What Is Mentalism? - The Secrets of Mentalists.

Have you ever left a magic or grand illusion show asking yourself: “What is the magician’s trick?”

When we try to understand an illusion, we often imagine complex mechanisms allowing the magician to “levitate,” make a tiger appear in a cage, or make us believe that he is sawing his partner in half. But if you have just watched a mentalism show made up solely of mental experiments involving telepathy, predictions, coincidences, and revelations of information that should be impossible to know, then your brain is completely disoriented. Everything happens inside your head, without gimmicks, without props, without a magic wand, without stage effects or machinery, making any attempt at an explanation much harder to imagine—perhaps even impossible.

This is what often leads us to a rather hasty conclusion: “What if, unlike a magician, the mentalist really does possess a supernatural gift?”

Is a mentalist truly endowed with psychological and paranormal powers? Can he really, as he claims, read minds? Does he possess extraordinary extrasensory abilities?

Frequently, at the end of a mentalism performance, the most curious spectators come to find the artist backstage and ask him, in a low voice and away from prying eyes, this question: “Do you have a gift, a special power?”

In general, the answer he gives is always the same: “Yes, but no more than you do!”

For here is the great secret: stage mentalism is first and foremost a set of techniques that can be learned and practiced. Just as an illusionist works on his tiger-appearance act, the mentalist works with his own mind in order to play with yours.

This is what we will try to teach you in this book: simple effects that go back to ancient Greece and that, with a little practice, will allow you too to become a Superman of the mind—a mentalist!

Nevertheless, this book is not devoted solely to the practice of stage mentalism. We will also discuss the history of mentalism and its various components through true stories, anecdotes, and portraits of those who once claimed to possess... extrasensory abilities.

But, actually, what is the exact definition of mentalism today?

Mentalism is the power to create psychological illusions such as reading another person’s thoughts, decoding secret information, making predictions, transmitting information by telepathy, and creating impossible coincidences. It is a stage art that can be presented either to a small group, among friends or family, or before a large audience, on stage or on television.

In modern mentalism, the experiments have only one purpose: to entertain, surprise, and make the audience question what they experience. It is neither clairvoyance nor supernatural phenomena, but a set of techniques whose only aim should be to disturb and amuse the mind, and to leave behind a memorable impression charged with emotion.

Beyond entertainment, the idea is to question the abilities of our brain and to prove wrong the well-known saying: “I only believe what I see!” After that, everyone is free to believe or not believe in the reality of divinatory arts—and quite a few mentalists sometimes play on these beliefs! The point is simply to remain open-minded and critical about the performances presented to you. And above all, to keep in mind that, in stage mentalism, everything comes from a very specific kind of knowledge whose manipulations originate in traditional magic.