You used the magician’s book. It doesn’t matter whether he told you that you could have chosen a different book, you used the magician’s book. It was not a random choice for you to use the magician’s book; for him to do this trick it was essential that you use his book, and so he forced you into choosing it.
No, he didn’t force anyone into anything.
But it’s possible that he would have done the trick differently if another book had been selected, possibly using one of the other methods discussed here.
Forceis a technical term used by magicians. It means tricking you into taking the item they want, while believing you had a free choice. Most mentalist tricks are based on a force of some kind.
I’m aware of that and was using it with that meaning.
Are you an expert magician? If not, how can you say that he didn’t force anything? You wouldn’t know. The entire point of a force is that it leaves people unaware that they have been forced.
It’s hard to say for sure that he didn’t do it in some super subtle way that nobody noticed. What I can say is that he didn’t do it in any of the ways suggested in this thread or any of the other ways that I’ve seen suggested elsewhere in discussions of this type of trick. And further - once again - that there’s really no need to insist that he must have forced it, because there are ways of doing similar tricks with random books and it’s possible that he would have done so had his book not been selected.
[ISTM that this is getting a bit repetitous, and I don’t intend to keep responding to the same things again and again to people who’ve not read prior posts. And in any event it’s not that big a deal.]
I don’t know why this is such a difficult concept. He used his book, and the divined word was one that is used in a standard trick book. He was clearly using the standard trick, apparantly quite well as you are still convinced that he did something clever.
I am not about to speculate on what tricks he could have done but did not when it is clear which trick he actually performed.
Hmm, I guess I just never thought of that. Good point.
nm
Perhaps I can help with some of the points in this thread.
I wrote ‘The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading’, which one or two posters have mentioned in this thread. I taught some cold reading skills to FBI agents, as well as to TV and stage mentalist Derren Brown. I am a member of the Inner Magic Circle, I perform as a mentalist on a semi-professional basis, I lecture to other magicians and mentalists at magic conventions and I write about mentalism for two monthly magic magazines. I also teach non-verbal communication skills to corporate groups.
**Re the term ‘mentalist’. **Magicians can specialise in particular types of magic. Some specialise in card magic, or stage illusions, or kids magic… and so on. Within the magic world, mentalists are magicians that specialise in magic of the mind and the imagination. Most mentalist tricks are based on the concepts of telepathy (I know what you’re thinking), clairvoyance (I know what no-one should be able to know), precognition (I know the future), or physical effects (I can make this spoon bend). So all mentalists are magicians, but not all magicians are mentalists.
In the UK, where I live, the term ‘mentalist’ is also used, though not very commonly, to refer to someone who is crazy or deranged. This usage was greatly popularised by the ‘Alan Partridge’ TV show. However, if you’re referring to the magic world, see above.
Re ‘reading’ people. When Sherlock Holmes does it, it’s just entertaining fiction. As several people have already pointed out, his deductions or observations don’t really stand up to close scrutiny. When mentalists such as myself do it, we usually combine a little bit of genuine, observational skill with a lot of trickery and deception. We are not trying to ‘read’ people like a book. We are trying, for the purpose of entertainment, to create a convincing illusion that we can do this.
So, setting aside fictional characters and stage mentalists, is it really possible to ‘read someone like a book’? Yes and no. Non-verbal communication is a large subject. When you meet someone for the first time, you can certainly train yourself to notice some small cues and clues that most people would miss, and that might give you some useful information. Peter Collett’s ‘Book of Tells’ goes into this in more detail. However, it is neither as precise nor as reliable as the fictional accounts would have you believe. The problem with a lot of ‘reading body language’ is that the parts that are reliable are fairly obvious, and the parts that aren’t obvious aren’t all that reliable.
Re the mindreading trick with the book. There are hundreds of tricks of this kind. It is impossible to say with any accuracy how that particular trick was done based on the description provided, although of course we can speculate as to which one of dozens of methods were used. There are two problems. (1) People don’t remember magic tricks very accurately. (2) As I have often commented here on the Dope, the problem with discussing how magic tricks are done is that those who know won’t tell, and those who are (apparently) keen to tell don’t really know.
Hi Ianzin, long time no see. I was hoping you would show up. (Possibly in a puff of blue smoke).
So, I found this link that explains a variant of the trick that
Doesn’t use a trick book and
Doesn’t require pumping for the first letter.
The biggest difference that I see is that the participant is not asked to pick a random word, he is asked to pick an interesting word from the first line of any page.
Maybe FP’s mentalist used a variation of this, with the trick book the instruction might be less specific than the first line. Maybe coincidence, but I noticed in the MOABT sample pages that there is only one “keyword” in the first paragraph on both pages.
The *biggest *difference is that the magician has to both see the book while the word is being chosen *and *handle the book after the word is chosen. Our subject in this thread is absolutely adamant those things didn’t happen and couldn’t have happened, even using cameras, stooges etc.
There are variants on this trick that don’t require the magician to see the book. The subject is asked to pick a random word from a random page with the book held up to their face, and when they are done the magician takes or touches the book while it is still open at the same page, but facing away from him so he can’t see the page. He then subtly slips a sliver of of transparent film into the appropriate page as he or, better yet, the subject closes the book. Done well it all looks perfectly natural and is utterly undetectable to a normal person. But of course it perfectly marks the page that the subject chose. As part of the following patter he riffles through the book to emphasise how normal it is and how many words it contains and in the process…
This is why I asked above whether the subject chose to hold the book face up, or whether he was told to and whether it is possible the magician handled the book afterwards. But both are absolutely not possible, apparently.
With the right book, this technique doesn’t have to rely on the subject picking the first word on the page either. Because there are only ~4 words on each page and the writing style allows words to be interchanged, the books can be printed with codes that tell the user what words appear on the page. For example any page with the number 1 contains the “A” word, and page with the number 19 contains the “T” word and so forth. So page 198 will contain “A”, “I”, “H” and “T”.
This can get increasingly complex in well written books, making the trick both more impressive and easier. For example, large numbers of words have linking themes. In the sample pages above the words “eyeglasses”, “sunglasses”, “bartender” and “photographer” are all linked by the theme “glass”. The words “photographer”, “illustration”, “videotape” are all linked by the theme “image” and so forth.
So long as the magician can find out the page number he can narrow the number of possible words down to just 4 or 5. “Psychic” banter then produces the answer:
“I am sensing the word is related to glass, right? Somebody wearing glass? No? But they are around glass a lot? OK, that’s what I’m getting, not wearing glass but using it a lot. Handling it?”
“I am sensing the word is related to glass, right? No? Not glass, but something hard? Rock? Something made of rock like a mountain? Somebody working with rock? Somebody breaking rock, using a jackhammer?”
Yadda yadda yadda.
But once again, it all hinges on the magician either being told the page number or being able to touch the book while it’s open and then later handle it. And the subject is absolutely certain neither of these things could have occurred.
This videowas posted earlier, the “any page, any word” trick with the magician supplying three books: “The book you choose is the book we’ll use”.
Now even after reading this thread, I have no idea how it was done, except that the subject put on his reading glasses to write down the word on a post-it on the book which was then held up to his face so he could “concentrate” on the word so maybe the magician was reading the reflection. I’m sure that’s too simplistic/unreliable.
But that’s not what I wanted to comment on. At the beginning of the video, the magician says he has three books and he holds them up one by one. What made me laugh is, he says the first one is by Stephen King and he holds up the Michael Connelly novel, The Poet.
The forced? book is “The Life of Louie Anderson” except that’s not the actual title according to the book jacket (the cover seems to be: “Goodbye Jumbo Hello Cruel World” by him. Close enough). Since they are all hardbound books with book jackets, I assume the book itself has been replaced.
The problem is that there are dozens of ways it could have been done. If you read my post after the video was first posted, you will see two explanations. basically:
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The inside of the dust cover is carbon paper, so whatever the subject writes on the post it note is transferred to the book cover. The magician or an assistant reads it after it is taken from the subject.
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The magician is using some form of Vernet writer, basically a small pen glued to his right thumb or beneath the thumbnail. After the subject displays his answer on the bench, the magician spends a few seconds talking crap and asking the camera to zoom in. While that is happening he is writing the answer on his post-it note using his thumb.
This is a really common, really old trick.
Probably not, there’s just no need to. This trick can be done multiple ways with truly random books and random words. They all rely on the magician writing down her answer after they have seen the subjects answer.
If you’re interested, you can see multiple examples of Vernet writers in action in this video. You’ll notice they are all essentially the same as the “any book, any word” trick in the earlier video. Most importantly, note that while the magicians always claim to write the answer down first, they never actually reveal what they wrote until after the subject has revealed the answer. That’s because they only pretend to write. The page is actually blank until they know the correct answer, and then they stall for a few seconds while they write it down with their thumb.
While Fotheringay-Phipps’ magician may have said that he could perform the trick with any book, if the trick book wasn’t selected he probably would have changed it to this trick. It is every bit as impressive, but genuinely can be done with any book, or no book.
I imagine that a lot of magicians actually alternate these tricks so that what happens becomes conflated in the audience memory and what they remember is that the magician could guess any word from any book without anything being written down.
It’s even easier. Try it with a post-it and ordinary pencil or ballpoint pen on any book with a smooth, shiny cover in dark colors. Remove the post-it, and hold the book at an oblique angle to the light. See it?
I know…zombie thread…but I didn’t see it originally.
I was the “stooge” at a show at The Magic Castle years ago with the book trick. It was definitely the trick book, and the word was mountainside!
My group and I figured it out (i.e. noticed it was a trick book), but it was still fun. I love going to The Magic Castle.