The Science Of Reading Minds.

I read a book on Harry Houdini when I was in the 7th grade. And it was interesting. He and his wife Bess used to do a mind reading act. And they'd fool people, even though of course they were never reading minds.

There are several ways to do this. The most obvious is to have a schill, or confederate in the audience who is in on the act. In prearranged script, you ask if you he thinking of apples, and he says yes he was. I often tell people this how I think alleged mentalists do this on NBC's "Tonight Show". They ask an actor or actress if that is what they are thinking. And the actor, who I really think is just acting, is amazed, and says it is. Val Valentino as the Masked Magician revealed in his 1997-2002 show, that the person or persons assisting in the deception then signs a contract for life, saying they will never reveal what they did. Sometimes whole audiences have to sign this contract, Valentino explained.

The simplest method, my HS chemistry and physics teacher told us, is called working the audience. The magician starts with a general question. "Does anyone here have a grandmother whose first name begins with an M?" he asks. (It always seems to start with M, I've noticed.) "I think they might be in this direction" he continues. Then someone say, yes, it's me. Then after he asks a few random questions, if his guesses are mostly false, he says it wasn't them, or he lost the contact, and moves on. Psychology and showmanship, help the magician do this. Most or many of his "hits" are not accurate. I've noticed the people seem to be going along with him, perhaps motivated by emotion when he says he's talking to a dead relative. And they may be lying to him when they say he's correct every time.

Harry Houdini in that above book had an ingenious method. He and his wife would ask people to come forward, and lay everything in their pocket on a table. Then as Bess went to each item, for each person, Harry would seem to know what it was. It actually was the way she was asking him the question. "Oh? What is this?" and "Goodness? What is this?" meant something different. They figured out everything that anyone at that time could possibly have in their pocket. (If she came to something there wasn't a sign for, she moved pass it, or said they didn't have time.) "Oh" could mean pocket watch, and "goodness" could mean handkerchief, and so forth. The book also said a mentalist man and wife had a really complicated system. Words, movements, gestures, were all important. Some words canceled out the word before it. They even had a code for spelling out word, thru the alphabet. I'm not kidding. I was also thinking then, and now, misdirecting people's attention might work. They'd get suspicious if you kept saying oh for pocket watch. So why not just have more than one word? Or that word before it that canceled it, and then use another word. Or, I thought. Why is it the before question, what is this? Have the sign the last thing you said, for the last object. No one would ever suspect that.