Nottinghamshire Magician
The question most often asked is, "How do you do it?!"
By way of explanation, lets consider a few things about how the mind works. Read the words below:
Red Green Blue Orange Black Yellow
Read the line above again, out loud. Note how quickly you could read the words.
Now read the words below, out loud.
Blue Red Green Black Yellow Orange
Did you notice that the speed at which you read the line was marginally slower? This is because of the way that the human brain processes information. The individual letters form words which are converted by the brain into pictures and recalled from memory as such.
Now try the next line. This time, in order to alter the way in which the information is processed, try saying the color, rather than the word that you are reading.
Black Yellow Green Red Blue Orange
You read that line out much more slowly, didn't you?
In a nutshell, this is the essence of Mentalism. An understanding of human nature, aided by careful observation and analysis of a person's actions and reactions, allows predictable outcomes to be achieved in certain controlled circumstances.
While most people prefer to consider themselves unique, in point of fact, each person is largely the outcome of a vast and widely shared cultural climate built on social traditions. This means that no matter how eccentric a person may appear or how individual they seem to be, they process information in a very similar way to the rest of us.
Consider the following example:
For every word you read, say out loud the first word that comes to mind:
Black
Up
Wrong
Happy
You see where this is going, don't you? You might be thinking that this was a silly or an obvious example. Perhaps. But in an attempt to explain how all of this is done, I have over-simplified what Mentalism is -- it is far more complex than this explanation would suggest. All of this is where Mentalism begins.
In fact, click NEXT, and let's try this again.
