Several people have got in contact wondering if I can supply the Direct Mind Reading book as a physical book rather than an ebook. The good news is that I’ve found a reasonably priced printer that can allow me to do this and I’ve decided to do a limited run (500 copies worldwide) of the book. I’m not running any discounts on the hard copy of the book so it is retailing at the full price of $127. You do of course get all the same extra bonuses and electronic updates as the regular purchasers of the ebook edition.

The book is a stunningly printed 6×9 inch paper back and if you’d like a copy you need to buy it through this link:

If you don’t yet know about the Direct Mind Reading routine, check out the video below or go to the main Direct Mind Reading site for a free sample of what is possible.

Previous purchasers of the Direct Mind Reading routine are welcome to “upgrade” to the physical version at a special rate. If you already own the Direct Mind Reading package, please email me for details!

Progressive anagrams are certainly one of the most powerful tools that a mentalist can employ in the performances. (If you don’t know about progressive anagrams – sorry, this will all be very confusing).

If you’ve spent any time using them, you’ll know they can take ages to create. I’ve made a little tool that automates the process and produces pretty decent anagram trees. Just enter the list of words you want to use:

One of the drawbacks of progressive anagrams as they are often performed is that they use quite small sets of data. It might be star signs, months of the year and so on – but you can get really good results by widening out the number of choices.

So rather than having the 12 months of the year – you could ask someone to think of a popular fruit, a name of a friend, a make of car or any other “big group” of things.

Obviously it isn’t practical to have a list of 1000 words in your anagram tree – but using some psychological principles and other tricks you can significantly shorten these near “unlimited” categories into something more manageable. Once you have this more manageable list – you need to put it into the anagram maker to build your tree. You probably won’t cover 100% of choices with your shortened list – but if you can cover 70%-90% of the choices that is pretty amazing. Here’s how you can build you lists – and I’ve love to hear about any good lists you’ve managed to  make.

First of all you can play statistics. If you are asking people to think of a fruit you know that most of the time people will think of common things like apples, oranges, bananas and pears. They are less likely to think of dragon fruit or passion fruit because they simply aren’t very common.

Second you can verbally eliminate – asking someone to think of a make of car “something like a Ford or a Toyota” has the effect of eliminating Ford and Toyota from the available choices and therefore reduces the size of your list.

Third you can play tricks with the names of the things in the list – so if you asked someone to think of a name, you could ask them to shorten the name to the usual “short form” of the name. This means that Alex stays as Alex, Alexander becomes Alex, Alexandra becomes Alex, Alexi becomes Alex, Alexa becomes Alex and so on. This means that you can have “Alex” on your anagram list, but actually use it to cover half a dozen variants. With 30 or so names on your anagram list you can cover a lot of ground here.

Fourth, you can use the word the person is thinking of to jump to another ‘shorter’ list. So if you ask someone to think of a surname (with really unlimited possibilities) you can then ask them to look at how many letters there are in that surname, or the first letter of the surname, or the last letter, or the first syllabal etc – and use that information to think of something else which doesn’t have unlimited possibilities. You can reveal this second thing they are thinking of using your progressive anagram and then use a nail writer to show that you also knew what they were thinking of originally.

To get us started in this first lesson I’m going to keep things simple. We’re going to ask a spectator to think of a number, then we’re going to reveal what that number is. We’re going to do it without them telling anyone else the number; without them writing it down – all they have to do is think of it.

But how?

Before you read further, imagine how amazing such an effect would be. Then try and imagine a way that it could be possible.

The first thing that can help us is the inbuilt favouring that every person has towards certain numbers. If you ask 1000 people to quickly think of a number between 1 and 10, most of them will think of 7. If you’ve got time to spare go and try it later today.

With this in mind, if you ask someone to think of a number between 1 and 10 – you’re best bet is guessing that they are thinking of 7. The trouble is, some of the time you will be wrong. We need a way to increase our chances.

So the easiest thing to do is to restrict their choice to odd numbers. Ask them to “Think of any odd number between 1 and 10″. This increases the chance that they will pick 7 because number 2,4,6,8,10 are no longer options. Often other spectators will forget that you even mentioned the word “odd”.

But what happens if the spectator thinks of number 1,3,5 or 9? We need a way to eliminate some of these numbers and further stack the odds in our favour…

What we do is say this “Think of any odd number between 1 and 10, by odd I mean that you could think of the number 3 or 5, but not the number 2 or 4.” This seems obvious enough, but since you have just mentioned the numbers 3 and 5, 99% of the time the spectator deliberately won’t think of them. That leaves just the numbers 1, 7 and 9 for the spectator to choose from.

With just these three options, the odds are now massively stacked in favour of the spectator picking the number 7. This is for a couple of reasons – some spectators will interpret “think of a number BETWEEN 1 and 10″ to exclude number 1. Secondly, since you mentioned “1″ in the question this further reduces the likelyhood of them picking it. Thirdly, we still have the fact that the general population favours the number 7.

From this point on, we have to make a very well educated guess that the spectator is indeed thinking of 7. This is what you should say: “Now you’ve got the number in your mind, don’t say anything outloud, but shout it inside you head – SEVEN, SEVEN, SEVEN, SEVEN”.

This is a clever bit of double-speak. If they are indeed thinking of the number 7, they will react – they will smile or might even burst out with excitement because they think your shouting of SEVEN, SEVEN, SEVEN is the result of you actually reading their mind. If this is the case great! You can say “SEVEN is your number”. In the vast majority of cases this will be the end of the effect!

If they don’t react, that means they are almost certainly thinking of number 1 or 9. In this case you quickly say something else to make it appear that your shouting of SEVEN was just to mimic what they should be doing inside their head.

Out of the numbers 1 and 9 – 9 is the more popular choice. At this stage I just guess. I say “Is it 9?” If they say “Yes” then you have another perfect ending to the trick. If they say “No”, well it’s not quite perfect – but you can still save things. Just say “Ah, then in that case it looks like a 1, it certainly looks like a number with a long vertical line in it. Is it number 1?”. By this stage you have to have been very unlucky to still be incorrect. In the one time out of a hundred when this is the case, I just compliment the person and tell them they are very hard to read and move straight on with another effect – this time one that is 100% guaranteed to work.

As you can see there is quite a lot of thinking that went in to just that fairly simple effect. We are taking advantage of psychological predipositions, elimination through verbal suggestion, double-speak and risk. It still has a couple of glitches – for example if your elimination of 3 and 5 doesn’t work. There are ways to cover yourself – one of the methods I’ll detail in a future part of this course – the other method is a little more advanced and I teach in my full book: Mind Reading Exposed.

Mind Reading Exposed also includes a more direct method to reveal any number – even a PIN number or birth-date without the performer saying anything at all. Check it out now and combine that method with these psychological ones.

Have you seen the Yes No Trick yet? I’ve been getting some great feedback on the latest premium offering from Free Mentalism. It really does allow you to amaze people by predicting their choices – literally ANY 50:50 decision. It works 100% of the time and there is nothing to stop you doing it again and again and again!

Check it out here: Yes/No Trick

It is definitely one of the cleanest, most direct mind reading tricks that I’ve ever performed. When the effect first launched it was just a pdf download. Since then the Yes No Trick has had video added to the product embeded directly inside the book which makes makes everything easier than ever. These new videos are free to download for existing owners. Just log back in to your members area to grab the latest copy of the ebook.

Keep coming back and checking the members area as fresh bonuses and updates are scheduled for the near future!

If you’ve been watching Fool Us in the UK, you might have seen the wonderful Nick Einhorn doing his mind reading thing. If not check it out right now:

So how did he do it?

Well assuming its not real mind reading there is only a few options.

He could have used stooges – that is, people that are in on the trick and not really members of the audience. He claims to have randomly selected the female member of the audience – but we can’t be sure that it truly was random. Other performers throw out a ball and have the audience chuck it around a bit. So the woman could be a stooge – only problem is that Penn (or was it Teller) confirmed on Twitter that she was NOT stooged. So that is that theory out the window!

Looking at the rest of the trick, three things were predicted:

1. That each man would be sat at the correct table number.
2. That each table has the right food on it.
3. The name of the man.

Lets ignore the “name” issue for the moment and lets pretend that somehow this problem takes care of itself…

Matching the correct table to the correct food suddenly becomes a lot easier. All you need is three sets of envelopes each with different predictions. You put a different set in each pocket and when you know the order the food has been placed on the tables you just bring out the correct set of envelopes leaving the others hidden.

So the predictions for the food and for the table numbers are easy. But that still leaves the issue of the “name” of the person that has sat at the table.

Those of you have already own Mind Reading Exposed will immediately be thinking “Dual Reality” – and that’s exactly what I’m thinking too.

I would wager that the prediction that the men each read out did NOT include their name. They were instructed somehow to “fill in the blank” when it came to their name. For example “This leaves (say your name) sitting at table number 3 where he will enjoy a pizza”.

Sneaky! But the question is, what else was written on the paper, or said to the men as they were coming up on stage to ensure that firstly they played along; and secondly that they didn’t tell all their friends when they returned to their seats? A good dual reality effect always takes care of this! Or maybe Nick didn’t – as he only needed the secret to be kept long enough to fool Penn and Teller?

What do you think? How would you script your dual reality – or do you think this effect is just too risky for anything other than TV work?

This Friday October 21st Derren Brown returns to UK Channel 4 with a new special episode – the first of a new four part series known as “The Experiments”.

Each episodes concentrates on answering a single question through a series of magic, mentalism, illusion and psychological suggests that go to show how easily human behavior can be manipulated.

The first episode “The Assassin” sees Derren Brown investigating hypnosis and asks whether a person could be hypnotized into killing a celebrity. Is it possible? Or is that beyond the power of hypnosis?

There is no footage online yet – not even a trailer, but stay tuned and I’ll post up anything new that I discover.

In the meantime, leave me a comment below – have you ever been hypnotized? Or better still have you ever hypnotized anyone else?

I was emailing with someone who purchased Mind Reading Exposed the other day. He was going to a friend’s birthday party and he wanted to perform an effect WITH the birthday boy. Super quick I wrote up the instructions to perform what I call “Black Magic”. Check it out below.

Everyone has to be in one room. You leave the room and everyone else has to think of an object that is in the room. When they have decided you come back in. Now your friend has to name different objects in the room at random. Then, whenever he wants he names the object they all thought of. You are able to instantly tell everyone that it was the object they decided on. So if everyone agreed on the object “apple” – your friend might say “beer, glass, plate, chair, table, ashtray, TV (which is colored black), apple”. The instant your friend says “apple” you know that it is the object they had decided on.

The trick is really simple. Your friend just has to name a black object before the object that was decided on. This is your signal that the NEXT item he names is the one everyone decided on. The great thing about it is that naming objects is the ONLY thing your friend has to do. Everyone will think there is some sort of trick… and they’ll watch for hand signals, blinking, body language and all manner of things. Sometimes they even want to blindfold people so they know it can’t be a signal.

It can be a really fun game and works great as a warm-up for the more advanced effects in the full Mind Reading Exposed ebook:

If there’s a certain type of effect you are desperate to perform, leave me a comment below and I’ll try to write about it soon!

Check out this guy Daniel Madison. Simple trick and great performance. It didn’t fool Penn and Teller, but I watching it with a house full of people… and they were all fooled.