A mentalist uses technical skill, misdirection, psychological subtleties, hypnosis (suggestion), cold reading, and spectacle to demonstrate what seems to be extraordinary mind reading, foresight, clairlecture, and telekinesis. A mentalist will try to use mind tricks to read your mind. This includes a technique called cold reading, which is a method of making generalized statements and then asking the target questions for information that can be used in later statements. Cold reading can make it appear that the magician has knowledge of the target's personal life and past experiences.
Mentalists use a wide variety of techniques to read people's minds, including cold reading, hot reading, NLP, and others. Ask someone to think of any number. Then tell them to add the next higher number to that first number (so if they choose 20, tell them to add 2.In front of a group, ask someone to whisper a number between 1 and 20 to their friend and say they can “read” it. Gently place your hands on your temples and count the number of times you feel the muscles in your temples tighten (which naturally occurs when you clench your teeth).
If you want to learn how to do incredible mentalist tricks that will make your friend gawk, check out the Master Mentalism course. Mentalists do a very good job of creating the illusion that they can read people's minds, but in most cases mind reading is pure mentalism ruse. If you have more questions about mentalism or magic, I'll try to answer them (or specifically how a mentalist reads the mind), please comment below with your questions. Master Mentalism is an in-depth course that will show you the secrets behind most of the popular mentalist magic tricks out there.
We'll also take a look at some popular mind reading tricks and mentalism techniques that can help you with your own mentalism skills. The main difference between a mentalist and a magician is that a mentalist tries to convince you that they have real abilities, whereas a magician never does.
