Mind Reading
Mind reading is one of those contentious subjects that is apparently used by psychics and those purporting some kind of psychic ability, and it is very difficult to prove or disprove if genuine mind reading or psychic abilities exist.
Mind reading acts are also one of the staples of mentalism.
The mentalist will traditionally rely upon one of 2 methods to achieve mind reading performances, which will be either in the form of “hot reading” or “cold reading.”
Cold reading is covered elsewhere within this website, and is really the area that we wish to concentrate upon, since it’s use allows people to appear to give facts, figures, and other information about a person that are so (apparently) accurate that there seems to be few explanations other than psychic ability.
Hot reading is the opposite technique and relies upon traditional mentalism and magic based techniques, although it is not limited to magicians and mentalists, it is undoubtedly used by many supposed “genuine” psychics.
Hot reading relies upon finding out the details and information about the subject in advance, and then “revealing” them in a suitably dramatic way to make it appear that some kind of supernatural ability has been employed.
Accusations of this kind of activity has been levelled at many psychics, including Derek Acorah (who refutes this allegation), and there is one wonderful example of an American evangelist who claimed to be given details about people directly from God, who was caught out when his wifes radio transmissions to his hidden earpiece were so dramatically eavsdropped upon and taped.
One of our favourite books on the deviousness of spirit mediums (aka psychics) is the facsimile copy of the otherwise impossible to get hold of Revelations of a Spirit Medium
It’s a real eye opener!
The methods outlined in this book range from outright trickery, through to a networked and systematic dissemination of information about wealthy spiritualist clients in each town and city that a medium could hire before visiting them - in other words, classic hot reading!
Obviously this method is unlikely to be available to a mentalist, and so other methods of obtaining personal information are employed, some requiring the participant to write things down in “sealed” envelopes (a rather clumsy and unsatisfactory method), through to far more sophisticated and elegant techniques to facilitate the illusion of reading a persons mind.
Another method employed by the mentalist is to use psychological subtleties that appear close to mind reading, but are drawing upon psychology, nlp, suggestion, and other methods outlined and discussed here, on The Mentalist.
You can find out about these different mentalism based mind reading techniques in our mentalism section.
