Psychological Forces
Posted: under Psychology, Skepticism.
I’ve recently been taking time to research mentalism. Mentalism is, in my opinion, the coolest area of magic. In mentalism, the magician (known as a mentalist), uses psychology and suggestion to create the illusion of mind reading, mind control, and extrasensory perception. That definitely beats card tricks. Think Criss Angel, Derren Brown, or “The Mentalist”.
Like all magic, it turns out that the secrets behind mentalism aren’t nearly as exciting as one would expect. One of the biggest secrets of mentalism is the use of psychological forces. In a psychological force, a mentalist will ask a person to think of something, perhaps a color, and then predict their response. However, as most people think in similar ways and share a common culture, many people will happen to think of the same thing when asked the same question. Let’s try this out. Don’t scroll down to far on this page or the experiment won’t work.
Please do each of the following things, and write your responses down.
Name a color.
Think of a number between 1 and 10.
Think of a pretty flower.
Think of a piece of furniture.
Think of a vegetable.
Look outside the nearest window and write the first object you see.
Now, here are the results a mentalist would predict:
Color: red
Number: 7
Flower: Rose
Furniture: Chair
Vegetable: carrot
Outside the window: tree
What do you think? Did it work? If it didn’t work, mentalists have methods of working around that. But that’s for another post…
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Nov 21 2009
