It implies a level of attention to detail that would be desirable in that line of work. It looks professional and successful, also desirable in that line of work. High levels of cleanliness tend to reduce the chances of obtaining evidence
It is. It is pretty much what I know. The book is linked to in the references.
Oh, you used the magician’s book. All bets are off then. You might as well say you used his deck of cards.
No matter what else you saw or what you think happened, he cheated you with a trick book.
An amusing aversion: In Moriarty, the Professor does the same scan on Sebastian Moran, and when he’s suitably amazed Moriarty just says “I have files on everyone.”
You are mistaken on two counts.
You are wrong when you say he’s not a mentalist. The term is accurate. Some magicians specialise in tricks where they appear to read minds. There is a term for those magicians. The term is mentalist. A mentalist is just a specific type of magician.
See for example Max Maven, a conjurer who calls himself a mentalist.
You also seem to imply he’s some kind of fraud. A mentalist is no more a fraud than any other kind of magician.
But this what I asked before "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…? " – and it seems that’s just what he did with a series of words.
I didn’t realize either that you were using HIS book – that makes it much easier!
…and I have no doubt this is true! 
I was at a stop light one afternoon, and a guy on a motorcycle in the lane next to me looked at me and said “2805 Mountain Summit Dr!” I was stunned that he knew my address! I looked a little closer and realized it was my paper delivery guy! On a loosely related story; I had a friend who was great at bar bets where you could give him any ZIP code or any city in the USA and there was a very high chance he would be able to tell you the corresponding city or ZIP code. He was a mail sorter in the downtown post office; and over the years he had an incredible knowledge. I only saw him miss a few times; but even then he could get closed based on the zone. It was damn impressive!
I agree with this too. In social situations where people aren’t being guarded with information they’ll let out a surprising amount of information if you’re observant. One cool trick is to guess someone’s birth month. Depending upon where you live I suppose, your license plate expires on your birth month. I’ve used this information more than once to guess what month someone was born. I have no doubts there are people who are very successful at cold readings. If for not other fact, that by and large human behavior is predictable.
The other words were mild emphases in middle of a sentence. When he said “bartender” he said it with heavy emphasis and stopped talking. Whether or not he was fishing earlier, he seemed pretty sure of it at that point.
On a similar note…
Penn & Teller’s book/magic kit Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends included a small book of short stories for use in a similar trick. The mentalist tells his subject to open the book to any random page, read the first line, and concentrate on it. The mentalist then draws a sketch of the image in the subject’s mind.
The book is written so that the first line on each page describes a similar image; for example (I’m describing this from memory, not actually quoting)…
…as the sun blazed high in the sky…
…crushed the spider beneath his heel…
…he examined the integrated circuit chip…
…discovered a new species of squid…
So all the mentalist has to do is draw a circle or oval with six lines radiating from it, and the audience is amazed.
The book itself is quite readable, as long as you skip over the first line of each page.
No, a mentalist is a guy who performs actual mental feats. Not mind-reading, of course, but a mentalist might do things like memorize long passages of text, or do many-digit mental arithmetic. This requires a quite different skillset than that of a stage magician.
I think that the many professional magicians who refer to themselves as “mentalists” would disagree with that statement.
From oxforddictionaries.com:
Then there are mnemonists, who actually perform feats of memory.
You can see it being performed here. The trick relies on the magician forcing the choice of word by demanding a specific number of syllables, and the subject then giving away the page number and/or first letter. After that, it’s all mnemonics.
There are only 26 large words in the entire book, and most of them are related to make them mnemonically easy. The individual paragraphs will also be repeated with only minor changes as well.
You can see even on the two sample pages that the words are the same. For example the words “handkerchief”, “receptionist”, “apartment” and “loudspeaker” appears on both pages and eyeglasses appears twice on the same page. As result these two pages contain only ~10 large words, where a typical book would contain over 30. And those same 10 words will be repeated on average every 3 pages.
Also note that each large word starts with a unique letter. So once you have been told that the first letter is “M” the only large word in this book that starts with “m” is mountainside. Notice that this word was selected in the video above, and also appears on the sample page given. In the trick you saw, the word selected was bartender that is also on the sample page.
That’s because any chosen word is on every third page on average.
So long as the magician can memorise 26 words, they can perform this trick. You’ll also note that most of the words are compounds: eye glasses, weight lifter, bar tender, video cassette, loud speaker. By recombining words of this sort, you can expand the number of large words without making it any harder to memorise. For example, this page uses “glasses” in both eyeglasses and sunglasses.
You can see how the writing style lends itself to using the same words in multiple paragraphs without appearing obvious:
Note that this uses the same words already on the page, but you could use almost any words you chose and it would look natural. And because it starts as a segue, it can be slotted into the story literally anywhere.
That explains the trick you saw. You told the magician the first letter of your word, even though you may not remember it. I am sure that the woman in that video wouldn’t remember telling him that either.
But the book has been cleverly written and can be used for other tricks.
It highlights the flashback coding, using antonyms on one page to tell you what the word is on the next page. By using this the magician can pretend not to look at the page in question, but by peeking at the adjacent page will know the answer.
Another trick here is that the same motifs are repeated every page. For example, the first page talks about somebody cleaning snowflakes from their eyeglasses, the second page talks about somebody cleaning fog from a car window. Another section will almost certainly talk about bartender cleaning ice from drinking glasses. This is for use with the technique that Cartoonacy described. The magician draws an image that is vaguely suggestive of somebody cleaning water from glass and “Hey presto!”.
With these books, it gets you nothing at all. Even if the same 5 paragraphs are repeated, as they were in the book I saw, it’s almost impossible to spot. The book you were subjected to seems to have been the “Mother of All Book Tests” linked to above, based on the use of the word “bartender”. This probably doesn’t repeat exactly the same paragraphs, rather it uses very similar paragraphs with a small pool of words interchanged. On one page a body is found on a mountainside by a detective who once worked as a bartender who tells his receptionist. On the next page, a videocassette is found in a graveyard by a receptionist who who once worked for a detective. Exactly the same sentence structure, exactly same words, just a different word order. This is almost impossible to spot.
Then we really have to ignore this other occasion. It may have been a completely different trick, similar to that in the video linked to above by Cartoonacy. That is trivially easy to do with a random book, and could easily be remembered as being the same as the trick you saw despite being completely different.
Would you accept that you could have forgotten that you gave away the first letter or the page number, as the woman in the video I linked to did?
Or perhaps the magician asked someone to pick a random letter and then asked you to open the book to a random page and select a word that started with that letter?
That’s the sort of thing I could easily forget because it only takes a second and you are deliberately distracted after it happens.
That is true. But as you described the trick initially, there was simply no way for the magician to know the word selected. As you described it, it was a random word from a random book, in a random language, off a random shelf and the answer was never written down. That’s not just difficult, it’s impossible without actual mind reading.
However, when we dig a little deeper, we find that you used the magician’s book and the instance where a random, foreign language book was used may well have involved the word being written down. Moreover the answer that you selected in your example happens to be one of the 26 words in a commonly used, commercially printed trick book. That changes everything.
But this is a classic example of people conflating what they remember from magic acts. You started this thread with a clear memory of using a random page from a random book in the act you saw. But then it turns out that you didn’t use a random book at all. You just thought the trick could be done using a random book because someone else there told you that it was the exact same trick performed with a random book. You then tell use that you know this magician performed the act that you saw, using a random book in foreign language.
It’s only when you think closer that it becomes clear that there is no reason to believe that. All we really know is that you saw a trick performed using the MOABT book and that the same magician performed some other trick with a random book.
Not really. What I was saying is that there is no way for someone to select a random word from a random book that they didn’t even see being opened and that was never written down or told to another person. That’s just not possible without using real magic. No amount of mentalist trickery will draw out a random word from a sample that consists of every word ever written down in every language ever written.
And of course what we find when we press you for more details is that this is not what happened. The magician guessed a word from a book that he gave you. At some previous point he guessed a word from another book that someone claims was random and foreign language but we have no further details.
While the first trick was impossible, there are literally hundreds of ways that the second two tricks could have been accomplished.
Which is probably classic misdirection. By playing up the idea that he is engaging in some sort mind reading technique, he distracted you from the fact that he knew the answer as soon as he was told the first letter or page number.
I’m losing the details of this trick here. Did you pick a word while his back was turned, or did you hold up the book to your face? Or did you hold the book up to your face even though he was looking the other way. That would have been redundant and not something a person would do naturally. Did he perhaps *ask *you to hold the book up to your faces as he turned away?
These little details can make a huge difference.
Some of these posts have revived a memory of something I haven’t thought about for nearly 50 years.
I grew up in a town of about 25000, with one municipal swimming pool. Hundreds of kids went there every day during the summer; I think it cost a dime or so.
The guy in the booth who took your money would also take your glasses and hold them for you. Several hours later, when you were done swimming, you’d go back to the booth and reclaim your glasses.
The guy would just look at me for a few seconds, reach into some bin, and give me my glasses. No fumbling at all, he just reached down and grabbed them out of what must have been several dozen pairs. They had no identifying marks on them. And he did this every time, for me and my siblings and friends, and as far as I know, everyone else, without error. It probably would have taken me five minutes to find them myself. And I’m not even sure that he was the same guy who took them; looking back, it seems unlikely he would work that long a shift. He just somehow knew whose glasses were whose. And like I said, this was nearly 50 years ago, way too early for any photo ID system.
Very strange.
Stranger still, the next day, every kid in town had bumps on their heads from walking into trees and cycling into cars, and headaches from reading books held upside down.
It sounds like maybe a photographic memory/idiot savant kind of thing (assuming it was the same guy all shift)?
Frank Robson, author of Thinking Dolphins, Talking Whales (1977), first dolphin trainer at first dolphin show place in New Zealand, made some similar strange claims. ( Amazon page. )
He claimed to be naturally telepathic. He claimed that, in his days working as a grocery store clerk, whenever he saw a customer walking in, he always knew exactly what they were going to purchase. :dubious:
He then claimed that, when he began training dolphins, he did so by telepathy. :dubious: He further claimed that it was easy, suggesting that any dolphin trainer could and should do likewise. :dubious:
(Did I mention that I am :dubious: ? )
Nonetheless, the book is a fun read. In the first half the book, he tells of his adventures in dolphin training. When he led the expedition that captured their very first wild dolphin, the very first dolphin they caught was a lactating female. He ordered it tossed back into the water. In the second half of the book, he quits dolphin training and works instead as a whale conservation activist.
That’s a Mentat.