrant and legalize it?”
Holmes: “Hardly on the evidence.”
That makes little sense.
What we do read Sherlock Holmes for is the atmosphere and the well-crafted dialogue.
I was wondering about that. Because the guy did not just announce outright what the word was, he had a bit of a spiel about this and that before ending with “… such as a bartender” (which was the word). But the spiel was only about a sentence or two, and the English language contains so many words that it’s hard to see how he could narrow it down fast enough that way.
What Mijin said. Holmes’s (and Doyle’s) constantly calling the process “logical deduction” does not make it so. The reader is led into error in thinking that Holmes is immensely clever and is left with a wish to be that clever himself. In truth, the reader is probably tooclever to draw Holmes’s inferences because he (and we) recognise that there are vastly many explanations that are equally or at least comparably viable.
Another issue with Holmes/Christie logic is that it almost always conceives of, and presents, “clues” as though they are finite class.
What I mean by this is essentially the Chekov’s Gun problem, the narrative convention of parsimonious supply of information. Readers must be presented with a limited universe of unquestionably true facts for the Holmesian deduction engine to engage with. The vicar was seen at the shop at 11.15. Smithers said he caught the 8.45 train from Waterloo Station. That sort of thing.
Each Clue must be assessed and assembled into a grand conclusion in which there are no loose ends, no unexplained details.
In reality, this is hopelessly unattainable. In reality, every single fact can, in principle, lead to a question which can lead to another fact in a sort of exponential explosion of detail. Not every rabbit can be chased down every burrow, and the satisfyingly closed universe of fictional clues yields to an untidy mass of details which can only be managed by corralling as much as seems necessary to make a pragmatic decision. Not every mystery needs to be explained or loose end tied off, nor in principle, can they be.
And the unquestionable nature of the facts presented in fiction is merely a consequence of the convention that gives a reader/viewer omniscience. We have an artificially precise record to go back and check - rewind the tape, or turn back a few pages. In real life, if it was important that the Vicar was seen at a certain time and place, the argument would focus not on the logical consequences of his being there, but in granular and dull analysis of whether the witnesses were mistaken. If it were incriminating for Smithers to have said he caught a particular train, in real life he would simply assert that the witness who heard him say it was mistaken, or that he misspoke.
TLDR version: Holmes and his spawn are horseshit.
That’s not entirely fair to Conan Doyle, IMHO. I can’t provide an example immediately, but IIRC several times Holmes dimisses presented facts as not actually being important.
And, maybe more to the point, Conan Doyle was not trying to write a challenge to the reader, by giving them all the clues that Holmes had, to see if they could solve the problem. Maybe Agatha Christie did indeed set out to play that game, but that was certainly not Conan Doyle’s game.
Speaking as a teacher, this isn’t the half of it. “Reading” people is essential to effective teaching even with well-behaved students. For anything to be explained, there are at least a half-dozen different ways to explain it, and you have to choose which explanation will work best for the particular students you’re dealing with (trying to give all of the explanations will only confuse them).
On the other hand, I also have a lot of techniques available to me which might not be available to a detective. For instance, in order to determine if my students play a musical instrument, I say “Say, do you happen to play any musical instrument?”, and from their response to that, I can usually logically deduce whether and what they play.
Trickkkkkyyyyyyy!
But, he could say “bartender” and wait for whether you reacted, and when you didn’t he would say “or…” and smooth over “bartender”. It’s the same as you then not noticing the misses until he guesses the right one…?
I don’t think he did that - IIRC he ended the sentence with some emphasis on the word.
In addition, my point is that the English language would seem to be too big for that type of technique. I could see that if he’s fishing for your mother’s hair color or your husband’s occupation. A word randomly selected from a book, not so much. He could have to go on with that forever. Though like I said I did wonder a bit if his technique was along those lines.
Also whether he was somehow able to see what we were pointing to, as we agreed on which word to use. But we held the book up to avoid that, and he was facing the other way anyway (& we switched the word after discarding our first choice) and it was my SIL’s living room so it’s not like there could have been any hidden cameras or mirrors.
Because you don’t know it seems like an amazing trick, but for many of these if you knew how it was done you’d roll your eyes at how pathetically simple it was. That’s the real skill in magic, once you get past a basic level of competence in palming a coin or dealing from the bottom of the deck it’s all about selling the trick to the audience.
I believe that, but how does he pick a random word from a whole book? Does he enlist the help of someone else in the room?
In the US, there are roughly 134,000 amputations per year. Most of these–82%–were due to diabetes. The cite does not break down the remaining fraction but let’s conservatively assume that all of them are due to trauma. The US population for the listed time period was about 250 M, which means the annual amputation rate from trauma per 100k of general population was 9.6.
There were 1542 amputations among soldiers in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2012. Peak deployment there was ~100k. Therefore, the equivalent amputation rate for soldiers was 140, or almost 15x that of the general population. The number is likely somewhat higher than that since most of the estimates I made were conservative.
One simple way to perform this trick is with a fake book with the same two pages printed multiple times. Variations include books with a dozen or so pages printed as different chapters and books with multiple printing of the same chapter. If the magician can see the page or the section of the book you are looking in they can know exactly what page you are reading.
That allows the magician to know every word on the page you are reading: there are only a couple of dozen if you exclude “and”, “the” etc. It’s easy to slip those into plausible sounding patter, in fact the book I saw came with such dialogue provided.
The first part of this trick, which makes it seem more impressive, is forcing the choice of book to use. Give someone a choice of, say, 3 books on a table and ask them to pick one. If they pick the one you want, say they chose it and go with it. If they pick the wrong the one, then tell them to hold onto it and get another person to pick another book. Repeat until you get the book you want. There are a million variations on this technique, but they all make it look like the book was chosen at random when there is never any real choice.
Or you could use a mathematical trick based on casting out nines, or the like, to guarantee you “randomly” choose a particular page number.
OK, that’s what I was thinking as a way to limit the choices of words.
BUT those amputations due to diabetes are in an older population, now consider only those in the 20-30s age bracket.
I excluded the diabetes amputations completely, since they’re irrelevant to the calculation. The 9.6 number assumes that the remaining 18% are all from auto-related trauma (obviously untrue, but a conservative assumption for these purposes). There might be a moderate age dependence when it comes to trauma since young males tend to get in more accidents, but there’s no way it would make up a 15x deficit.
None of this was done in the case I participated in. I flipped through the book and it was legit. The guy had offered to do it with any book that we produced, but the book he offered looked legit so we didn’t bother. (Someone else told me he had seen this same guy do it at a different party and in that case they gave give him a book of their own - in a foreign language.)
What does this mean? We picked the page without any interference from him. (He was facing the audience and talking about something or other while we settled on our page and word.)