Psychics
Whenever I think of psychics I can’t help but remember that old quip:
“They are called mediums because they are not rare, and seldom well done.”
Whether you believe in psychics and psychic ability or not is irrelevant really in the context of this website, our sole purpose is to show how the mentalist can reproduce exactly the same effects using nothing other than psychology, NLP, suggestion, mind reading, cold reading, hot reading, and other mentalism effects - no supernatural powers are required.
Needless to say that even when a mentalist has produced a psychic performance using the cold hard and completely non paranormal methods that mentalists employ, the true believer will often claim that, in fact, the mentalist was using psychic powers, they just don’t realise quite how psychic they are.
Although you may well feel a Homer Simpson “D’oh” moment coming on, this highlights the sheer futility of trying to argue one way or the other whether psychic powers exist or not.
Instead lets examine the methods used by metalists to achieving a psychic like demonstration that resembles a mediums/psychics/spiritualists performance.
As you will notice with almost every subject in The Mentalists menu bar, the subjects do not sit neatly by themselves, isolated from all of the others, instead they overlap quite significantly, drawing upon areas of all of the others.
Reproducing psychic ability is no different, since it draws upon many of the other topics, probably mainly suggestion and cold reading.
We’ll go into cold reading later, but in the meantime the power of suggestion can be utilised very effectively.
Often, if you have had the pleasure of visiting a genuine psychic, you will find that their premises are suitably decorated with a variety of mystical, mysterious, spiritualist type objects, which clearly tell you you’re at the right place - and suggest to you that they are there for a purpose.
The mentalist can also use this rather obvious ploy to ensure that he or she looks similarly gifted in the black arts of speaking to the dead or picking up the auric vibrations of the victim customer lucky individual.
The manner in which you hold yourself, you speak, move, and talk, including the language you use, are all suitably good tools of suggestion to give yourself the air of a genuine psychic.
Once you move onto the reading itself you can either employ the trickery included in the mentalism section of this website, use the cold reading techniques that you have developed, or just bluff your way through - amazingly this is often good enough, since people who want a psychic reading will convince themselves that this is exactly what they have had.
I would at this point like to recount to you my own recent experience with a “genuine” psychic.
I generally don’t go in for this kind of thing, but since it was being conducted at the local pub during their halloween party, and it only cost £10 to participate, I went along to see what happened.
I have to say that I had my suspicions from the start, since the person who organised the psychic (and who was also a friend of hers) enveigled not only myself to come along, but also her landlord.
The psychic seemed to be using the rather hit and miss techniques that they do, with the usual questions:
“Do you know someone who’s name begins with an “A”? - How about a “B”?, “C”? - any letter of the alphabet?”
Or the classic to a woman of about 80:
“Do you have a male relative who might have died in WW2?”
What are the chances? She progressed in this manner, including when she got the vibes of the chap sitting next to me. What I found interesting about this was that she started with the line:
“I’ve got a male here” to which he replied it’s probably my brother, and once she had established that it was indeed his brother proceeded with the usual trivial messages that the dead seem intent on delivering.
During this encounter, one of the things that the psychic said was that “he’s telling me something about his hair,” to which the chap next to me replied that yes, he had a full head of curly hair whilst he himself was bald, which was apparently the source of some leg pulling between them.
Note that the psychic did not reveal this herself - she simply mentioned “hair” and he filled in the gaps for her, which she duly repeated back to him.
The amazing thing was that, during the interlude, the chap next to me recounted how she had got his brother correctly, and how had she known about his head of curly hair and the joking that it used to inspire between them!
In his mind he did not realise that it was he who provided this information, and she merely repeated it back to him.
The psychics performance continued along these lines for the rest of the show until the organisers landlord appeared (he arrived late), when she instantly came up with his recently deceased fathers name, how he died (he hung himself), his occupation, etc, etc, etc.
Now to me there was either a case of spontaneous psychic ability at work, or it was a classic case of hot reading, and so, since she appeared to be suddenly gifted with some genuine insight I decided to test her out.
I asked her if she could get any message from a person connected to me, and added that he’d died unusually.
Unfortunately we were straight back to the machine gun bombardment of every possible fact & figure that you could glean from that tiny piece of information:
“Was it your father? Grandfather? Brother, Uncle, a friend?”
It was a friend I confirmed, but could she tell me how he had died?
“A car crash?, Train crash?, Airplane crash?, etc.”
Eventually I had to reveal that he did, in fact, fall off a mountain, to which she instantly, unbelievably, and quite cynically replied - “are you sure it was an accident, because I’m getting the impression that he was murdered!”
Fortunately this quite shocking and ridiculously appalling suggestion convinced me that she was nothing but an out and out charlatan, and so when she suggested that she just knew that me & the organiser were going to be going into business together I just knew that we weren’t.
It seemed clear to me that the psychic had been fed the information about the landlord by the organiser, who it seemed had some ulterior motives.
You might well think that this is a bit of harmless, if not ever so slightly sadistic fun, but the reprecussions of this run a little deeper.
The organisers landlord ended up so amazed by the psychics performance that he was telephoning her every day, and taking advise on everything he did, for a fee of course.
On top of that it transpired that the organiser was now living in her rented acccomodation free of charge, since she was crying the poor tale to the landlord, and he was being told by the psychic that, in essence ”K is just destined to be in that house - if she leaves bad things will happen.”
That isn’t just harmless fun, it is really fraud and highlights the danger of believing anything that is presented to you.
It is also important that the mentalist makes sure that he stays on the side of entertainment only, and does not cross over onto the dark path of pretending to have real powers along with the rest of the devious, despicable, and downright criminal fraternity.
The worry of course is that the mentalist could be a more convincing psychic than even they could - even the “genuine” ones.
The trick really with giving a psychic performance is to study, master, and perfect the delivery of cold reading techniques. If you can manage to throw in some good old fashioned hot reading too then you can see clearly how effective it can be.
I’d also recommend the Revelations of a Spirit Medium
If you are interested in learning more about developing your psychic techniques (ie, your mentalist psychic techniques), then I recommend that you read some of the books in the recommnded reading section, and the traditional mentalism techniques in our mentalism section.
