Hot Reading - The Secrets of Mentalists.

The term hot reading refers to information collected before any visual or physical contact, through other channels such as the Internet or media sources, for example. In this way, one can already know as much as possible about a person before they are even questioned.

Before each experiment, most mentalists already have some basic information about their audience, based on the clues the audience lets show.

Often also called pre-show, this technique allows the mentalist to extract information very discreetly from a person without them realizing it, before the show begins.

Hot reading is also a technique widely used by mediums, tarot readers, and fortune-tellers, who decode as much information as possible about their clients in order to tell them what they want to hear and make them want to come back for another consultation.