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Professional mentalists generally do not mix "standard" magic tricks with their mental feats. Doing so associates mentalism too closely with the theatrical trickery employed by stage magicians. Many mentalists claim not to be magicians at all, arguing that it is a different art form altogether.
Billet reading, or the envelope trick, is a mentalist effect in which a performer pretends to use clairvoyance to read messages on folded papers or inside sealed envelopes. It is a widely performed "standard" of the mentalist craft since the middle of the 19th century.
To force the page, a number of methods are used. The most common has the mentalist leaf through the non-force book at high speed and asks the spectator to call "stop" at any point. When the spectator stops him, the mentalist states that they have stopped on a certain page and asks the spectator to open the force book to the same page.
Invisible touch is a prop based trick which requires a magician to use an invisible thread, a clear elastic thread which is difficult for the naked eye to see even in close proximity. The magician may wave his hand around the mark with no visual cues of contact or touch a different person only to have a visually untouched person feel the effects.
The second example is a classic example of a book test, a trick that goes back hundreds of years. In the book test, some sort of method is used so that the same passage is selected every time. In some variations, this is accomplished with trick books, in others, some sort of magician's force is used. The complex method of selecting the passage ...
Cold reading is a set of techniques used by mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, and mediums. [1] Without prior knowledge, a practiced cold-reader can quickly obtain a great deal of information by analyzing the person's body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. during a line ...
Geller's performances were revealed to be tricks due to the work of magician and investigator James Randi and others. [1] Despite hundreds of experiments by parapsychologists to determine whether spoon bending is a genuine psychic phenomenon, spoon bending by psychic powers has not been demonstrated to the satisfaction of the scientific community.
The book is now considered by most magicians to be a classical text on mentalism. [ citation needed ] The book describes various techniques used by mentalists to achieve what appear to be psychic phenomena such as telepathy , precognition , extra-sensory perception , telekinesis and the ability to communicate with the dead as a medium .