I am a consulting mentalist (i have book published for that public and designed a stage show amongst other things) and... This article is very empty. It mostly quotes small points from thinkers in that domain to a public who does not care about those small points as they don't know what mentalism is.
Mentalism is an ensemble of techniques (including mnemotechnic, hypnosis, magic tricks, a knowledge of statistically likely phenomenons and, indeed, a trained intuition) used to produce incredible phenomenons (usually psychic phenomenons or an impressive mastery of the human mind) in an entertainment setting.
One point that is worth stressing is that it is neither all real (magic tricks are great to make things look better / add some punch and anyone telling you they don't use them is either lying or very ignorant) nor all fake (anyone telling you otherwise is, similarly, likely ignorant or a magician who did some telepathy-themed tricks and think that it is all there is to it, the human mind is an amazing toy).
If you want to be entertained by a world class mentalist, I highly recommend watching some Derren Brown shorts on YouTube (as someone else suggested).
But Spideys tricks tend to boil down to sleight of hand - something the author claims that mentalism is not, and alludes that it is a way of reading peoples thoughts.
Derren Brown is such an incredible rabbit hole to fall down, the passion he has for the craft of illusions and mentalism really shine through.
Recently he's shifted towards an honesty that I really appreciate, about where he's coming from and his own abilities. It feels so much more genuine, which makes it connect so well.
If you're relying on likelihoods, what do you do on a stage show when it fails? Do you leave yourself backup possibilities? Just throw your hands up and try again?
Derren Brown shows have the benefit where he can try his tricks on 100 people and just show you the successes.
Depending on the situation I could lie about it succeeding, go forward as if it didn't matter, use a back up technique, take the miss and admit i am not perfect or do it on the full audience all at once to make sure it mostly works (you will observe some of the above if you go see Derren's stage show several times).
Browne's live shows (usually in a packed auditorium or theatre with an audience of hundreds or thousands) are amazing. Sure, his TV stuff can be edited, but the live show has to work, and it does.
> If you want to be entertained by a world class mentalist, I highly recommend watching some Derren Brown shorts on YouTube (as someone else suggested).
I've been to see him live (in Bristol, UK). He did the 'usual' (for him) amazing mentalist stuff, then did a physical turn. He got some audience members to break some glass bottles on the stage, hyperventilated in a bag (to slow his pulse), then lay with his cheek on the shards and got someone to press his head down with their foot. Afterwards he stood and plucked bits of glass from his (not bleeding) face.
He followed it up with a brief explanation of how he'd done one if his routines that night using suggestion, including photos of billboards/posters outside that guided attendees down certain thought paths before the show started. It was a revelation.
Incidentally he also published "Tricks of the Mind" which has a fair amount of detail about how he does some of it.
> He followed it up with a brief explanation of how he'd done one if his routines that night using suggestion, including photos of billboards/posters outside that guided attendees down certain thought paths before the show started. It was a revelation.
This is all for show. That's not how any of these tricks are done. Brown is famous for giving fake explanations for his effects.
I've been wanting to get into hypnosis for a while but I typically find all the classes are aimed (and priced) for a wannabe hypnotherapist. I'm interested in the stage hypnosis side of mentalism. Do you have any tips for what I should be looking for?
Should I start with your "how to be a mentalist" book?
In the magic and stage mentalism worlds, this one is a bit of a classic:
Trance-Formations: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Structure of Hypnosis - 1981. When I was doing magic, I found quite a bit of it to be useful in helping structure routines, patter, or improve non-mentalist effects.
I would recommend "The Trilby Connection" by Antony Jacquin (coupled with his book "reality is plastic") to start in hypnosis as entertainement. It is fairly well explained and focuses on close-up meaning that you can start practicing it now without needing a stage. Once you are confortable with that, you can start researching stage hypnosis.
Hypnosis for pure mentalism is different (when you are not explicitely telling people that you are using hypnosis). This is where you might want to complement your mastery of the basics with some NLP books such as the one given by an other commenter (or Steven Heller's "Monsters and Magical Sticks"). Note that a lot of NLP is not evidence based but you are fine if you keep with the founder's work on hypnosis.
(fun fact, I got started in hypnosis with some hypnotherapy books)
My book is written in French and covers the technique most dear to the Bob mentioned in the article (not giving more specific details here), if you read French don't hesitate to email me and I will send you a link. My computer scientist background can be mostly seen from the research elements of the book (I have references and tips going back two hundreds years in the past) and the fact that I got my editor to let me typeset it in Latex.
The next ones will be in English (and Latex if my English editors agree with it...) and might get out within two years, keep you eyes open for a Nestor.
Side note: the word "mentalist" is widely-used London (maybe South-East London) slang for nutter/weirdo/unhinged person; the kind of person who is unpredictably or disproportionately angry, violent or prone to high-risk social behaviour that is best avoided. Usually a man: "bloke's a mentalist!"
It is basically never a compliment (whereas "mental" occasionally has a positive/fun connotation now).
It makes reading about Americans talking about "mentalists", including some of the comments on this page, very funny indeed.
To note that this is because people needed a word to describe someone who's "utterly mental" but didn't like "crazy" or "insane" (which are both considered not-PC these days, among other things), so they reached for the closest they'd heard - mentalist, made famous by the TV series - even though it was not the correct word.
But yeah, it is now in common usage. A bit like their/they're/there and "should of", it hurts my pedantic sensibilities, but in the end, people will speak how they want to speak and if enough of them agree, the language just changes.
No it's not, and I've used it long before that show was around. So much so that the title of that show was just as amusing as this title of this thread.
I especially enjoyed the trailers for tv show "The Mentalist" in this light.
I'm not as sure about the violence aspect of it, but certainly the rest rings true. Imagine the scene, you're driving in London and someone pulls out in front of you and does a series of weird manoeuvres, holding up the whole street for what feels like several hours. An appropriate exclamation could be "What the f*ck are you doing you utter mentalist?"
The Mentalist is such a guilty pleasure for me. The Sherlock/Watson combo is done to death in crime procedurals but as far as contemporary twists on the formula go, I found it a bit more memorable than, say, Elementary or Castle.
In my former South-West London circles, "mentalist" rarely had the negative connotation you describe. More frequently it was used to refer to someone's (contextually) outrageous/daft/extreme behaviour.
"You ran 15km before breakfast? You bloody mentalist"
"You carried on drinking even after I left? Mentalist"
I used to walk around with a queen of hearts in my pocket and, as a party trick, ask a female friend or acquaintance to "name a card, any card, just not ace of spades, everybody picks an ace for some reason". If I got it right, I'd produce the card, otherwise I'd blurt out some "character reading" bs based on what card they picked as an "out".
I learned the trick from a Derren Brown book in which he describes a much more elaborate version. You would be amazed how well it worked. It's just one of those things: A number between 1 and 5? 3. 1 and 10? 7. 1 and 20? 17. And the famous "red hammer" trick. Humans are lousy PRGs.
Of course I could hide several cards in several pockets to increase my chances but that would be "cheating".
It works so well that my boss came back from lunch once and described excitedly how some guy had stopped him and run a routine to get him to pick a number and a colour, and as he described the prompts the colour blue and number 7 popped into my head. And they were the right ones.
I just tried the number game on my wife and she got, 3, 7 and 16. I would call that a success. Especially as I had to repeat the last one which gave her more thinking time.
I wonder if Alice In Wonderland along with Disney helped make the queen of hearts a memorable card face enabling people who are not as familiar with cards to recall the character.
I agree, I love Penn and Teller and their style of magic. It _feels_ very science-y to me. Like they explain a trick but still blow your mind at the end of it. They show you they are masters of their craft, and most of the time (not always) they aren't trying to deceive you.
Mentalism on the other hand is the exact opposite. The only point is to impress you with pseudoscience, as far as I can tell.
If you are taking this article at face value then you are missing the point.
This is 100% a marketing piece. It is a standard part of modern Mentalism to pretend to explain how it works by psychology, powers of suggestion, and deep study of human nature. This is misdirection. Mentalism is an illusion, like any other magic show.
Source: Like the author I also have a stack of books on Mentalism.
None of his claims would pass an Amazing Randi challenge.
There's another psychological trick here: we are effectively being told we must believe something happened and wasn't trickery because he tells us so. So his wife "wasn't a confederate of the mentalist". Ok, right. Where's the proof this even happened at all? Because some guy calling himself a mentalist says so in an internet article?
> None of his claims would pass an Amazing Randi challenge.
"So, yes, what I do is real" means that his act really is mental (intuition, suggestibility, etc), as opposed to non-mental (confederates, well-placed mirrors, trick pens, etc). He wasn't claiming to have psychic powers.
Oh, but it IS an act of non-mental tricks (confederates, research, etc). From the comments on the link you provided, and do note this person is appreciative of the showmanship of it all:
> "Notice how the letter F was clearly not random and he specifically chose that girl from the audience. What also wasn't random was that he asked specifically if she had any pets. He did research on one of his audience members beforehand and decided upon this girl and mind-reading a pet name - because she had her pet name on one of her social medias. What makes this even better is that they probably would have chosen a social media account she hadn't used in ages or a post from years ago to maximise disbelief. It wasn't mind-reading or looking intently at her face for plosive sounds or anything. It was just audience research and epic showmanship and story-telling."
Now, I like a good trick and I enjoy magic acts. But this has nothing to do with intuition or suggestibility or mind-reading of any kind.
Surely, Derren Brown's team talked to the lady, asked her a few questions like her name, her age, her dogs names etc, and fed that information to Derren. It's very easy with a few pieces of information like that to completely narrow it down to one person. You can see in the video, he asks for all the Fs to stand up, and he selects one person.
I'm sure there's more to mentalism, like reading body language but it feels like 90% magic (lots of prep work + hard work + presenting / misleading) and 10% improvisation.
> I perfected another where I asked a person to think of a loved one, and then I guessed their loved one’s name
I don't see how you do this one sans psychic powers unless you're at least somewhat familiar with the person and their loved ones. Guessing common names would work every once in a while, but nowhere close to the majority of the time.
Now perhaps if you research the person ahead of time, maybe frame your question in a way that they're more likely to think of a particular type of person (e.g. mention age or old times so that they're more likely to think of grandparents as opposed to younger relatives), I could see that working, but that's not what he said. "Hey stranger, think of a loved one" -> "I know their name" is impossible without telepathy.
Similarly:
> Having someone merely think of a drawing, then taking a pad and duplicating their vision perfectly?
No, you can't do this without psychic powers unless you're adding a lot more context around the type of drawing before they do it. "Hey stranger, do a drawing of something, anything" isn't gonna work. Even if you assume there's a handful of common objects that people are likely to draw -- a house, a car, a dog, a flower -- you're still gonna be wrong more often than right.
I really like a lot of magic, but mentalism isn't very interesting magic to me because it always boils down to the same thing:
1. They get passed information via some surreptitious source (hidden mic, signals, ode, etc.)
2. They make some kind of swap using sleight of hand
3. They got lucky/had multiple outs/the person was in on it
And the presentation beyond that is really boring, like: "pick a card", then "oh I know what it is". Once you've seen it once it's always the same. Obviously everyone knows you can't actually read minds or predict the future, so it's just a matter of what type of cheating occurs.
>Can I bend cutlery and coins? Sure, but I heed Cassidy’s advice, and I don’t. If I step onstage and bend a fork with my brain, it makes everything too unbelievable.
No, you cannot bend metal with your brain.
That would actually be worthy of our attention instead of this drivel.
Readit News
Mentalism is an ensemble of techniques (including mnemotechnic, hypnosis, magic tricks, a knowledge of statistically likely phenomenons and, indeed, a trained intuition) used to produce incredible phenomenons (usually psychic phenomenons or an impressive mastery of the human mind) in an entertainment setting.
One point that is worth stressing is that it is neither all real (magic tricks are great to make things look better / add some punch and anyone telling you they don't use them is either lying or very ignorant) nor all fake (anyone telling you otherwise is, similarly, likely ignorant or a magician who did some telepathy-themed tricks and think that it is all there is to it, the human mind is an amazing toy).
If you want to be entertained by a world class mentalist, I highly recommend watching some Derren Brown shorts on YouTube (as someone else suggested).
He us not as famous as Derren Brown but he reveals lots of party tricks. And stage tricks are often just simple tricks with more presentation effort.
Recently he's shifted towards an honesty that I really appreciate, about where he's coming from and his own abilities. It feels so much more genuine, which makes it connect so well.
If anything he's a strong skeptic against it.
Derren Brown shows have the benefit where he can try his tricks on 100 people and just show you the successes.
The audience doesn’t know the plot of the trick, so the actual reveal can be different depending on how things go.
You got me curious, what does a consulting mentalist do? Also, what is your book? Unless you want to keep yourself anonymous here on HN..
At a guess, they consult to stage performers rather than performing on stage themselves.
I've been to see him live (in Bristol, UK). He did the 'usual' (for him) amazing mentalist stuff, then did a physical turn. He got some audience members to break some glass bottles on the stage, hyperventilated in a bag (to slow his pulse), then lay with his cheek on the shards and got someone to press his head down with their foot. Afterwards he stood and plucked bits of glass from his (not bleeding) face.
He followed it up with a brief explanation of how he'd done one if his routines that night using suggestion, including photos of billboards/posters outside that guided attendees down certain thought paths before the show started. It was a revelation.
Incidentally he also published "Tricks of the Mind" which has a fair amount of detail about how he does some of it.
This is all for show. That's not how any of these tricks are done. Brown is famous for giving fake explanations for his effects.
Should I start with your "how to be a mentalist" book?
https://www.amazon.com/Trance-Formations-Neuro-Linguistic-Pr...
Hypnosis for pure mentalism is different (when you are not explicitely telling people that you are using hypnosis). This is where you might want to complement your mastery of the basics with some NLP books such as the one given by an other commenter (or Steven Heller's "Monsters and Magical Sticks"). Note that a lot of NLP is not evidence based but you are fine if you keep with the founder's work on hypnosis.
(fun fact, I got started in hypnosis with some hypnotherapy books)
The next ones will be in English (and Latex if my English editors agree with it...) and might get out within two years, keep you eyes open for a Nestor.
It is basically never a compliment (whereas "mental" occasionally has a positive/fun connotation now).
It makes reading about Americans talking about "mentalists", including some of the comments on this page, very funny indeed.
But yeah, it is now in common usage. A bit like their/they're/there and "should of", it hurts my pedantic sensibilities, but in the end, people will speak how they want to speak and if enough of them agree, the language just changes.
I'm not as sure about the violence aspect of it, but certainly the rest rings true. Imagine the scene, you're driving in London and someone pulls out in front of you and does a series of weird manoeuvres, holding up the whole street for what feels like several hours. An appropriate exclamation could be "What the f*ck are you doing you utter mentalist?"
"You ran 15km before breakfast? You bloody mentalist" "You carried on drinking even after I left? Mentalist"
and so on.
Well some of this I include under high-risk social behaviour I suppose.
But it's a good observation. I can't think of a time recently I've heard it used positively.
Deleted Comment
I learned the trick from a Derren Brown book in which he describes a much more elaborate version. You would be amazed how well it worked. It's just one of those things: A number between 1 and 5? 3. 1 and 10? 7. 1 and 20? 17. And the famous "red hammer" trick. Humans are lousy PRGs.
Of course I could hide several cards in several pockets to increase my chances but that would be "cheating".
All "magic" is cheating.
Why not increase your chances and increase the odds of your audience enjoying themselves?
As long as you don't claim to have real magic powers and make it clear that it's "just a trick", I don't see a problem with this.
In fact the article doesn’t say anything at all.
Pen and teller use every opportunity to pan mentalists and the mentalism-explained videos on YouTube I’ve seen all boils down to sleight of hand.
If you read the comments first, don’t bother with the article.
Mentalism on the other hand is the exact opposite. The only point is to impress you with pseudoscience, as far as I can tell.
Here's an hour long presentation that James Randi gave at McGill University:
James Randi - Investigating Pseudoscientific and Paranormal Claims https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRqlvqHBVCg
This is 100% a marketing piece. It is a standard part of modern Mentalism to pretend to explain how it works by psychology, powers of suggestion, and deep study of human nature. This is misdirection. Mentalism is an illusion, like any other magic show.
Source: Like the author I also have a stack of books on Mentalism.
But you are absolutely right, this article is about misrepresenting mentalism and promoting the author.
What "real" books on the subject do you recommend?
There's another psychological trick here: we are effectively being told we must believe something happened and wasn't trickery because he tells us so. So his wife "wasn't a confederate of the mentalist". Ok, right. Where's the proof this even happened at all? Because some guy calling himself a mentalist says so in an internet article?
"So, yes, what I do is real" means that his act really is mental (intuition, suggestibility, etc), as opposed to non-mental (confederates, well-placed mirrors, trick pens, etc). He wasn't claiming to have psychic powers.
> Where's the proof this even happened at all?
Guessing names is a very common stage trick; here's Derren Brown getting the name of someone's pet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1IV_kkh1Xs
Oh, but it IS an act of non-mental tricks (confederates, research, etc). From the comments on the link you provided, and do note this person is appreciative of the showmanship of it all:
> "Notice how the letter F was clearly not random and he specifically chose that girl from the audience. What also wasn't random was that he asked specifically if she had any pets. He did research on one of his audience members beforehand and decided upon this girl and mind-reading a pet name - because she had her pet name on one of her social medias. What makes this even better is that they probably would have chosen a social media account she hadn't used in ages or a post from years ago to maximise disbelief. It wasn't mind-reading or looking intently at her face for plosive sounds or anything. It was just audience research and epic showmanship and story-telling."
Now, I like a good trick and I enjoy magic acts. But this has nothing to do with intuition or suggestibility or mind-reading of any kind.
I'm sure there's more to mentalism, like reading body language but it feels like 90% magic (lots of prep work + hard work + presenting / misleading) and 10% improvisation.
He's not?
> I perfected another where I asked a person to think of a loved one, and then I guessed their loved one’s name
I don't see how you do this one sans psychic powers unless you're at least somewhat familiar with the person and their loved ones. Guessing common names would work every once in a while, but nowhere close to the majority of the time.
Now perhaps if you research the person ahead of time, maybe frame your question in a way that they're more likely to think of a particular type of person (e.g. mention age or old times so that they're more likely to think of grandparents as opposed to younger relatives), I could see that working, but that's not what he said. "Hey stranger, think of a loved one" -> "I know their name" is impossible without telepathy.
Similarly:
> Having someone merely think of a drawing, then taking a pad and duplicating their vision perfectly?
No, you can't do this without psychic powers unless you're adding a lot more context around the type of drawing before they do it. "Hey stranger, do a drawing of something, anything" isn't gonna work. Even if you assume there's a handful of common objects that people are likely to draw -- a house, a car, a dog, a flower -- you're still gonna be wrong more often than right.
Deleted Comment
They just pretend to use "intuition" or "suggestibility" (not sure why, but it seems to make it more appealing), but those are not real methods...
1. They get passed information via some surreptitious source (hidden mic, signals, ode, etc.) 2. They make some kind of swap using sleight of hand 3. They got lucky/had multiple outs/the person was in on it
And the presentation beyond that is really boring, like: "pick a card", then "oh I know what it is". Once you've seen it once it's always the same. Obviously everyone knows you can't actually read minds or predict the future, so it's just a matter of what type of cheating occurs.
No, you cannot bend metal with your brain.
That would actually be worthy of our attention instead of this drivel.