In 1948 the American psychologist Bertram Forer conducted an experiment in which he administered a personality test, called the Diagnostic Interest Blank, to a group of thirty-nine college students. A week after conducting the survey, he handed each student a personality description that was supposedly based on the data he’d collected. The students were then asked to rate the accuracy of their profiles on a scale of zero to five, with five being a perfect match and zero being poor. The results were impressive. The average score was a 4.26, meaning that a majority of the students thought the personality descriptions were spot-on. Only 12.8 percent of the students ranked their profiles below a 4.0 (“very accurate”), and none scored theirs lower than 2.0 (“average”). Typical responses from the students included such statements as:
Surprisingly accurate and specific.
On the nose!
Very good. I wish you had said more.
Applies to me individually, as there are too many facets which fit me too well to be a generalization.
The Diagnostic Interest Blank seemed to be a sharp tool indeed. Except for one thing: Forer never used it. In reality, he had scrapped the test and given every student identical “personality descriptions” that consisted of a list of generic statements lifted from a newsstand astrology book:
You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
You have a great deal of unused capacity, which you have not turned to your advantage.
Forer had not unearthed some divine trove of universal truth at his local magazine store, but he had discovered a fascinating and surprisingly universal psychological principle, one that lies at the heart of every horoscope and palm reading and psychic divination, a multibillion dollar industry in the United States alone. Forer’s original result has been replicated dozens of times—to this day, the average rating hovers around 4.2—and psychologists have since given a name to the astonishing eagerness with which people will embrace stock personality sketches as unique portraits. They call it the Barnum effect, after P. T. Barnum’s famous dictum “We’ve got something for everyone.”
One interesting corollary to Forer’s original study is that the more personal information a subject willingly discloses, the higher that participant tends to rate the accuracy of his or her reading. In a demonstration at the University of Kansas, volunteers were separated into three groups. A person claiming to be an astrologer asked one group for their exact birth dates—day, month, and year. The second group was asked to disclose only the month and year in which they were born; while the third group gave no information. The participants then received identical horoscopes allegedly based on the information about themselves they had given. Remarkably, the three groups rated the accuracy of their readings differently. Those who had revealed no information about themselves gave it an accuracy rating of 3.24, an above-average score but nothing extraordinary. Those who had given the month and year of their birth averaged a 3.76. And those who divulged their exact birth date, 4.38. In other words, the perceived accuracy of the astrological reading was a function not of what the astrologer told them, but of what they told the astrologer. Astonishingly, this means psychics can boost their powers just by letting their sitters talk more.
That’s not to say that the content of a reading has no bearing on the result. For one, it must be generic enough not to be flat-out wrong. (Even so, this isn’t as important as one might think, because people selectively remember accurate statements while forgetting inaccurate ones, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias.) Moderate praise also tends to be more compelling than outright flattery or severe criticism. Beyond that, there is remarkable latitude in the kinds of readings that will succeed. Crucially, Barnum descriptions work not because they are sufficiently ambiguous to ring true in most cases, but because, on some fundamental level, people want to believe them.
The use of the Barnum effect—along with demographic profiling, fishing for clues, and good old acting—to feign psychic powers is known as cold reading (“cold” in the sense that you don’t have any prior information about the subject). Cold reading is what psychics and mediums use to convince people they possess extrasensory insights. A good cold reader can appear to read minds, predict the future, and commune with the dead.
I first came across references to cold reading while combing through the literature on mentalism, a branch of magic that includes telepathy, mind reading, palm reading, fortune telling, ESP, clairvoyance, and metal bending—skills that, according to Jeff McBride, are the province of the all-seeing Oracle, stage three of the magician’s life cycle. In these books, I learned how to extract private information from people, bend spoons with my thoughts, surreptitiously change the time on a wristwatch, convince strangers that I knew all about them, predict seemingly random events, duplicate drawings made in secret, and many other remarkable feats of the mind.
At first blush, I was skeptical. Does this mumbo-jumbo really fool anyone? The authors sure seemed to think so, enough at least to append their books with stern-sounding disclaimers cautioning readers that the methods therein were for entertainment purposes only. The gravity of these warnings made me laugh. Could this stuff really be that strong?
Being of a scientific disposition, I decided to test it out myself. Could I, a mere magician, become a mind reader? An occasion soon presented itself one night while I was doing magic in the basement of a Midtown bar. I was showing the bartender a few of my latest effects when an attractive thirty-five-year-old woman with saffron hair and misty green eyes rolled up next to me. She asked me to show her something, and almost as a reflex I performed one of my favorite card tricks.
“That’s not magic,” she scoffed, swiping a forelock out of her eyes. “Show me some real magic.”
Fine, I thought to myself, here goes.
I handed her a piece of paper and asked her to write down a name—“someone who’s close to you but not in this room”—and then fold it up without letting me see. Taking the paper, I tore it into ribbons and sprinkled the shreds in the palm of her hand. Then I grabbed her wrist, found her pulse, and with my best effort at gravitas steered her into a cold reading script. I asked her when she was born, studying her palms with unblinking intensity. I told her I sensed movement. Geographic, maybe emotional. Deep in her past. A trauma or broken bond. A closeness, followed by a great distance. Not a father? No. Like family, though, a brother perhaps. A love, far away now.
She knitted her brow and flashed a frail smile. Yes. A deep wound. The contours still visible on her soul. With conspicuous effort—summoning spirits is hard work—I sounded out the name:
G-e-o-r-g-e.
How did I know? Because I’d secretly peeked at the name in the act of tearing up the paper, an ingenious ruse known as a center tear. There is an entire body of literature that deals with just this one technique.
Color had risen in her cheeks, and her eyes were clouded over.
“George is still with you,” I said, growing more confident. “And he misses you too.”
The smile was gone, and her eyes were swamped with tears. “How did you . . . know?”
Experimenting further with these techniques, I was astounded at how often they worked, and even more so at the reactions I got. Grown men and women would break into tears. One man, a middle-aged guy in a Mets cap whom I met at a restaurant near Columbia, accused me of spying on him. “You were watching me from across the bar,” he said. “You must have been. You were listening in on my conversation. Otherwise how could you know all that stuff?” Others threatened me for invading their thoughts. One woman, a Russian exchange student, insisted we’d known each other in a past life. “We were in love,” she said. “And you broke my heart.”
There was something truly mesmerizing about this sort of magic. It was scary, because people actually believed it was real. You could start a religion with this stuff. I was beginning to see the rationale behind the disclaimers. I felt an extraordinary sense of power—“Tell me more!” people would plead, grabbing my wrist. “What else do you see?”—and an equally strong sense of guilt. I felt like a liar, which was ironic, because magicians lie all the time. But this was different somehow, and it made me uneasy. Mentalism, like the ability to cheat at poker, is an ethical minefield.
There are really two types of liars, I realized. On one hand you have professional magicians and showbiz mentalists who lie through their tricks, but don’t, in general, lie about being magicians. They’re what you might call honest liars. “All men are frauds,” H. L. Mencken once said. “The only difference between them is that some admit it.”
In the other camp are people like TV medium John Edward and telepathic performer Sylvia Browne and metal bender Uri Geller and palm readers and fortune-tellers and a good number of revival tent evangelists and faith healers and cult figures who employ conjuring tricks to promote false beliefs or to profit from people’s grief or ignorance or fear, a scam so insidious it makes the Soapy Smiths of the world look like the neighborhood watch. They are what I would call dishonest liars.
The line that separates honest liars from dishonest liars can be a fine one and, not surprisingly, many magicians cross it in pursuit of money and power and fame. Before he became a famous escape artist, Houdini traveled the countryside as a spirit medium, telling fortunes and offering to put people in touch with their dead relatives. Often he’d case the local cemetery beforehand in search of inside information on the newly deceased. Years later, he looked back with shame on this period of his life and dedicated himself to unmasking fraudulent mediums with an almost religious fervor.
Used responsibly, however, mentalism can add emotional depth to a magic performance by giving the audience a reason to care, something that is not always true of garden-variety tricks. (You can make a coin vanish? Great, so what?) Whereas conventional magic tricks have a tendency to alienate the spectators—you know the secret, and they don’t—mentalism engages them on a deeply personal level, creating an illusion of intimacy. The focus is on them and their problems, not on the magician. If magic is about being fooled, mentalism is about being understood.
As a mentalist, you appear to possess secret knowledge about other people, knowledge that they are often desperate to have. “Whereas magic creates questions,” Jeff McBride says, “mentalism is about answering them.” I figured that mastering the techniques of mentalism might help me broaden my repertoire and make my magic more relatable. This in turn would make me a better performer and perhaps even give me an edge at the IBM competition.
To learn more, I went to Las Vegas for MINDvention, the world’s largest mentalism convention. MINDvention attracts top-flight mentalists from around the globe; at this year’s, more than twenty countries were represented. It was held at the Palace Station Hotel and Casino, where I’d now stayed half a dozen times. MINDvention was sharing the facilities with a role-playing-game convention known as NEONCON. NEONCON is for people who carry around twenty-sided dice and spend long hours painting miniature soldiers and tiny artillery units for tabletop battles of Warhammer 40,000. In other words: hardcore nerds. And yet there were more women at NEONCON than at the magic convention. Like, wow.
I saw several familiar faces as I walked into the main auditorium where the talks were being given, including Jeff McBride and Mystery School sage Eugene Burger. McBride, in particular, was a presence at almost every convention. He usually sat up front with a notebook and kung-fu-perfect posture, and his laugh was always the loudest in the house: a hearty buccaneer’s howl.
With their suits and headset mikes, many of the guests at the convention looked like motivational speakers, and it’s no coincidence. A lot of mentalists earn high-dollar fees giving mind-over-market pep talks to major corporations. There’s a distinctly business-class vibe to the mentalism industry, and the discussions at MINDvention were frequently loaded with corporate buzzwords. There was talk of compliance technologies, cold calling, spectator control, positioning, and negative closing. “Hooters is a great place to practice cold reading,” one speaker told us—which still doesn’t seem like a good enough reason to go there. Mentalism, I realized, was one part magic, one part acting, and three parts sales.
Mentalism draws on a constellation of different skills. Some mental tricks rely on sleight of hand and require a great deal of manual dexterity—although it’s easier to get away with sleight of hand in a mentalism context than it is during a magic show, because people typically aren’t expecting it. The ideal cold reader has a high emotional intelligence, keen powers of observation, a firm grasp of human psychology, a flair for the dramatic, and an ability to read a subject’s reactions on the fly.
Mentalists speak a lot about the 15 percent. A magician should pull off every trick perfectly; a mentalist should not. Mentalism should only be about 85 percent accurate. Otherwise it’s too good, and it looks like a trick. “Error is a necessary element in mentalism,” observes Eugene Burger in his 1983 book Audience Involvement. “Without error, one is simply and very obviously doing magic tricks.”
Mentalists are like jugglers in this regard—they appear more skillful by messing up once or twice. In traditional magic, you might pretend to fail at the outset—the so-called sucker trick—but in the end the magician always finds the card, escapes the death trap, nails the landing. Not so for mentalism. The idea is that the sixth sense, like the other five senses, should be fallible, prone to errors. As with juggling, introducing the occasional slipup makes the act seem more plausible. The power of mentalism, a lot of the experts will tell you, is in that 15 percent.
I was particularly interested to hear what people had to say about the ethics of mentalism and the use of disclaimers. The party line on ethics, according to the Psychic Entertainers Association, or PEA, is that pretty much anything goes, provided that no claim is made with the intent to cause a “detrimental reliance,” be it financial or personal, on the authenticity of said claim among members of the general public, although what this entails in practice is the subject of considerable debate.
“As soon as you give a disclaimer, you devalue what you’re doing,” argued Jim Callahan, a lantern-jawed paranormalist who advertises that he can communicate with the dead using pendulums, during a panel discussion on the ethics of mentalism. Others, meanwhile, struck a note of caution. “The stuff that we dabble in is incredibly powerful,” said Andy Nyman, a creative English mentalist and Buddy Holly look-alike. “A lot of people are desperate to believe.”
The very fact that this debate was taking place, and at a session specifically devoted to ethical issues, was remarkable in itself. Can you imagine the same sort of talk at a magic convention? Magic isn’t freighted with these kinds of moral conundrums. No one of sound mind has ever faulted a conjuror for failing to disclaim supernatural powers. No rational person thinks David Copperfield is actually being cleaved in two by a giant buzz saw in his popular Vegas show. And yet, some years back, when Copperfield started mentally divining people’s phone numbers, many spectators were beside themselves. “I enjoyed your show,” fans would say. “But the thing you did with the telephone number, that wasn’t a trick was it? I know the difference between tricks and the real thing, and that was real.”
The producers of Monday Night Magic—a long-running weekly magic show in downtown Manhattan—used to refuse to book mentalists who made supernatural claims, and they requested that all of their mentalism acts provide disclaimers. (Jamy Ian Swiss, the curmudgeonly close-up wizard who for years hosted the show, once said that magicians are the only honest liars.) This policy rubbed many mentalists the wrong way, including Bob Cassidy, who wrote the disclaimer used by the PEA and was one of the panelists at MINDvention. The day I saw Cassidy speak, he had on tinted glasses and a western-style shirt, but by far his most distinctive feature was the great white cloud of retro hair hovering above his head, which looked a bit like the inside of an unspooled baseball. “Mentalism should not be presented as a magic act,” he insisted. “You lose a lot from it. I never say I’m psychic. I say I’m a mind reader. Let them figure out what that means.” A tall corporate mentalist in a red button-down with thinning hair and a black goatee took an even more radical view. “My concern is not whether I’m lying,” he said, “but whether I’m lying in a way I can get away with.”
No one voiced any immediate objections to this rather cynical point of view, although later in the evening I met a San Diego magician with thick glasses and a gray Old Testament beard who told me he thought magicians had a responsibility to police the mentalism world and protect lay audiences from its more unseemly elements. “It’s incumbent on people like us that know the tricks to try and keep the population from being ripped off,” he said. “Especially when you’ve got troops coming home dead, and bereaved families, and psychics are taking advantage of them.” (Shortly after 9/11, television psychic John Edward began taping segments for his show in which he offered to contact victims of the World Trade Center attacks on behalf of their loved ones.) “I think we should be out in front blowing these people out of the water. We should be doing stings and going into séances and finding out who the bereaved are and talking to them afterward. Because there’s almost no one else that can do this kind of work.”
In fact, magicians have been rooting out superstition and exposing fake psychics for centuries—although their motives aren’t always pure, and they’ve often wavered in their convictions. Houdini embodied this contradiction more fully than any other magician in modern history. “Magicians always come after mentalists,” Bob Cassidy complained, claiming that Houdini’s primary motivation for crusading against spirit mediums was to “keep his name in the papers.” Whatever his reasons, Houdini spent much of his life debunking spiritualism. And yet, while he may not have been a spiritualist, he always held out hope for an afterlife. In the decade following his death in 1926, on Halloween, his widow, Bess, hosted a yearly séance with the aim of contacting her husband in the next world. The Houdini séance has since become a ritual reenacted by magicians all across the country on the anniversary of his death. Following in Houdini’s footsteps, the Society of American Magicians now mans an Occult Investigation Committee designed to probe supernatural claims. The committee’s general directive has a picture of Houdini on it and reads like something out of Ghostbusters. I became a member in 2009, but have yet to be sent out on a case.
PASSING OFF MAGIC TRICKS AS miracles is as old as religion. Ancient priests used steam turbines to power open the temple doors, as if by spirits, when fires were lit upon the altar. Hydraulic statues bawled to worshippers, and wine flowed from pressurized vessels—ancient rites designed to cudgel fear into the masses.
In tracing the history of magic back to the early Christian era, one finds convincing evidence that Jesus himself may have been a magician, and that the gospel miracles—water into wine, multiplying loaves, levitation—were stage tricks drawn from the conjuror’s repertoire.
This was indeed the picture of Jesus that endured for centuries after his death, when Christianity was still seen as a pagan religion and Christian apologists exerted considerable effort refuting the charge that Jesus was a charlatan. Further evidence comes from the parallels found between the gospel rites (including the Last Supper and the forty days in the desert) and a collection of spells and rituals from Egypt known as the Magical Papyri, which were compiled between the second century BC and the fifth century ad. These similarities suggest that Jesus may have studied the practices of Egyptian wizards and miracle men during the eighteen years of his life unaccounted for in the Gospels (age twelve to thirty).
While the facts surrounding Jesus’s life are murky at best, it is clear from the Gospels and contemporaneous sources that during his own lifetime, Jesus was seen principally as a miracle worker. It was because of his miracles, some of which were framed as fulfillments of Hebrew prophecy, that he attracted followers and was eventually executed. Miracles were his claim to fame. Archaeological evidence supports this conclusion. In 2008, scientists from the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology uncovered a two-thousand-year-old earthenware bowl in Alexandria’s great harbor engraved with what many experts believe to be the first known mention of Jesus. The engraving on the bowl reads simply, “Christ, the magician.”
Ironically, church authorities would later anathematize all forms of magic, along with juggling and acrobatics, as the work of evil spirits. For centuries, magicians were persecuted for being in league with Satan, and sleight of hand was condemned as the devil’s pastime. Magicians feared death, and many fell victim to the witch-hunting crazes that regularly swept across Europe during the early modern period. The first English manual on sleight of hand, Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, published in the late sixteenth century, was meant to save sorcerers’ lives by demystifying their tricks. Back when magicians ran the risk of being burned at the stake, this sort of exposure, which today might raise hackles among the anointed, was a strategy for dodging the pyre. In the Discoverie, Elizabethan masked magician Reginald Scot defends his fellow conjurers against charges of sorcery by explaining the secular methods behind the dark arts. (See, it’s not real magic; it’s just a trick. Put down the torch.) The book so infuriated witch-slaying Bible peddler King James I that he ordered all copies of it burned. But the book survived, and for the next two hundred years it reigned as the standard magic textbook in the English-speaking world.
Many modern religious figures have also used conjuring tricks to attract followers. Hindu fakirs and African medicine men have been caught trying to pass off tricks lifted from the Tarbell Course in Magic, an eight-volume encyclopedia, as divine works, and Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, began his career as a treasure hunter who swore he could locate silver mines and lost Spanish gold with a divining rod. (He’d palm a lump of ore and plant it in the trawl.) Smith accumulated a healthy rap sheet before realizing that he could make more money—and have more wives—in the religion business. Still no word on those gold plates, though.
Uri Geller claims to have made his fortune in a similar manner, as a dowser for oil and mining companies. “My money I didn’t make from bending spoons,” he told an audience of two thousand magicians at the International Magic Convention in London, where he received the Berglas Foundation Award for his services to magic. “I made my wealth from finding oil and gold.”
While mentalism techniques go back at least two thousand years, the first recorded account of mentalism being marketed as a form of entertainment is of a 1572 exhibition by an Italian knight named Girolamo Scotto, who became the Holy Roman Emperor’s favorite court conjurer. In a command performance for Archduke Ferdinand II, Scotto picked out from an array of coins the very same one the archduchess had selected in her mind. He then proceeded to locate a thought-of word in a book—a book test, in mentalism lingo—and duplicate the archduke’s handwriting from another room. Scotto’s act killed.
Modern mentalism emerged in the nineteenth century, its growth coinciding with the rise of spiritualism. The word telepathy was coined in 1882, just as scientists were learning how to send signals wirelessly through the air. It was the dawn of vaudeville and radio, theosophy and spirit cabinets, turban acts and the telephone. Inspired by the discovery of electromagnetic waves and the advent of telecommunications, theories of thought transference and “mental telegraphy” became fashionable among many prominent thinkers. If one form of intangible communication was possible, they reasoned, why not others? For a while, executives at telegraph companies worried that telepathy might signal the death of their business.
In an attempt to capitalize on this trend, many performers began adding mentalism to their acts. In Paris during the mid-1800s, French conjuror Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin invented one of the earliest-known second-sight acts, a two-person mentalism routine in which a secret code is used to simulate telepathy. With his son Emile blindfolded onstage, Robert-Houdin would thread his way through the audience glancing at objects spectators had brought with them to the show. “Here’s an interesting object,” he would say. “Yes, please hand it over. I’ll ask you to concentrate on it.” His son would then identify the object from onstage. The code, which took years to perfect, worked by embedding information in the phrasing of the request. “Here, what is this?” for instance, might indicate that the object in question was a watch. Further specificity could be added by inserting extra words into the phrase. “Here, please, what is this?” might signify a gold watch, for instance, while “Here, look, what is this?” might mean the watch was silver. A similar set of cues could communicate letters and numbers, names and dates, and just about any common object. Forty years later, Yorkshire conjuror Charles Morritt and his partner, Lilian, improved on Robert-Houdin’s act by using a technique called silent thought transmission, in which the cues were embedded not in the words themselves but in the pattern of gaps between them. The length of a pause between two syllables, for instance, might denote the color of an object or the denomination of a coin. These classic code acts have inspired mentalists ever since.
We even see evidence of the mentalist’s toolkit leaking over into politics during the days of Boss Tweed, when crooked pollsters rigged ballots with covert writing implements known as swami gimmicks, which can be used to simulate precognition. In the 1920s, mentalists began appearing among the performers listed on cruise ship manifests, and radio mentalism became a staple of popular entertainment. Coming off the success of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair wrote Mental Radio in 1930, a book about his second wife’s psychic powers, to which Albert Einstein contributed a glowing preface.
One of the most popular and well-paid performers of the vaudeville era was a crystal gazer named Claude Alexander Conlin, who began his career as a black hat in Soapy Smith’s con man militia and later billed himself as Alexander, the Man Who Knows. The bit that minted him a fortune was his question-and-answer act. Draped in an Oriental robe, Alexander would answer audience questions scrawled on sealed slips of paper by holding them up to an invisible third eye on his forehead and using Barnum-esque language in his replies. He also made millions doing private readings for rich society types.
The man widely considered to have set the standard for contemporary mentalism was Joseph Dunninger, a New Yorker who popularized himself as a radio performer in the 1940s and read the minds of six presidents and one pope. “Never have I witnessed anything as mystifying or seemingly impossible,” Thomas Edison said of Dunninger’s thought-reading act. Not only was Edison fooled, but so were many scientists—along with millions of laypeople who listened to his weekly radio show and later watched him on television. “For those who believe,” he would say, “no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation will suffice.”
Dunninger’s heyday in the 1940s and ’50s marked the end of what might properly be called the second wave of mentalism. The third wave hit in the 1970s, when Uri Geller started bending spoons and restarting broken watches on television. Geller’s arrival in New York in the mid-1970s was, according to Bob Cassidy, “a big revolution.” Mentalism was officially added as an event at the Magic Olympics in 1979, and spoon-bending parties, a staple of the swinging ’70s, persist even to this day. University of Arizona parapsychologist Gary Schwartz threw a psychokinetic jamboree as recently as 2001.
The secret to mentally bending a spoon is not, as was suggested in The Matrix, to realize that there is no spoon, but to realize instead that you’ve got to bend the spoon with your bare hands when no one is paying attention. Unless you’re using a fancy magnetic metal-bending apparatus, called a PK system, the standard method is to introduce a small bend in the head of the spoon before the trick even begins, hiding this action behind a smokescreen of misdirection. Once the spoon is bent, you hold it vertically by the tip of the handle with the bend facing the spectator—it’s best if no one is at your sides—and gradually rotate it downward toward the audience, while twisting it along the vertical axis. Done correctly, the spoon looks like it visibly liquefies in your hands. The illusion is so strong you’ll fool yourself with it.
The best metal bender in the world is a ferociously talented mentalist named Banachek, aka The Man Who Fooled the Scientists. In 1979, while still a teenager, Banachek (born Steven Shaw) and magician Michael Edwards conned a team of scientists at St. Louis’s Washington University into thinking the two could bend spoons, keys, and other metal objects with their minds. After 120 hours of tests conducted inside a $500,000 state-of-the-art research facility funded by the McDonnell Douglas Corporation and overseen by a physicist, the researchers were convinced beyond all doubt that Shaw and Edwards had telekinetic powers. The infamous hoax, nicknamed Project Alpha, was made public in early 1983, when Shaw and Edwards confessed that the whole thing had been a put-up job engineered by skeptic James Randi.
Today, interest in mentalism is once again on the uptick, in part due to the sluggish economy. When the market goes south, demand for mentalism rises as people seek solace and an easy escape from their woes. Like guns and booze, gambling and the lotto, mentalism is a countercyclical industry, peaking in times of crisis. These days, more magicians are turning to mentalism as a hedge against a gloomy future. Meanwhile, a new crop of paranormalist shows has hit the airways. “Financially the rewards are much higher right now doing mentalism than doing magic,” Docc Hilford, a Miami-based mind reader, told a group of magicians at the Ronjo magic store on Long Island in March 2009. “Just the glimmer, the slight flicker of a possible hope in something, anything, is enough that people will pay for it right now.” Hilford is known for being a wicked cold reader. Some years back, he and magician Simon Lovell were stranded at a magic convention without any money. Hilford told Lovell not to worry, and he shuffled off to a local hair salon to do some readings. “Two hours later,” Simon recalls, “he came back with $600 in cash.” (“He’s a carny at heart,” Wes said of Hilford.)
A magic store clerk from LA, with whom I had a lengthy conversation about the lure of mentalism, summed up the temptation succinctly: “Why bother doing magic shows when I can make three times that much doing readings for old retired ladies?” he asked. The only answer I could come up with was that I’m the wrong kind of liar.
ON THE LAST DAY OF MINDvention, I got my hair cut at a barbershop down the road from the Palace Station. Next to the barbershop was a karate dojo and a palm reader. Call it fate. I’d never been to a psychic before, and given what I now knew about mentalism, I was especially curious. So I walked in and paid forty bucks for a reading.
The psychic’s name was Stephanie and she was middle-aged and slightly overweight, with dark hair and dark eyes and a face pitted with acne scars. She led me into a back room filled with Bible knickknacks: cherubs on harps, dancing angels, and a plastic Jesus with the words “Divine Miracle” printed on it. The walls were plastered with tarot drawings, and I noticed that the calendar hadn’t been turned in months. I sat down at a wide glass table, and she asked me for my name and my birthday.
“Good boy,” she said, in a hoarse voice. “Now make two good wishes.”
I did.
“Good boy. Let’s see your right palm.”
I held it out.
“Good boy.”
She took my hand and told me she sensed movement. In the past two years things had kind of gone upside down for me. It seemed like everything I tried to do was three steps forward and four steps back. I didn’t sleep well. I tossed and turned at night. I worried about all kinds of stuff that was going on in my life. I also had a bit of a hot temper, although it never lasted long. I was kindhearted and I liked to help people. But sometimes when I needed help, there was no one around I could depend on, and I had to fend for myself.
I had to admit: for the most part, she was spot-on.
There was also someone in my family who was sick (check), although there were no immediate deaths on the horizon. I, for one, had a very long life ahead of me. I’d had my heart broken in the past and was tired of playing games (check). I wasn’t getting any younger, after all. (Who is?) It was time to settle down and start a family. (Sure, why not?) There would be traveling in my future (yep), profitable investments (no joke?), and a visit from an old friend or relative on the horizon (you mean Nick?).
“Do you often see things people should be worried about?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she sighed.
I raised my eyebrows at her.
“Would you like to know about it?”
I nodded. Pray continue.
“I pick up that there’s some people that are gossiping about you,” she said. “I don’t know why. You never tried to do anything bad to them. But they just like gossiping about you.” Who were these gossipers, I thought to myself with a shudder, and what were they saying? Seconds later, the rational side of my brain lurched into action and, like a stern boxing coach, chided me for letting my guard down.
Marshalling my thoughts, I decided to shift the focus of the conversation away from my issues and instead train the spotlight on Stephanie. If nothing else, I wanted to know how she’d gotten into the mentalism business in the first place.
I asked her how she had discovered her gift, and she shrugged. “It’s something you’re born with,” she said. “I was about eight years old, and I seen this old lady. She was walking. I told my mom that I feel something dangerous was gonna happen to her. And then my mom approached the lady and told her, you know, and she didn’t believe her. And me and my mom and the old lady was walking across the street and a truck came and almost hit the old lady and my mom pulled her back. It’s a gift that you’re born with. It’s called the third veil. You’re born with a layer of skin on your face, like a little mesh. My mom had it, my grandma had it.”
After we finished, she led me out past a room with a massage table and a Tibetan singing bowl for chakra cleansing, and I thanked her and shook her hand.
“Good boy,” she said. “You’re ready to go.”
Later that day, I caught myself brooding over what Stephanie said—that is, until I remembered the source and pushed those thoughts aside. And yet, no matter how hard I tried to dislodge them, they had a stubborn way of creeping back into my consciousness. My memory was playing tricks on me, it seemed. Had I told her where I was from, or had she guessed it? (She’d asked me about my life in New York.) And how did she know my mother was ill? Confirmation bias set in, reinforcing the hits—what she’d gotten right—while disguising the misses. She said I’d be traveling soon, I recalled, as I boarded a plane back to New York that afternoon. Lying awake that night, I remembered how she’d said I had insomnia.
One of the scariest things about mentalism is that even after you understand how it works, it still feels believable. Subsequent Forer experiments have even shown that the perceived accuracy of sham personality descriptions shoots up when the readings are ascribed to mystical sources such as astrology and palmistry. People want to believe.
In 1988, a young performance artist named José Alvarez catapulted to stardom in Australia by posing as a spirit medium. He called forth phantoms on national television and spoke in tongues at the Sydney Opera House. In the process, he attracted a massive cult following. Later that year, Alvarez announced publicly that he’d made it all up—in fact, it had been yet another prank hatched by serial hoaxer James Randi, of Project Alpha fame. And yet many of Alvarez’s fans continued to insist that he was for real.
I had a similar experience some months ago, while doing magic at a friend’s dinner party. A few card tricks and a watch steal later, the topic of mind reading came up, and I mentioned that I’d dabbled in the psychic arts. Immediately, one of the guests, a writer in her late twenties whom I’d only just met, asked me to show her something.
At first I was hesitant. After my initial bout of experimentation, I’d cut back on the mind-reading thing. It was a little too creepy. But she wouldn’t let it go, and finally I agreed. What’s one more reading? I thought. She wrote a name down on a scrap of paper and folded it up while I averted my gaze. Then I tore the paper to shreds. The name was Julia.
“It’s not a family member, is it?” I asked, picking up some subtle negative cues. “No, not a family member,” I continued. “But like family in a way.” Here I was using a technique called the vanishing negative. By phrasing the negation as a question—“It’s not a family member, is it?”—with ambiguous inflection, I sound right regardless of what the answer turns out to be. If I sense a yes coming, I go with it—“Yes, that’s what I thought.” And if the answer is no, I simply restate the question as a declarative statement: “No, it’s not a family member,” and add, “but like family.” And again, you only want to be right 85 percent of the time.
“I think that’s what I’m picking up on,” I said. “I’m sensing an almost maternal bond between the two of you.”
She was blushing a little. I was getting warmer.
“A close family friend, yes?”
She smiled and uncrossed her arms.
“Her name starts with a J—like Judy or Julie.”
“Julia!” she cried, ecstatic. “She’s my aunt. I mean, she’s not my aunt, but she’s like my aunt. She’s my mom’s best friend from high school. I’ve known her forever.”
“I can see her now. She’s roughly your height, darkish hair.”
She nodded enthusiastically.
“She’s good natured, loyal, has a warm sense of humor. You two are a lot alike, I can tell.” (We tend to believe that our friends and, to a lesser extent, our loved ones, are either exactly like us or exactly the opposite.)
She was eating it up.
“I’m also sensing some distance—emotional or geographic. Does Julia live nearby?”
She shook her head. “She lives in England.”
“That’s what I thought. You didn’t hear from Julia recently, did you?” Not surprisingly, the person is often someone who’s been on their minds lately.
“Yes, I did! I just got an e-mail from her the other day.”
I started feeling cocky. Maybe I really was psychic.
“Julia had some news for you, didn’t she?”
“Oh my God. She did!”
“It was some important news.”
“It was.”
“Very important.”
“Yes.”
“She wanted to tell you”—and that’s when I overreached—“she’s pregnant.”
Her jaw sagged and she eyed me warily. “Um, no,” she said, her voice flattening. “She has cancer.”
The word cancer seemed to reverberate across the room like a gunshot, and a stunned hush fell over the table. Nobody said a word. Later on my friends would confess to me that they were thinking the same thing I was, only they were hoping that I wouldn’t say it. But my mouth was on autopilot, and it just came flying out.
“Well,” I said, scratching my forehead. “That’s like being pregnant with a tumor.”
Gulp!
Fortunately, the woman was a good sport, and she didn’t take offense. Feeling guilty nonetheless, I apologized profusely and explained the trick to her in detail.
“Okay,” she said, brushing me off. “I get the thing with the paper. But don’t you think there’s something else to it?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely confused.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t you think there’s something there? Some part of it that’s real? I mean, you don’t believe any of it?”
Unable to come up with a satisfactory answer, I recalled what magician Ricky Jay once said, after being asked if he’d ever seen a real mind reader.
“No,” he replied. “But I’ve seen a great one.”