Mind Reader: Revealed PDF

DEDICATION For Tal, who fills me with happy thoughts. I couldn’t have done any of this without you. CONTENTS Cover Title Page Dedication Preface—Mind Reader: Revealed 1 Mentalism Revealed—Now I’ll Have to Kill You 2 A Beautiful Mind 3 The Power of the Mind—You Think, Therefore I Am 4 The Power of Persuasion—Great Minds Think Alike 5 Harnessing the Positive Power of Energy 6 Trust Your Intuition 7 Getting Creative with Thinking Acknowledgments About the Author Credits Photo Section Copyright About the Publisher Mind Reader: Revealed LOS ANGELES, MARCH 23, 2009, 9:28 P.M. One night I was in Los Angeles with a friend and his family when a car followed us home from a party, slipping into the private gated community behind us. We darted into the house, wondering what to do, while the car parked across the street. There were four of us, and we decided to go back outside and investigate. Safety in numbers, we thought. But the moment we stepped into the darkness outside the house, a large man leapt out of the car and screamed, “Don’t move. Whoever you are. Police.” He was holding a gun. We’ve all seen it in movies but it’s really, really scary when it’s happening to you. Thoughts flew into my mind, none of them good. Then, almost before we knew it, there were six police cars, sirens blaring, and a helicopter circling overhead lighting up the sky. What was going on? The first policeman yelled at me, waving me forward. All around me lights were flashing and there was constant noise and movement but all I was looking at were guns. Within seconds I was handcuffed, my hands bound together in front then jerked up over my head. The policeman patted me down, not rough but purposeful. Invasive. I searched his face, his eyes, but didn’t see anything. My mind was just filled with the word “why?” and choked up with fear. From my jacket pocket, he pulled out one broken spoon, a handful of long silver nails, one pencil, and one small notepad. He brandished the broken spoon right in my face like it was a weapon, yelling furiously, “What the hell? What the hell is this?” For a moment, I was silent. Shocked. “I’m, I’m a mind reader,” I stuttered. “A mentalist. A performer?” He stared at me in disbelief, glared at the items in his hand, and then shook his head, telling me to balance on one leg. It turned out that he thought I was driving drunk—I wasn’t—and he called for backup when he saw four men start out of the house toward him. The point of the story is that all the officer found on me was a broken spoon, some long silver nails, a pencil, and a small notepad. The spoon had been broken in two with the power of my mind at a private party two hours before. The nails I would bend in practice to prepare for a Japanese TV show the next week. And the pencil and paper were for everyday mind stunts—you never know when you might need them. These items mean the world to me. Literally. They are the tools of my trade, and they have taken me from a small town in Israel to TV shows, live shows, private parties, lectures, business conventions, and trade shows in more than forty countries around the world. When you’re standing there, scared for your life, with strange thoughts flashing through your mind, you find yourself reduced to your essence. While I balanced on one leg and proved I wasn’t drunk or dangerous, the policeman looked at that broken spoon again and said, “A mind reader?”—his voice suspicious, but his eyes open, vulnerable. I reached for my notebook and pencil, looked into his face, and scribbled something down for myself. Then I asked him, “If I were to ask you to think of a number between one and a hundred, what would it be?” My fear was gone. He thought for a moment. “Twenty-eight.” I tore the paper from my notebook and gave it to him. It said, “The policeman will say 28.” He was blown away, grinning from ear to ear like a child. My name is Lior Suchard, and I am a mentalist. I entertain people by showing them the amazing power of the mind. I love to see their eyes widen with surprise when I tell them what they’re thinking, or, even better, when I make them think what they’re thinking. I love the positive energy that comes out of all my shows, my encounters, big and small, on the streets of Tel Aviv, at a TV show in Japan, or before eight hundred people in Vegas. No matter who someone is, they become like a child again when they experience that sense of wonder. It’s why I do what I do, and my run-in with the policeman reminded me of that. If my essence is getting people to laugh and wonder with the help of a broken spoon, a handful of long silver nails, a notebook, and a pencil, then I’m okay with that. Besides, the experience gave me another cool story to tell, which is part of my essence, too. L.A. cops, huh? Mentalism Revealed—Now I’ll Have to Kill You So what does a mentalist do? Right now, I’m incredibly busy performing all over the world: Las Vegas, New York, Los Angeles, Japan, South Africa, Russia, Europe, Israel, the list goes on. I’ve traveled to three different continents in one week. I sleep a lot on airplanes and carry several different phones. I never know who might call or when. It could be the king of Romania one week, Donna Karan or a high-tech maven the next; with Russian oligarchs in between just telling me to show up at a private airfield at a certain time. And, by the way, don’t be late. I appear in many countries on TV talk shows, including Jay Leno, and sometimes they even invite me back. Including Jay Leno. I’m big in Japan. Go figure. I work at international corporate events and trade shows, for companies like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, BMW, and Omega. I’m invited into big- business conference rooms to break the ice before meetings, to make billionaires play nice—and I’m invited to private Hollywood parties to entertain movie stars and their A-list friends. I’ve opened for Joan Rivers in Las Vegas, where I also have my own show. And yes, I’m welcome in Vegas as long as I stay out of the casinos. By the way, the stories about the black list are true! Sometimes, when I happen to be at the beach or the market or the local diner, I perform. I just can’t help myself. I’m walking down the street and before I know it I’m meeting someone and performing. I’m amazing them with my mind games and they’re looking at me, wondering, “Oh my god, how did you do that?” It’s fun. I love the energy. It’s a whirlwind of an adventure, and everywhere I go I put in my best performance. I may have just arrived off a twelve-hour flight from hell, had a fight with my manager, my mother, and my girlfriend, but no one in the audience will sense it. I check my fatigue, my emotions at the door, and when I step onto the stage or enter a room, I turn my mind on full blast and become Lior Suchard Extreme, supernatural entertainer. Positive energy and human connection are everything to me. I live to show others how amazing the mind is and to make people laugh, to step outside of themselves and say, “Wow.” Whether they’re a Hollywood movie star, a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or the person sitting across from me at the airport, it’s all the same to me. I want people to wonder. YOU’LL SEE THIS LOOK OF WONDER THAT I LOVE SO MUCH WHEN I HEAD TO THE BEACH AND TELL RANDOM PEOPLE THEIR BIRTH DATES. GO TO WWW.MINDREADERBOOK.COM/BIRTHDAY So that’s what this mentalist—or supernatural entertainer, as I sometimes call myself now—does when not evading the police. But maybe that doesn’t really answer the question. What exactly does a mentalist do? Well, in general and according to Wikipedia, the tradition of mentalists as stage performers goes back to the sixteenth century, but there are references to seers and oracles among the writings of the ancient Greeks. Mentalists demonstrate highly developed mental or intuitive abilities. That’s certainly true for me. I wield my mind like a precision tool to read minds, influence thoughts, make predictions, and make objects move or bend without touching them (like the spoon and nails in my pocket). I could guess the name of your first love, first teacher, the name of your unborn child, your birth sign, the number you’re thinking about. I can transfer feelings using the power of positive energy from one person to another. And I can guess your next question: “But please, Lior, how do you do that?” During one of my performances, for a large company, a man called out exactly that question in the middle of the show: “But please, Lior, how do you do that?” When someone unexpectedly interrupts my show—and it happens more than you’d think—I try to keep the mood light. I don’t want to punish them. So I looked at him, laughed, and said with a grin, “Sir, if I tell you, I’ll have to kill you.” There was gentle laughter in the audience, then silence as the audience’s attention turned back to me, ready for my next act. But the man piped up again. “Then could you please tell my wife?” Everybody started to laugh like crazy. The guy had just asked me to kill his wife. Now I tell this story at every show. But, in answer to the question—and without killing anybody—I’ll say, basically, I use my five senses to create a “sixth sense.” A sense of the mind. A sensitive intuition. Then I use this sense, in conjunction with a whole bunch of skills I’ve learned, to do the mind reading, persuasion, telekinesis, and other cool stuff. Skills like the power of suggestion, knowing how to read body language, persuasion, guided imagery, psychological analysis, and nonverbal communication. I put these techniques together in different combinations and I use them to direct and influence people and read minds. I take in crazy amounts of information and I implant information. I use my intuition a lot. That’s what mentalism is about—it’s a skill; in my case, probably partly genetic, partly learned. Everything I do is about using my mind in the best way I can, at the highest level that’s possible. Sometimes it can be hard to analyze and explain what I do, because I just do it. Like Nike. Think about love for a moment. When people are in love, they know what it feels like—it just happens and exists and makes perfect sense to them. They don’t analyze it rationally. But a scientist could come along and explain that love is chemistry, that when we fall in love we experience a racing heart, flushed skin, and sweaty palms, because of the chemicals dopamine and norepinephrine that our bodies release. It doesn’t sound so romantic anymore. And it doesn’t explain all those other things about being in love: finishing each other’s sentences, knowing what the other is going to say, that feeling of walking on air. It narrows something down to an exact science that maybe isn’t an exact science. Over the years, I’ve created metaphors for what I do as a mentalist. I think the clearest way to explain is to concentrate on the way I use and focus my mind, as that is at the heart of everything I do. If you imagine the difference between a flashlight and a laser beam, you’ll understand. Both are sources of light, but the laser beam is much more focused, so you can see more with it. Do more. If you flash a flashlight in your eyes, you’ll be blinded for a moment, but a laser beam can cut diamond. I believe it’s the same with thought. When I’m working, my thoughts are really focused and powerful, and that’s how I make things happen. I’m harnessing the power of my mind in a very conscious way. We actually sense thinking outside of the mind as we project our thoughts, all around us, not just inside our brains. I believe that everybody has transmitters to receive or send thoughts, but it’s a question of how many people use them. We all use our minds differently. Think about it. Anyone can learn to play the piano, but not everyone will become Beethoven. What I do today as a mentalist is a combination of a gift and development of that gift. However, being a mentalist is about more than mental skills—if you want to make it big in the entertainment business, anyway. There’s another equally important component that goes along with the mental abilities. My father calls it a gene—the showman gene, or the performance gene. I’m lucky enough to have that, too. Over the years I’ve come to realize how important it is to what I do, and so I’ve taken special care to understand it and develop it. After all, there wouldn’t be much entertainment value to my show if I just went up on stage, quietly read a few minds, mumbled shyly and awkwardly, shuffled around with my back turned to the audience, thanked you for coming, then ducked behind the curtain. You’d want your money back, and there certainly wouldn’t be any positive feelings fluttering around at the end of the show. The success of my performances is probably based fifty percent on my mental skills—everybody likes to be wowed—but the other fifty percent is definitely for the show I put on: the close connection I create with the audience. The comic concepts, jokes and humor; the rapport I develop; that sense of positive energy. Everything goes hand in hand in my show and everyone is guaranteed a good time. But why am I telling you this when you can step inside the theater and see me perform? Let me invite you to a show and you’ll see for yourself the power of the mind. But, remember, if you ask me how I do it... I’ll have to kill you. It’s a few minutes before showtime. The audience settles, people are taking their seats and chatting quietly when suddenly the lights go out and complete darkness fills the auditorium. Anticipation builds. Silence. Then a blast of music and light. Velvet curtains sweep back across twenty-foot screens as a video begins to play. A deep voice reverberates, “Do you believe that someone can read your mind?” Images of me performing around the world flash across the screen: audiences in London, Hong Kong, Sydney, Moscow, and Paris laugh and gasp and their amazed reactions and looks of wonder fill the screen. The video introduces the in-your-face excitement and raw emotion to come, and the audience here in Vegas is captivated as they anticipate what’s ahead for them in the next hour of my show. As the video screens fade to black, the voice continues, laying out the words dramatically, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Lior Suchard.” Drums roll and music blasts as I run out onto the stage, smiling, excited, my arms extended toward the audience. Behind me, colored lights splash across the huge screens while a spotlight follows me from one side of the stage to the other. Applause rolls toward me in waves, and I let it reverberate around the auditorium, washing over me, rebounding off the screens and back toward the audience. It’s loud tonight, welcoming. Some people are standing, clapping, others getting to their feet now. There’s a good crowd. A sold-out show. Already I can feel the energy in the air. TO SEE A SHORT TRAILER OF MY WORLD TRAVELS AND THE REACTIONS OF DIFFERENT CULTURES GO TO: WWW.MINDREADERBOOK.COM/OPENING “Hello, hello,” I say over the noise. The applause continues but people start to settle, sitting down in their seats. “Good evening, everybody. Shhh.” The applause fades away now. Faces are turned up expectantly toward me. I wait a moment, one beat, two. They’re listening. Here we go. “So, do you believe someone can read your mind?” I address the whole audience, microphone in hand. They wait for my answer. “I guess we’ll have to figure it out tonight.” Gentle laughter. “Before I start I have to ask a question,” I say, scanning the audience. I’m taking notes in my head, seeing who’s here in a group, who’s celebrating something, whether there are more men than women, the little details. “You! Over there. Say your name out loud.” The man answers, “John.” He’s about forty, casual, laid-back. “You are correct,” I say. He laughs good-naturedly, and the rest of the audience follows suit. They’re relaxing, settling back in their chairs for the show. “Let me write something down for you,” I say, hopping down into the audience and jogging over to John, who’s sitting about six rows back. I look at his face while I’m writing on a whiteboard, holding it close to my chest so no one else can see. John looks interested, his gray eyes intelligent. Open-minded. I keep the board to myself for now. “So, if I were to ask you to say out loud a two- digit number, what would it be?” All eyes in the audience turn to John now. He doesn’t pause. He doesn’t think long and hard. Right away, he says, “Twenty-four.” “That’s amazing. I wrote down here, ‘John will say 24,’ ” I say as I turn the whiteboard around and show John, then hold it up so everyone in the audience can see. I hear someone scream “Oh my god” in a distant row. Beside me, John is laughing with surprise, and the audience is impressed. “Thank you, John. Oh, and don’t forget to get your check after the show. Next time say sixty-two, okay?” John does a double take, before laughing loudly. “Just kidding,” I say. I head back to the middle of the stage, hold out my arms in welcome. The lights dance behind me, and there’s a low rattle of drums. “So, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Lior Suchard and I deal with something very, very rare. I am a mind reader. This means that in the next few minutes you are going to experience a supernatural, entertaining adventure that will explore the great abilities of the human mind: mind-reading, influencing, nonverbal communication, ESP, and much, much more. You will not see sleight of hand here. In fact, if you see sleight of hand—then it means that it was not sleight of hand.” Everyone laughs. I smile and laugh lightly along with the audience. They are warmed up and ready to have fun. “By the way, I’m terribly sorry about my bad English... but my accent is wonderful.” Gentle laughter ripples across the audience. Some people are leaning forward toward the stage, expectant. Others relax in their chairs. I scan their faces, sensing their energy. They are all engaged. “So, everyone, take a deep breath. It’s time for me to try and read your thoughts.” The music starts up, energetic and upbeat. I stride down from the stage and move among the audience, smiling, looking from left to right. “It’s funny,” I say. “Every time I do this, everybody goes, ‘Noooo, please don’t let him choose me.’ ” I’m still looking around, deciding whom to pick. A gray- haired man looks confident, while the woman in the next seat hides behind him. At the end of another row, I pause. People are laughing, smiling. One woman seems nervous but she smiles anyway. The woman next to her has lots of dark hair and looks eager. “Hmmm,” I say. “What’s your name?” Bubbling with laughter, she says, “Shirley.” “Shirley, please join me on the stage! Give a big hand to Shirley.” All the women in her row clap like crazy, especially the one who looked nervous. Maybe they’re having a girls’ night out? I follow Shirley back onto the stage, soaking up all the applause as I go. We stand side by side. She pulls at her shirtsleeves and plays with a silver chain around her neck. “Hello, are you afraid of me?” She shakes her head so her hair dances. “You will be soon.” Laughter. “By any chance, do you have a piece of paper and marker on you??” Shirley laughs. “No.” “Okay, so I’ll use mine.” I’m addressing Shirley but also speaking to the audience, keeping them involved. “This is the first mind experiment. In a second I’ll ask you to go outside... and don’t come back. No, I’m just joking. ” Shirley giggles. “So, you’re going to go outside and write a name on the piece of paper. The name of someone you know who’s not here, and that there’s no chance in the world that I would know. Then fold up the paper and hide it deep in your pocket. Okay?” Shirley nods enthusiastically and starts to walk away along the stage. The music plays to the beat of her footsteps while the spotlight shines down on her. Very dramatic. Very theatrical. “Now, it’s very, very important that you do not let anyone follow you, that you don’t let anyone peek and see what you wrote.” All the time I’m saying this I’m walking right behind her, like a cartoon character, very close, peering over her shoulder. She senses me, turns, and laughs, then puts her hands on her hips as if she’s telling me off. The audience likes that. She holds the piece of paper tightly in front of her, then heads off stage while I go back to the middle and look down into the audience. Then, as an afterthought, I call out to Shirley, “Please write on the left side underneath the special camera I installed there.” There’s a lot of warm, good-hearted laughter in response. While we’re waiting for Shirley to write the name, I turn back to the audience and address them, section by section. “Okay, my friends. This show is all about positive energy and that means that when Shirley comes back I want to hear you all applauding like crazy. All the guys shouting and cheering. All the women, bras in the air. Just kidding.” Everyone cracks up, laughing loudly. “Shirley, take your time,” I shout over the laughter and applause. “You have ten seconds.” That brings her back quickly and she half-walks, half-runs across the stage. She’s a little flushed, excited by all the noise. “Ladies and gentlemen—please welcome: Shirley!” The music strikes up again, loud and cheerful, matching the atmosphere beautifully. “Okay, so did anyone see anything written down?” I’m asking the audience. They’re shaking their heads. “Good. Now, Shirley, look into my eyes.” I gaze into her eyes for a few moments, getting quite close. She stands still. “Hmmmm,” I start, “I can already sense something from you. It’s a man or woman, right?” She and the audience laugh loudly. “Okay, so please say out loud the word ‘man.’ ” “Man.” She whispers it. “Now say the word ‘woman.’ ” “Woman,” she says, barely any louder. I look directly into her eyes. “It’s a man, right?” Shirley nods and says, “Yes.” She looks very pleased. “But wait,” I start. “It’s not that impressive.” I look out into the audience. “That guy over there is thinking to himself, ‘Fifty-fifty,’ right?” Everyone laughs. I turn back to Shirley. “Now think of the number of letters in the name. Don’t say, just think. If you say it and then I reveal it, it’s much less impressive for the audience.” My voice is calm and I keep up the banter, but I’m focused now, energized. “So there are one... two... three.... four... it’s four letters, right?” “Yes!” The audience starts in with applause but I hold up my hand and turn back to them. “No, no, no, don’t applaud. He’s still thinking: ‘Lior, many men have four letters in their name.’ ” I move down off the stage and into the audience. “For example, what’s your name?” “Mike.” “You see, four letters. What’s your name?” “Jonathan.” I stop short, counting on my fingers. “Never mind!” Everyone’s laughing now. Especially Shirley up on the stage. I bound up the steps to join her there, caught up in the energy of the audience. “So, Shirley, now comes the hard part. Imagine that he is here now, and you have to introduce him to me. You would say, ‘Lior.’ Please repeat after me. 'Lior, I would like you to meet.’ ” Shirley repeats the sentence then looks expectantly at me. “Then you would say his name, right?” She nods. “You would say, ‘Andy,’ ” I say. Shirley’s mouth opens wide in amazement and she clutches at her face. “Yes!” she shouts. “Oh my god! Holy ****!” “Really?” I say. “Yes!” She’s jumping around on the stage, her hands over her mouth. “That’s amazing!” The audience is clapping like crazy. Over their noise and energy, I shout, “Please give her a big round of applause.” The music starts to play while Shirley, still holding her mouth, heads back to her seat. Her friends leap to their feet to welcome her back, still applauding. I’m back in the middle of the stage and I walk out to the very edge to address the audience. “Now I want to stop the show completely. I need you to listen carefully, very carefully, and you have to capture this moment in your mind. Don’t forget what you see!” I pause to let the message sink in. “I need someone who has some money.” Some people in the audience are laughing, but others have their hands in the air. I choose one of these, an eager-looking guy in a nice suit. “You, sir, come here, please. I promise I will not touch your money. Promise.” He has reached the steps to the stage and comes running up. “What’s your name?” “Blake.” “Okay, please take out any bill from your wallet. Just hold it, and don’t let me touch it. In fact, if I touch this bill, I want you to hit me hard in the face. In fact—if you see me touching this bill, please jump on me and choke me to death.” The guy nods, laughing, looking out at his friends in the audience. “DO NOT LET ME TOUCH YOUR MONEY,” I yell. He half-jumps and turns his attention back to me. “Now, Blake, please take your bill and keep it enclosed in your hand and hold it until the end of the show. DON’T LET ME TOUCH IT. I’m also going to give you this special scroll. Please, don’t unroll it, just hold on to it. Okay?” I take a large white scroll of rolled-up paper from a table on stage and hand it to Blake. He grins. “Now listen, please go back to your seat, my friend. Every time I ask during the show, ‘Where is the money?’ I want you to scream, ‘THE MONEY IS HERE!’ and wave the bill in the air.” He nods, enthusiastic now. He turns around and goes back to his seat and his friends, the bill and the scroll in his hands. So now you’ve seen me perform a little. My shows are an organic process and nothing is ever fixed or static. I’ve performed in over forty countries around the world. Reactions to my shows are different from culture to culture—in India the audiences are reverential as if I’m a god, in Japan people get scared and run away, in Europe it’s “How does he do that?” and in America people get loud with their excitement or opinions. But the one constant is the universal sense of genuine astonishment. It’s an amazing feeling that we don’t get to experience very often: that awareness that the things we don’t know are greater than the things we do. Especially when it comes to our minds. A Beautiful Mind Most people, when they meet me, ask questions about my mind-reading, especially about moving objects without touching them. How do I do it? Do I have supernatural powers? During my shows, people say “wow” or “oh my god” or “awesome” a lot. People are amazed, and I like that very much. But the most amazing thing for me is this: I used to be a shy little boy with only four close friends—Yuval, Nissim, Shumer, and Yishay—but over the years, with the help of my mental skills, I turned myself into an extrovert, someone who introduces himself to total strangers and can stand on a stage and perform for anywhere from twenty to two thousand people. For me, that’s the real magic. A kind of mind over matter. I’ve come to understand the important role of the mind in everything I do on and off stage. Just like the people who come to my shows, I’m constantly awed by the power of our minds. Everyone’s mind is capable of unbelievable things. Yours, too. We just need to understand a little about the way the mind works to harness and focus its energy and use its power. By developing my mental abilities, I was able to become a completely different person—or at least unlock my true self. It took me a lot of reading and practice to get in front of a crowd, entertaining with my skills and positive energy. I’m not a scientist, a psychologist, or an academic. I’m not a researcher doing weird experiments in a university laboratory somewhere, but I have read psychology and business books as well as books on intuition, suggestion, guided imagination, parapsychology, even occultism. You name it, I read it. Then I went out into the world and practiced everything I’d read. I made mistakes and learned from them. Then I made completely new mistakes and learned from those, too. I gathered experience. Now I use my mind as a powerful tool in all aspects of my life, and you can, too, because I’m going to give you the key to some underground secrets. You’ll learn how to use your mind’s power to communicate and persuade, to make connections, to create and harness positive energy. You’ll discover how to use the mind creatively to bring about change. You’ll develop your intuition in such a way that you can call on it to take decisive action. Our minds are key in everything we do. Over the next few chapters I’m going to show you some of the different ways in which I use my mind. Then I’ll teach you some tricks for finding and unleashing your inner mentalist. The first thing to remember is this: your mind is incredibly cool. Just try this experiment and see what your mind can do. It’s called the Ganzfeld Procedure. First, you’ll need to halve a Ping-Pong ball and grab some tape. Next, tune a radio to a station playing static or go to Simplynoise.com to play some white noise. You can listen through headphones if you like. Lie down and get comfortable, tape one half of the Ping-Pong ball over each eye, and relax—with your eyes open for a good few minutes. So what happened? What did you see? Or hear? You probably saw some crazy stuff, images racing through your mind. Basically, you deprived your mind of any stimuli and when that happens it makes up its own. Interesting, right? If it can do that without any help from you, think about how amazing it can be when you learn to control it. Before I share my cool mentalist secrets with you, let me start by explaining how I found out about my skills for the first time. I grew up in Haifa, Israel, with my parents and two brothers, Talmor and Aviram. I was the youngest, always full of energy and very curious. We lived in a three-story house with a nice yard and deck at the back, which was good for me, because I always liked to be on the move, exploring, imagining, climbing. The deck was very useful in a way I’m sure my parents never anticipated. I was pretty forgetful and I always forgot or lost my house keys, so I had to find creative ways of breaking into the house. Usually I’d head through the garden, up a tree, shimmy along a branch, and leap onto my bedroom window ledge. Then I’d use my metal school ruler (which somehow I never managed to lose or forget) to break the pencil that held together the window shutters, slowly open the window, and boom, there I was on my desk. My father would close up the window and shutters again and again, but I was always able to break in. I think I’d have been a good burglar. But, luckily, I chose to be a mentalist instead. Or, to be more precise, being a mentalist chose me. Life was always interesting with me around. I think I probably had ADHD or ADD, or one of those disorders. I used to play with everything. If I was given a toy, I would study it first, sort of research the way it looked and felt, and then I would play with it. For me this meant taking it apart to see how it worked. Even with a book, I would look at the outside, how it was made, how it felt, and feel its energy before I opened it. One day, my dad brought home a television. I took it apart the next day and couldn’t put it back together. I wasn’t being bad, I was just curious to find out how it worked. Luckily, my parents were quite understanding about it, but they didn’t like to leave me alone with things for too long. My parents tell me that one night when I was about six years old, I was sitting at dinner eating soup like any other boy. But then the spoon in my soup bowl started moving, just a little bit toward the edge of the bowl—without me touching it. My brothers stopped talking, my dad stared, and my mom told me to stop playing with my food. But I wasn’t playing with my food—the spoon was moving. On its own. Or that’s what it looked like. We all watched it shiver a little way to one side, slipping along the edge of the bowl through the soup. It was fascinating. And what was even more interesting to me was that I knew that I was making it move, that I had somehow connected with it through my mind and I was in charge. I just didn’t really know how I was doing it. It was the first time that my unusual abilities showed themselves, and from that moment I knew that I had a special skill. I just had to find out how I could control it. And my family? Well, my mom was in shock, my dad was wondering if he was drunk, and my two brothers were just waiting for me to get in trouble. My parents didn’t rush me to the doctors to find out if there was something wrong with me. After all, I hadn’t levitated out of my chair and across the dining room. I had maybe made a spoon move, or maybe the table had shaken or the wind had blown it—there were ways to explain it away. Easier ways than thinking your youngest son had these strange abilities. So the incident was forgotten in the rush of everyday life and I just went back to being six years old, taking televisions apart. And thinking. I did that a lot. I was a quiet child and didn’t have too many things to say—which, by the way, people now find hard to believe. I was always thinking about different ideas, taking in what other people said and thinking it through in my own way. It was my way of processing information, running it through my brain, taking it apart and storing away useful bits for later. It wasn’t necessary for me to talk about my ideas, and mostly I was too shy to try, anyway, so I spent a lot of time inside my own mind. In many ways I take after my father with this. No matter what his work was, he was always coming up with ideas and plans for other things, writing them down, drawing sketches, always thinking, inventing. Like Leonardo da Vinci. It’s crazy but he has drawings from ages ago for things that have only just been invented. I always joke that he could have been a billionaire by now if only he’d patented his ideas. But he’s not interested. He’s happy with his life. At the time I didn’t know this, but now, looking back, I’m aware I had discovered my passion. From the moment I moved that spoon a fraction of an inch across my soup bowl, my whole life started to follow one direction. Everything I did after that was about moving my life further down this track— developing my mental abilities and becoming a performer. My parents taught me to believe in my own abilities and not worry about what others thought about me. They accepted that I was a little different from the other kids. I was still very young when I started trying out experiments on my brothers. I knew there was something going on with my mind, but I couldn’t explain it. I had very strong intuition and could tell a lot about people just by looking at them, or I’d know what someone was going to say before they said it. Especially my mom. I’d ask my brothers to think of a number, and a lot of the time I guessed right. In the beginning I just tried to guess numbers between one and ten, and right away I noticed something cool. Most people say seven. There’s a process of psychology. First they eliminate one and ten, because you’ve said “between one and ten,” then they eliminate number five, because it’s right in the middle. Then, for some reason, number nine goes. So that leaves only two, three, four, six, and seven. Then the majority of people will choose the number seven. Some think of it as a lucky number—it is a number that comes up a lot in various religions and in everyday life with things like seven days of the week, seven colors of the rainbow. I became really interested in the human mind, in the way we think and act, and why. I thought about this a lot. Why did people say the number seven? Are we so predictable? I decided to see if I could make people say a different number, the number I was thinking of. And I could. I wasn’t sure how I was doing it. I would look at someone and imagine a number and they would say the number. Sometimes I would concentrate on twenty-six... twenty-six... twenty-six... twenty-six... and then the person would say, “Twenty-six.” Or sometimes I would just look at someone and feel a number coming from them... like sixty-eight. So I would say, “Sixty-eight,” and it would be right about 90 percent of the time. It was very exciting for me and incredibly rewarding, because I would get that look of amazement thrown in my direction. It made me read more and practice more. I would leave my friends and their games to go and read more and more books, anything I could get my hands on about what goes on inside people’s minds. I was drawn to it and just couldn’t help myself. It was so interesting to me. Not like school work at all, and I was happy to sit inside, losing myself in these books, jumping from the middle of the book to the beginning and then back again as I searched for information. This drive for knowledge came from somewhere deep within and I explored as much as I could. At the same time I worked a lot on focusing my mind. Some people have told me that this hyper-focusing is a symptom of ADD, that you can become engrossed in something that interests you for hours, blocking out everything around you. That was definitely me when I was reading or focusing or practicing my “think of a number” routine. By the way, that’s how I open all my shows now, around the world: “If I ask you to think of a number between one and one hundred, what would you say?” I LOVE TO SEE THE SURPRISE ON PEOPLE’S FACES WHEN I DO THIS ACT. I THINK YOU WILL TOO. CHECK IT OUT ON WWW.MINDREADERBOOK.COM/THINKOFANUMBER Once I had worked long and hard on my numbers act, I started to practice other things. I would ask my brothers to hold a small object in their hand, something like a coin or a stone, and then let me guess the hand. And I mostly guessed right. You can say that there is a fifty-fifty chance to guessing it correctly, but when you do that ten times or twenty times in a row, then it becomes something else. Around this time I was also practicing how to stop watches at a specific time and then influence someone to think of this time. My feats were getting more complex, combining different skills, building on what I had already learned. I also started to watch people, trying to figure them out, just like I had done with objects. I would study their faces and the way they moved, to try and work out what was going on in their minds. It was a puzzle to me, a challenge. I think I started people-watching because I was shy. I didn’t say much but I observed everything and took it in and processed it. This is when I discovered something amazing. My skills became an icebreaker for me. I didn’t know how to start conversations with people or even how to continue a conversation if someone else started one. There’s the expression “socially awkward.” That was me. But when I would try an experiment on someone, we would be engaged on a social level as if it wasn’t me. It was someone else. Lior the performer. My actions were speaking for me. The only way for me to really practice my new feats was to perform them as often as possible, so I had to start interacting with other people. It would happen like this: at school or in the neighborhood, I’d try out a routine on one of my few very close friends, they’d invite someone else over to see it, and before long there’d be a crowd of people around me. Whenever I worked with my mental skills, I’d become the center of attention. And I probably hadn’t said anything to anyone other than “Do you have a watch?” or “Think of a number.” In a way, I was able to hide behind my routines and observe my audience. What did they expect from me? What happened if I said something funny? I took notes in my mind. I saw that people liked my jokes and quips, that they liked to laugh, so I added this dimension. Little by little, I was developing a whole show and it all felt very natural. It was inside me all along—as my dad said, I had the gene—I just needed to let it out. So my mental skills and my showman skills grew side by side, one helping the other, as I practiced both. Sometimes I wonder: if I hadn’t discovered my mental abilities, what would have happened to me? Would I still be that shy boy, observing, watching, thinking, or would my showman side have found another outlet? Growing up, I always loved Superman, and had all the comic books, action figures, and T-shirts. He was my hero. He still is—just ask my girlfriend, Tal. She bought me a Superman ring that I never take off. The interesting thing about Superman is that he was born that way. There’s a cool conversation about this superhero mythology in the movie Kill Bill 2. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he’s Superman. He has to change into his alter ego, Clark Kent, to fit in with the rest of the world. Think about Batman and Spider-Man—they wake up as Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker and have to change into superheroes. I’ve always liked this analogy, and think of it sometimes in connection with my life. As a kid, I felt like Superman when I was performing, but when I wasn’t in front of a crowd, I was the other Lior, a little shy and unsure of himself. The question was, which was the real me? Which was my alter ego? Which one was I when I woke up in the morning? As I’ve become older and grown in self-confidence, my professional and personal lives have meshed and the lines between the two have blurred. I’ll always have a soft spot for Superman. By the age of thirteen or so, I was confident enough to put on shows for my friends at parties and bar and bat mitzvahs. We also had something in Israel where people would host shows or lectures in their living rooms for a group of thirty to fifty people. They could be anything “entertaining”: an astrologist, a lecturer—me! No longer was it just a question of me running through a few of my skills in the school yard. I had a whole show now, a real performance with a real audience. I would tell them which number they were thinking about, which hand they were holding an object in, stop watches, that sort of thing. People were always impressed with the acts, but it had become important to me that they enjoy the whole experience from beginning to end, that they leave with a feeling of positive energy. My problem was that the shows were supposed to last one hour, but they couldn’t get me off the stage. I always stayed longer and longer, trying out new party feats. Later, when I got a manager, he explained to me that you should always leave your audience hungry for more. The first show I ever did was for children, and I was paid 100 shekels, which is about $30. I was thirteen years old. I was so proud. I became known as the young kid with the abilities, and I picked up quite a bit of work through people we knew. But I decided it was time to find a wider public. To do so, I needed to get my name out, which I knew could be a difficult prospect, so I set about marketing myself. I had two different approaches. One method was to go into small restaurants and diners in Haifa and perform for free there. It takes guts to show up at a table of a big group of strangers or a couple on a date, but I would put on my best jacket, make sure my hair was combed, take a deep breath, smile, and approach. Usually I’d be very polite but confident. One of the tricks I’d learned was never to give people the chance to say no. Instead of saying, “Would you like to see something amazing?”—to which the diners could say, “No thank you,” and go back to their own conversations—I’d say, “I’m going to show you something amazing.” Then I’d launch into guessing the number that they were thinking, or I’d make a spoon or a glass bend or move. The diners always responded positively. People at other tables would be turning around, seeing what the excitement was, hoping I’d go to their table next. My appearances in restaurants had what I call the “double reality” effect. This is something I still use today. In the beginning, the owners of the restaurant would sometimes think that one of the guests had invited me, while the diners would think that the restaurant had invited me to perform. So no one asked me to leave. It works every time. I would perform for a few minutes at a few tables, entertain people, make them laugh and feel good, and then I’d leave my newly printed business cards, hoping that someone would see me and need me for an office party or a bar mitzvah. I landed some good business this way. My other marketing technique was to send letters to various companies in Haifa that might be interested in having me put on a performance. I wanted to stand out from the crowd, so the letters and envelopes were black, and on the envelopes I printed “DO NOT OPEN THIS LETTER.” Of course, the envelopes were opened—as a student of the human mind, I knew they would be—and inside there was a cheeky photograph of me with the words, “I knew you couldn’t resist” and then information about my show. People like to laugh. They like to be entertained, and they appreciate a bit of good-humored mischief in the middle of the day. I received a lot of phone calls from those letters I sent out. Sometimes I used my growing abilities to win over my teachers at school. By the time I entered high school, I had stopped being outwardly shy. Suddenly I had a lot to say in class about a lot of things. My best subjects were the sciences and math—subjects with concrete answers—and for those I received a stream of constant As. My B subjects were the abstract ones, like Bible, literature, and history. My answers were never what the teachers wanted to hear. A teacher might say the poet wrote those lines because he was feeling platonic love for his mother, but I would always disagree and offer a different interpretation—one that the teacher would interpret as a B. However, I managed to raise my grade in my Bible class because I guessed which exact word my teacher would point to in the Bible, and my gym teacher gave me a higher grade because I predicted the outcome of a school basketball game. Those abilities were definitely useful to have. Fifteen years later, I’m still using those skills. Look at this quote from the New York Post, July 29, 2011: “During Major League Soccer’s All-Star Game at Red Bull Arena on Wednesday night, mentalist Lior Suchard entertained with his mind-blowing tricks. Before the match Suchard correctly predicted the halftime score as well as which players would score goals and when.” Sound familiar? SEE THE WHOLE INCREDIBLE PREDICTION AT WWW.MINDREADERBOOK.COM/SOCCER My favorite teacher was my math teacher. I really respected him, as he found a way to guarantee my cooperation. At the end of every lesson he would give me a few minutes to perform in front of the class—as long as my performance included math. In exchange he expected me not to interrupt during his class. I had great fun with his proposal and it helped me focus on the idea of performing something new each day for an audience. In this way I stretched and tested my abilities. So what kind of feats did I do to entertain my math class? I would write down a number on a piece of paper and keep that number secret. Then I would ask the teacher to come up with a mathematical formula. Any formula. No matter which formula he chose, the answer would always be the number written on the paper. It was great fun to see his surprise every time. I used to push the limit. I’d write a number on a piece of paper and give it to him in an envelope and say, “Think of a number. But don’t tell me yet. And, by the way, don’t open the envelope.” After a few days I’d ask if he’d thought of a number. Finally he’d say yes and then open the envelope. Of course, the number he’d thought of was the number on the piece of paper. He’d be blown away each time, because he’d always have thought of two or three numbers then changed his mind and still the number he settled on would be the one in the envelope. I also used to play a game where I’d write out a formula on a piece of paper that only I would see. Then the teacher would come up with a number. His number would be the answer to my formula. Every single time. By the way, speaking of math, here’s an easy riddle for you. If chocolate and chewing gum cost $1.10 together and the chocolate costs $1.00 more than the gum, how much does the gum cost? You’re probably thinking 10 cents, right? Way to go. Except you’re wrong. The answer is 5 cents. Later on you’ll find out why you’re not the only one to get this riddle wrong. Recently I went back to visit my math teacher and he told me something very interesting. He’s been a teacher for over forty years and has taught many, many kids during that time. But he’s only seen a very small percentage of kids come through his classroom door who’ve known exactly what they wanted to do with their lives. I was one of them. He knew when I was in high school that it wouldn’t matter what grades I got, which school I attended, or which subjects I studied. The end result would be the same, because I had a passion and a dream. I was aiming for something. It was very exciting for me to hear him say that. After high school I signed up for the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces. It’s mandatory in Israel, for three years. You’re away from home and expected to take responsibility—and so you become responsible. It’s a very good experience. I managed to keep performing during my time there, doing unofficial shows as a combat soldier. I also had other duties that used my mental abilities, which I can’t talk about—otherwise, you know, I’d have to kill you. And then, when I came out of the army, I set about achieving my goals of becoming the best mentalist in the world. I got myself a manager, and together we worked incredibly hard finding shows for me. I performed everywhere I could, no matter how small the event, even performing free of charge. I wanted to get my name out there. I worked the entertainment circuit in Israel—bar mitzvahs, private parties, corporate parties— and, little by little, more work, in different countries, started to come in. I didn’t say no to anything. I worked like crazy. One night I was invited to a private party in Israel to perform before a crowd of people. There was nothing unusual about the event—I had done many other such parties—but at this one I was asked a question that made a big difference in my life. The host of the party owned a large telecommunications company and he was about to launch a new cell phone. This was a big new product for him, and he was hoping it would make a huge splash in the cell phone world. Toward the end of the party, he approached me and told me about this high-quality, next- generation cell phone. Then, to my surprise, he asked if I would be able to go to an international trade show and help with the marketing. My first thought was that I had never done anything like this before and had no idea of what was expected or whether I could do what he was hoping for. So, of course, I said yes, absolutely, I would be very happy to be involved. Then, when I arrived home that evening, I thought, what have I got myself into? I had all kinds of worries. What if this new role took me away from the live performances and television shows that I hoped would be the direction of my career? Was this selling out? What if I truly couldn’t find a way to promote a cell phone? I’d only ever done entertainment, not product pitches. I fought down the panic in my stomach and rephrased the question “How the hell am I going to do this?” into “What is the best possible way I can prepare for this event?” Then I added another question, “How can I make this trade show part of my career path?” After that, I learned everything I could about the telecommunications business, the company I was working with, and their competition. I read books and articles on marketing and sales. I even made a special trip to an overseas trade conference to see exactly what takes place and what would be expected of me. Finally, the day of the event came around. The stage was set. Me in front of two thousand people. One of my biggest shows ever. After some preliminary banter, I invited ten randomly selected people up onto the stage with their cell phones. One by one, I asked them to call home or to call a friend. Most of them failed to do so. Their calls wouldn’t go through—no reception, they said. A few were able to make their calls successfully and I gathered them together at the edge of the stage. “Which cell phone are you using?” I asked them all, one by one. And, of course, the successful cell phones were made by the company I was promoting. The huge audience was very impressed and applauded wildly. I didn’t have to add other words to the sales pitch: the message was received loud and clear. Since that first trade show, I have performed at dozens of others all over the world. My solution is always to create a metaphor for the clients so that their product will be remembered. For Hewlett-Packard laser printers, I came up with the concept of mind-printing instead of mind-reading. For BMW, I drove a silver E250 blindfolded, the slogan “You can count on BMW with your eyes closed” emblazoned on giant screens. I interlace my abilities with the products. I ALSO HAD A LOT OF FUN DRIVING BLINDFOLDED IN MY FRIEND’S PORSCHE. YOU CAN SEE HOW NERVOUS HE WAS AT WWW.MINDREADERBOOK.COM/PORSCHE One day a few years ago, I received a phone call from a producer at a TV show. They had heard of me through the infotainment business. They wanted me to appear as a contestant on a new reality TV show called The Successor, which would be broadcast in Israel and a bunch of other countries around the world, hosted by Uri Geller, celebrated Israeli mystifier and entertainer. The idea behind the show was for Uri to choose the next great mentalist, his so-called successor. Uri has been internationally famous since the 1970s for his amazing mental abilities such as bending spoons, stopping clocks on command, and using incredible telepathic skills. He has advised celebrities and business leaders around the globe, has helped companies find oil, and was the first true infotainer. He’s also famous for the number of skeptics who devote so much of their time to trying to prove he is a fake. I accepted immediately. There were nine different mentalists in the running, competing to win the title, and over a twelve-week period we all used our mental skills to perform mind-bending, mesmerizing acts hoping to win the favor of Uri, the judges, the studio audience, and viewers at home who could also vote. It was an amazing experience and great fun. All the mentalists knew each other, so there was a huge amount of laughter and positive energy. I learned so much from being on live TV. The added pressure of being followed around by cameras wasn’t really so different from performing in front of an audience at a party. You always have to be on your toes as a mentalist, as a performer. You have to be ready to ad lib and be spontaneous, change your act if necessary. It was interesting to think about the television viewers watching the performances in their homes. It forced me to think about keeping the performance personal for the live audience, but also to focus on being charismatic enough to amaze people you can’t even see. On the final show, I was announced as the winner. The successor. Two- thirds of the voters voted for me. Uri Geller even said, “I’ve stopped the clock Big Ben twice but what you did impressed me more.” This was a great moment in my life. I became a bit of a celebrity in Israel and Europe, especially Israel. By being on TV I had performed inside many people’s living rooms and suddenly I couldn’t step outside without wearing sunglasses. It was exciting. Many people think of The Successor as my big break, but I don’t really view it like that. It made all the hard work I’d been doing for the past few years more public. The media attention that came with winning was fun for a while and it got me more phone calls and more work, but after it was over, I just went back to what I was doing before—working very hard to become the best mentalist in the world. The Power of the Mind—You Think, Therefore I Am NEW YORK, 2011 I ask Amy to think of a person, male or female, that there’s no way that I could know. Someone who’s not at the meeting, in the conference room at my publisher’s office. There’s a bunch of us in here, and all eyes are on Amy. She nods briefly. She seems quiet but confident. Immediately, she thinks of a person. I can tell by the concentration on her face that her decision is made, that she’s not wavering and changing her mind. “It’s a woman,” I say. She nods and smiles. I look carefully at her face, at her eyes, moving quite close to her. “There are five letters in her name.” Again, a nod, a smile. She is empathetic, wanting me to succeed. Her mind is very open—it makes it much easier for me. “Does anyone in this room know her?” She shakes her head. I’m holding a pen and card in my hands and I start to write. I’m seeing letters now, an image. I start to write the letters down. An N, an I. “She’s very close to you?” I say. It’s not really a question. I know she is by the strength of Amy’s thoughts. I’m done with my writing now—I have a five-letter word, a name, written down on the card. I show it around the room but make sure that Amy cannot see. TANIA. Everyone looks first at the card, then over at Amy, people in the second row craning to see her face. They want to know the name. “So, Amy,” I ask. “What was the name you thought of?” A moment’s pause—she has good timing. “Tania,” she says. Everyone gasps. I show her the card. “She’s my best friend,” says Amy. “And that’s exactly how she spells her name. With an I not a Y.” Which makes sense, because that’s how she thought about the name when she thought of her friend, and that’s the way I saw the name in her mind. Everyone is excited, talking now. How did I do it? How could I have gone inside Amy’s mind and pulled out this name? I’ve read thousands of people’s minds and pulled out thousands of names of friends, first loves, first teachers. I love to read minds. It shows the essence of what I do and the power of the mind so clearly. One mind going into another. It’s cool, and it makes people stop for a moment to think about how amazing the mind really is. Not only my mind, but Amy’s, too. She was able to conjure up an image of her friend inside her mind when that friend was far away. That’s a very complex process. Not only that but she was able to hold this image in her mind for quite a long time while responding to questions I asked her. And, probably, she had a million other thoughts whirring through her mind at the same time: What if Lior doesn’t guess correctly? I wonder what Tania’s doing right now. What if Lior can read everything in my mind? And what’s really cool is that everyone in that room could have done the same thing. Take reading this book, for example. Just seeing the symbols that make up words sets in process a whole whirlwind of activity in your brain. That’s before you’ve even translated the symbols into words and sentences with meaning, which, in turn, will spark other connections in your brain as you engage your intellect and your emotions. Not to mention you’re also registering the sound of traffic in the street, remembering that it’s your brother’s birthday, noting that you’re thirsty, and figuring out that it’s probably time to go to work soon. All in the time it took you to read that sentence. The mind is an incredible thing. We all know that we have five senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. I can still remember learning about it as a kid. Our senses let us process and perceive the world around us. Guess what? It’s not that simple. Scientists now agree that we have other senses, too, other ways of taking in outside information. You know how you ride a bicycle? Through your sense of balance. And what tells you to wear gloves on a freezing cold day? That would be your sense of temperature. It also tells you to stop touching the hot iron. I used this one a lot when I was a kid. We also have senses that help to detect pain or tell us how heavy something is. And then there are senses of time and direction—although I know many people who don’t seem to have either one. For me, there’s another sense, too, that is very, very interesting. It is what is commonly known as the “sixth sense.” What do I mean by this? It means perceiving the world through my mind, using this sense in addition to the other senses to see and understand things in a special way. I believe that through our attention we create fields of perception that stretch out around us. Some of us are more sensitive to those fields or we are able to focus our attention more intensely. People ask me all the time whether I have supernatural powers—I don’t. Even though I use the word “supernatural” in my show, I don’t believe that my skills are unnatural in any way. I don’t say that I’m psychic or clairvoyant. Instead I say that I have certain “skills” or “abilities” and I believe that everyone has them. To some degree. We all use our minds differently. For me, it was a question of discovering as a young kid that I had this talent for using my mind in a different way, and then deciding to practice and hone this skill. It was all about focusing, and I mean really, really, really focusing on the matter. You can’t just want a spoon to bend or move. Or to read someone’s thoughts. You have to focus and practice. And, as you know, I practiced a lot. There’s a famous moment when South African golfer Gary Player hit a perfect shot three hundred yards into the hole. Appreciation and wonder rippled through the crowd, and one spectator called out, “Lucky shot!” To which Gary responded, “You’re right. But the funny thing is, the harder I practice, the luckier I get.” How to Focus on Focusing Focusing the mind is about emptying it of distractions so that we can think clearly. Kids find it easier to get into deep concentration because they live in the moment and don’t worry about things that aren’t in the here and now. Adults, on the other hand, are often not fully present because they are distracted—and don’t realize it. Learn to ask yourself, “What’s on my mind right now?” Maybe you’re thinking about a phone call you have to make and it’s stopping you from focusing. If you can, handle distractions immediately. Or put them on a list to handle later, so your mind can relax for now and you can use all your brain power for the task at hand. There’s a blind artist, John Bramblitt, who, after losing his sight, learned to paint by feeling the different textures of different-color paints. He sees so well through touch that he paints portraits that are exactly lifelike—of people he’s never seen in his life before. How amazing is that? There are blind people who can ride mountain bikes and navigate pathways through forests because they’ve learned the skill of echolocation to get around. There are deaf composers who create the most beautiful symphonies but never hear that music played aloud. There are so many ways of perceiving the world. Why is it so surprising then that someone can read minds or use mental energy to bend silverware? The mind is an amazing thing. My show is called Supernatural Entertainment. The name is self- explanatory. The show delves into the supernatural, into those areas beyond the five senses that deal with extrasensory perception. And, equally important, it is pure entertainment. My aim is to provide a positive, thrilling experience for the audience each time I perform. I’ve described the way I use my thoughts as similar to working with a laser beam compared to a flashlight. When I play basketball, I’m definitely a flashlight to Michael Jordan’s laser beam. Or playing the guitar? Well, I’m better than a flashlight but no laser beam. We could go on here, but you get the picture. I’m sure you have many talents where you’re closer to a laser beam, and others —well, we can just forget about those. Here are some things I can do with my mind: Know a number you’re thinking of between one and one hundred Know your first love’s name Know your first teacher’s name Know your birth sign and birth date Know the name you’ve thought of for your unborn child Bend a coin or spoon or nail in your hand Bend the stem of a wine glass Make your eyeglasses jump into the air Tell you a story that only you would know Transfer energy between you and another person Make you think you’re being touched when you’re not Predict which word you will choose in a book that you randomly choose from hundreds Predict numbers now that you will say when I ask you tomorrow Mess up a baseball player’s swing Win in any poker game Here are some things I cannot do: Guess the lottery—as it is figured out by machines (although I’ve come close) Read the thoughts of random strangers walking along Read all your thoughts as I sit across from you at dinner Find missing persons—although I wish I could Cure diseases (I’ve been asked many times) Speak to the dead (actually, I can speak to the dead—they just never answer me!) Walk along sidewalks without falling into holes Gain weight even though I try Play casinos in Vegas I use different aspects of my mental skills for each of the different feats I do and combine them with techniques I’ve picked up from psychology along the way. For mind-reading, I’ll read the overall person as well as the mind, using clues like body language and eye movement to help me channel my thought processes, and to focus more clearly on the exact name or image the person is thinking about. Whenever I give you a choice to think of something, whether it’s a number between one and one hundred, or a word in a book chosen from hundreds of books on a shelf, I’ll write down ahead of time what your choice will be. This seems like I’m making a prediction. And, in a way, I am making a prediction, but it’s one that is called an open prediction. The question is, “Is it possible to read a mind when the thought isn’t there yet?” Wrap your mind around that one for a moment. How can I predict a number when you haven’t thought of it yet? It’s the same for the word. How can I predict which word you’ll choose when you haven’t even selected a book to choose it from yet? But the reality is that you choose a number or a word because I make you do so. I persuade you. I influence you. I zip into your thought process and plant that word or that number. How cool is that? Sometimes I’ll do a little mind-reading and a little persuasion at the same time. The lines blur. I’m at an office party in an old converted warehouse near the river. I ask Penny to go outside the room and think of a time in her mind. Any time, whatever time she wants. While she’s gone, I ask a young guy, Peter, to turn the dial on his watch, making the hands spin backward and forward, backward and forward, and to stop whenever he wants. All while hiding the face of the watch so no one, including Peter, can see the time. Next I call Penny back into the room. “Did you think of a time?” I ask her. “Yes,” she says. “Does the time have a specific meaning for you, or is it just a random time?” “It’s special,” she says, nodding enthusiastically. Next I ask her to visualize the time on a clock. “Imagine Big Ben, or just a big clock.” In this way, she sees the time in her mind as analog and not digital. It’s easier for me to feel it this way. At that point, the image of the time becomes very clear to me. I write it down on my card, keeping it hidden. I look over at Penny. Her face is alive with emotion. “Please say the time you were thinking about.” “Seven fifty- five,” she says. “It’s the time I was born.” “That’s amazing, because I wrote down on my card ‘7:55,’ ” I say, showing everyone the card. Penny gasps. She can’t believe it. “That’s crazy,” says someone a few rows away. Everyone in the room is moved that I read Penny’s mind and found such a personal time in there. “But wait,” I say. “There’s more. You remember that Peter turned the hands on his watch and chose when to stop? And no one saw the time?” Everyone is nodding, anticipating. “Well, Peter, could you please look at your watch and tell us the time.” He holds up the watch. “Seven fifty-five,” he says. He’s shaking his head, astonished. “Incredible,” someone shouts. Everyone bursts into applause. Amazing, right? But there’s another layer to this. Here’s my question to you. Did I read Penny’s mind while she was outside the room and get the watch to stop at the same time? Or did I stop the watch at 7:55 first and then persuade Penny to think of that time? And, if I persuaded her, how did I know to persuade her to think of a time that had such emotional meaning to her? The time of her birth? Coincidence? I don’t think so. I don’t believe in coincidences. Mind- boggling, yes. I’ve done this kind of thing many times, when I ask people to think of a number. I’ll plant a number in their mind and then they’ll tell me they thought of that number because it has special associations for them. One woman told me she’d thought of the number ninety-one because her grandfather had just turned ninety-one. In reality, I had written down that number before even asking her to think of a number. It makes you think, right? I mentioned earlier another aspect of my mental skill—the transfer of positive energy, or chi energy. It’s essentially a form of vital energy that unites body, mind, and spirit, that I create and control using my mind. It involves extreme focus of my thoughts to gather and send energy—enough energy to make eyeglasses fly through the air, to bend spoons and coins in someone’s hand, or to stop a watch. Or even to transfer energy from one person to another. This kind of mentalism is really interesting, because it’s where my thoughts can clearly be seen to operate outside my mind, projecting beyond my body, showing themselves in a physical way. It’s mind over matter, of the purest kind. So, mind-reading, persuasion, and chi energy are the elements of how I use my mind as a mentalist. It’s the basic answer to “how do you do that?” It’s all about harnessing the power of the mind in very specific ways. I’ll talk in more depth about what I do in later chapters, and open a door to a world of underground secrets that you can use. I really believe that everyone can increase their mental powers—maybe not to the point of being a mentalist but enough to move a little way along the road from flashlight to laser beam. You’ve probably guessed that I love everything to do with the mind and how it works. I consider it part of my job to read everything I can about the mechanisms of our brains, about our thought processes, about how we think the way we do. Mind over matter is a really interesting concept, especially when we think of it in terms of metal-bending and objects flying through the air. But what if I were to tell you that we all use it all the time? Think about the placebo effect for a moment. We’ve all heard of medical studies in which patients are given a treatment that, in reality, does not affect them physically in any way and absolutely cannot cure them. But the important point is that the patient is told that the treatment will help their medical condition, and so they believe that it will. In this case, the mind takes over. It gets to work in helping the body to heal. Mind over matter. There was a study in Germany, where people were spun around quickly in a motorized chair. Before the ride, some of them were given a licorice-flavored wafer to chew and told, “This helps to prevent nausea.” When asked how they felt after the ride, they all felt much, much better than the ones who didn’t receive the special medicine. The licorice-flavored wafer was just candy, but as soon as their minds received the information that they were being given a medication, their brains sent out signals that set in motion the body’s own pain relievers. So they didn’t feel nausea. Cool, right? If I tell you that you’re going to have a great day, then you will, simply because your mind will process this information and internalize this expectation. If I tell you that you’re going to have the worst day of your life, then, believe me, you will. You’ll be caught in the rain without an umbrella, show up late for a meeting, lose the client you’ve been hoping to win—to your archenemy—get dumped by your boyfriend or girlfriend. And that’s just before lunch. You get the picture. And not just because I’m a mind-reader and persuading you that it’s true. It’s the Pygmalion effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a prediction that causes itself to be true—and there’s even scientific data to back it up. In an informal study, a teacher divided her class of nine-year-olds into two groups, according to eye color, and told one group that they were superior in intelligence and more likely to succeed. They were allowed special privileges and were spoken to in a positive way, compared to the inferior group. The superior group did much better on their school work that day, while the inferior group performed very badly. A few days later, the groups were reversed. In that day’s math and spelling tests, the new superior group (the former inferior group) did very well and the new inferior group (the former superior group) did very badly—merely based on suggestion and the mind’s processing of that suggestion. Getting Sneaky with the Subconscious Our minds are at work without our knowing it, from the moment we wake in the morning and start making our multitasking way through our world. We’ve learned all kinds of shortcuts and automatic responses for dealing with the things we don’t need to think about—those little details like breathing, or knowing, by the smell coming from the kitchen, the first cup of coffee is ready—so that we can focus our minds on the morning commute or navigating the treadmill at the gym. All the time we’re viewing the world through our senses and acting and reacting to the external stuff, while focusing on the internal stuff—what did your girlfriend mean last night when she said she was working late? What’s the name of that new movie you want to see? Our conscious minds are busy, busy, busy. And then there’s the subconscious. Most of the time we’re not even aware of our subconscious, but it makes up a great percentage of our mental processes. It, too, is active even if we’re not always sure of what it’s doing. You want to see your subconscious at work? Imagine that, by some miracle, you’re running ahead of schedule and you have time this morning to pop into a grocery store before heading off to work. You decide to buy a cereal, and head over to the cereal aisle, where dozens of different boxes and packages shout their brands and logos from the shelves. You scan the rows and see a product that you’ve never tried before but you’re sure is delicious. And even healthy, too. Crunchy ChocoNuts. You don’t know why you want it but it seems like the right choice, even a familiar choice. So you buy the cereal and head down the stairs into the subway station. Usually you race down these concrete stairs, eyes and ears straining for signs of an arriving train. But this morning, you’re early. So you stroll down the steps not worrying about the train, and taking in details that you wouldn’t usually register: the broken tile on the wall ahead, the new blue paint on the ticket booth, and an advertising poster right in front of you for Crunchy ChocoNuts. Delicious—and even healthy, too. You’ve never seen this poster before in the mad rush of your mornings. But your subconscious mind has registered it and acted upon it—without your own knowledge. The box of Crunchy ChocoNuts in your bag bears witness to this. This is why advertisers fight with each other to bombard our minds with subliminal messages. People have asked me if I use subliminal messages in my acts to help with mind-reading. Like maybe putting the number thirty-eight on the back of each seat in the auditorium at my performances and then asking someone to think of a number between one and one hundred—and they guess thirty-eight. But that’s not really the way I use the power of my thoughts. I’ve honed my skills to the point where I work in a very subtle, subliminal way, but it can’t really be rationalized or pinpointed like the ChocoNuts poster. Now, if I did put the number thirty-eight on everyone’s seat, could I influence someone NOT to say it? That’s a more interesting question to me. Would you like to play a game with me so we can get into the world of your subconscious mind? I want you to think of two simple geometric shapes, one inside the other, but don’t tell me yet. First read my advice to you very carefully. Ready? Choosing is such a personal matter. I want you to sit down and Relax for a moment and Calmly think about your options. Let yourself breathe deeply, in and out, and Enable your mind to go blank and focused Imagine an empty canvas in your mind. Now I want you to think about two simple geometric Shapes. They are one Inside the other in the Deep recesses of your mind. Empty your mind of everything else. Think about those shapes Rippling through your mind one Inside the other And visualize them Noting their Geometric Lines and their strong Energy Now hold the shapes in your mind. Which ones did you think of? If you’re like 80 percent of people—and open to some subtle subliminal persuasion—you will have imagined this: Now look back at the first letter of each sentence of my advice. Interesting, right? And if you didn’t choose this combination of shapes, don’t worry. Just know that I won’t be playing poker with you any time soon! Putting Your Mind in Gear So what else can our amazing brains do? Take a look at the following sentence: Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. You probably didn’t have any problems in reading it. While it turns out that the information provided here is not entirely accurate (and you can read the whole story at http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/ people/matt.davis/Cambrigde/) what strikes me is that it is cool that the mind can decipher these words at all. Our brains can make sense of nonsense. They like to put a logical spin on things. Are you up for a challenge? See if you have the brain power to read the following text that I received as an e-mail. You’ll probably find it gets easier the farther you read. F1gur471v31y 5p34k1ng 7H15 M3554G3 53RV35 70 PR0V3 HOW OUR M1ND5 C4N DO 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5! 1MPR3551V3 7H1NGS! 1N 7H3 B3G1NN1NG I7 WA5 H4RD BU7 NOW, ON 7H15 LIN3 YOUR M1ND 1S R34D1NG 17 4U70M471C4LLY W17HOU7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4BOU7 17. B3 H4PPY, ONLY C3R741N P30PL3 C4N R3AD 7H15! A lot of the time our minds take mental shortcuts so they don’t have to wade through and process every single bit of information that is thrown at them. We take in information and, based on what we already know from our life experience, we come to conclusions. Most of the time, this works out just fine. If we see a four-legged piece of furniture at a table, we know this is a chair and we don’t need to analyze every nail or the grain of the wood to know this is true. We glance and our brain fills in the rest. We move on with our lives. But sometimes our brain takes a shortcut that leads us in the wrong direction completely, with surprising results. Hold that thought and let me read your mind for a minute. Go to the photo section of the book. Now take a look at this sentence: It’s easy for us to read, right? Wonders of perception. Our brain is able to fill in the blanks, based on our knowledge and past experience, and come up with the rest of the words. Pretty impressive. Except that it’s wrong. This particular shortcut has not served us well. Here are the words. WQNDFBS QE PFBCFPTLQN Here’s another one: Say this sentence out loud. Now say it again. Now say it really slowly so that you pause after every single word. Aha! Now you see that you missed the second “the” the first time around, because your brain sensed familiarity and slipped into autopilot. Amazing what you can miss, isn’t it? Now count the number of Fs in this sentence. Finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of years... How did you do? Did you get three or four? Would you believe me if I told you that there are six Fs? Try again. It can take some people three or four readings to catch all of them. Our brain doesn’t register the word “of” with its letter “f,” because it is such a common word. We just zip right past it, our brains on autopilot. So you see that reality can play tricks on our minds, making us take a step back and say, hold on. Let me engage my brain and think this time. This time, focus your brain first and see if you can read this sentence: I love Paris in the the springtime. While it seems that our minds can get things wrong a lot of the time, the fact is that there’s a crazy amount of stuff going on inside our brains, and so we have to rely on these shortcuts. We don’t have time to analyze and double-check every single tiny piece of information that comes our way. Most of the time, these shortcuts work. But, sometimes, we need to be more mindful, more aware of what’s going on, and less ready to fall back onto autopilot in our lives. We need to tell our minds who’s in charge. I have to do this a lot as a mentalist. I need to make my mind work for me in ways that I can control. To take that power and manipulate it, whether it’s through channeling chi energy, using intuition, focus, influence, and persuasion, or reading body language and nonverbal expressions. These all increase our control of our minds and unleash its power. Here’s a funny way of showing how you can focus your thoughts to stop your mind from running on autopilot. Start circling your right foot clockwise—to the right, and keep drawing circles with it. Now use your finger to draw a number six in the air. What happens to your foot? If you’re like most people, your foot will automatically start circling counterclockwise—to the left. Try it again, this time trying to will your foot to circle to the right. It’s hard, but it can be done. It’s like mind over mind over matter! You’re fighting your mind’s own natural inclination to follow the movement and direction of your hand. The more you focus on it, the easier it will become. Here’s a Necker Cube, an image that our brains interpret as a 3-D image. In reality, it’s just twelve intersecting lines, but most people see it as a cube with the lower left face as the front. It is possible to make the image shift. Sometimes this will happen spontaneously, but you can also do it purposely. Focus your mind to pull the back face of the left-facing cube up to the right so that it becomes the top face of a right-facing cube. Try it—it’s fun to manipulate the image—and to see that what our eyes see is only the version that our mind enables us to see. As you have just seen, the most important lesson for using the full power of your mind is to first be aware of it in all its complexity. Acknowledge that your mind is amazing. Then be aware of how often we switch from active thinking to speeding along on autopilot. How often do you walk somewhere and realize you have no memory of the journey because your thoughts have been elsewhere? Of course, sometimes it’s fine to be on autopilot, but most of us do it more than we should. You need to consciously put your mind into gear and use it, especially if you want something from other people. As you’ll see. Now back to the show. Up until now, I’ve guessed a number, guessed a name, and Blake is holding on to a scroll and a $5 bill, and no one’s touching the money. I’ve invited a woman, Jane, up onto the stage to help me. She’s a little nervous. “Jane,” I say and I place my hand gently on her shoulder. “Do we know each other personally?” “No,” she says, shaking her head vigorously. “You seem to be very happy about this. Why?” Now she’s laughing, relaxing a little. “I need your help in finding a phone number.” I hand her a huge local phone book and she staggers under the weight of it. “I’d like you to choose any phone number in the whole book. Any at all from the hundreds of thousands of numbers inside. Your choice.” Jane quickly riffles through the book, her eyes searching everywhere. “Take your time,” I say. “Because while you’re searching for a number we’re going to have some fun.” I step lightly down into the audience with some big white cards. Each card has a number on it. There’s a real positive energy down here. “Okay,” I say, stopping by the front row next to a group of women in their twenties. “I choose all of you.” They giggle. “I’m going to hand you these cards and you’re going to shuffle them up between you, mix, mix, mix, just like musical chairs so we’ll have a completely random combination of numbers. And stop whenever you want to. Okay?” They nod enthusiastically and I hand over the cards. Already they’re passing them back and forth. The music plays. “Jane, have you chosen yet?” Up on stage, Jane nods, and I address the row of women with the cards. “Remember, when you’re ready, stop mixing the cards.” There’s some last-minute movement, one card passed along to the very end of the row, laughter from the women, and then they stop. “Keep them facedown until I tell you, okay? So no one can see the numbers.” They all clasp the cards as if their lives depend on it, smiling, waiting. I run back up the steps to the stage. “So Jane, just to make sure it’s fair. Did I tell you which number to choose?” Jane laughs and shakes her head. “So tell us then which number you chose out of the whole phone book.” I take a marker and stand by the flip chart, ready to write. “464-9672,” says Jane. I repeat the numbers, “4 6 4 9 6 7 2,” pausing after each one and writing it big so that everyone in the room can see. “Thank you, Jane.” Now I look out into the audience. “So, out of about a half million numbers in this phone book, Jane chose a random but specific number. 464-9672.” I point to the number on the flip chart. “Now, it’s impossible to predict the number chosen by Jane and it’s impossible to predict the random combination of numbers created by the women in the front row. So what is the chance that one would match the other? “Now, ladies.” I look down into the audience at the row where the card shufflers sit. “Please stand up one by one, starting from this end, turn around and hold up the cards one by one so everyone can see the numbers.” The first woman stands and holds up her card: 4. Then the next woman holds up a 6. People in the audience are craning their necks, whispering to each other. The following number is a 4. The audience is getting louder. “No way!” shouts someone in the back. The women with the numbers are laughing, shaking their heads. Now the remaining women, in turn, show their numbers: 9, 6, 7. People in the audience are shouting out the numbers now. There’s tension in the air. Electricity. The woman with the final card holds it to her chest, nervous to show it. “On three,” I shout and the audience counts down with me, “Three, two, one.” She turns the card; it’s a 2. The audience erupts into a cheer, leaping out of their seats. We’re all laughing. It’s amazing. The energy is crazy. Suddenly I yell out, “I haven’t forgotten. Where is the money?” At the back of the room, Blake leaps out of his seat, clutching the bill and the scroll. “THE MONEY IS HERE.” Everyone laughs even harder. The Power of Persuasion—Great Minds Think Alike TOKYO, 2011 I’m on a big talk show in Japan, and the stage is filled with newspapers. Dozens and dozens of Japanese newspapers, over four hundred of them, stacked in overflowing piles. Professor Ootsuki is a well-known professor in Japan, and he’s a skeptic. A huge skeptic. I’m going to change his mind by predicting which single word the TV host, Takeshi Kitano, will choose from all the newspapers. I hope. Did I mention that all the newspapers are in Japanese? I don’t speak Japanese. The professor watches closely as I look at the mountain of newspapers, and then as I look at the host, searching her face. He isn’t smiling but he’s curious, I can tell. I write a word on a big piece of white paper—so only I can see. I’m writing Japanese symbols. I have no idea what the word means or how to pronounce it, just that this is the word that will be chosen. Next I fold up the paper and place it in an envelope. Then I give the envelope to the professor, who signs his name on it and keeps a tight hold of it. With preparations done, and my prediction made, I have just one job left to do. That is to influence the host to choose this one word from all the tens of thousands of words scattered on the ground before her. I explain that she has a series of choices to make. First, she needs to choose a newspaper. She takes a little time with this but then she takes one, pulling it deep from the pile. Next, she must choose the left-hand page or right-hand page of her newspaper. She does that quickly—the right page. Then it’s time to choose her word. When she has chosen, she smiles and quickly goes to write her word on a big whiteboard so that everyone—including the professor and me—can see. She writes: With great flourish and drum roll, we get the professor to open the envelope, signed by him and still in his hand. He pulls out the piece of paper on which I have predicted the word, unfolds it carefully, and holds it up for everyone to see. It is the exact same word: The host and studio audience go wild. They tell me that this means “hotel.” I predicted that the host would choose this specific word out of all the words available to her, and she did. The professor just sits there nodding. He is very, very shocked. And maybe not a skeptic anymore. I was so excited by this routine that I did it again live on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. And Kim Kardashian. But with an interesting twist that I’ll tell you about later... CHECK OUT THIS AMAZING FEAT AT WWW.MINDREADERBOOK.COM/JAPAN Remember that I call this kind of prediction an “open prediction,” as I’m predicting something that hasn’t happened yet. How does this work? I’m not reading the future, because I can’t do that. Instead I’m influencing the future. I’m causing it to bend to my wishes by persuading the host to choose the word that I predicted. Cool, right? But that’s not all. It’s possible to persuade more than one person at a time. Imagine that you’re sitting in the audience at one of my shows. I come bounding down to your section of the audience and ask you and the people sitting around you to all think of a number. Your number is forty-four. Everyone’s number is forty-four. And, of course, I know that you’re all thinking of the number forty-four. I ask all of you a general question: am I reading your minds or am I influencing you to think of a certain number? At first, most people say that they think I’m reading minds. But I can see they’re not sure. They haven’t really thought about the possibility that I could be persuading them. It’s an interesting question. I ask everyone to again think of a number. And guess what? Everyone thinks of the number thirty-seven. Including you. How can that be? How can everyone have thought of the exact same number? You’re pretty amazed, sitting there in the audience. So now what do you think—am I reading your mind or persuading you to think of a number? It really gets people thinking —and talking—about the power of the mind. Every time I go up to someone and say, “Think of a number between one and a hundred,” I am being persuasive. In my shows, I’ll first write down a number on a whiteboard, and then I’ll ask the person to think of a number. When they say their number out loud, I show them the board—with that number written on it. The person is always amazed. Very often they will tell me that they thought of several different numbers before they settled on their final number— or I’ll tell them that they did. A lot of people think of a number with a seven in it first, and then decide to change it. Or they’ll think of a number that they consider too easy for me to guess and they’ll change it. But the reality is that I am influencing them to think of a certain number. I interrupt their thought process, and tell them what to say. This is the power of persuasion. I know you’re thinking, that’s really cool, but how? How do you do it? Well, part of my answer is that to this day I do not know all the reasons. It is something that I have spent years developing and it comes naturally to me, so it is difficult to take it all apart and analyze it step-by-step. However, I have studied, and read, and practiced everything I possibly could about the psychology of persuasion and I’ve developed some methods in this way. One of the areas I’m especially interested in is Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), and it’s a very important part of what I do. It explores the relationship between how we think and how we communicate, both verbally and nonverbally. For example, if I raise my hand as if I’m going to punch you, you will automatically shield your face. Everything we do in life triggers something else. Everything we do causes a response in another person. In this same way— although harder to explain—I can do something with my words, with my voice, my body language, my tone, to persuade you to do something, to do this and not that, to do that and not this. I work at a very subliminal level in reading and directing other people. There’s give and take—it’s partly about the information I get from you through your body language, your words, your expressions, but it’s also about the information that I put out there. My body language and expressions, my words, my tone of voice. This is the psychological side of persuasion. In some ways, humans are easily persuaded—just look at the scams we fall for. We are conned and misled by people all the time, by everyone from salespeople to psychopaths. In my case, I have the added advantage of the power and focus of my mind. When I combine the two, it’s dangerous. People don’t stand a chance. They will be persuaded to have a good time at my show! How many nines are there between one and one hundred? Count them up: nine, nineteen, twenty-nine... all the way up to one hundred. How many? The answer is twenty. Are you surprised? I know I persuaded you to see the problem in a certain way. But what about ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety- three, ninety-four, ninety-five, ninety-six, ninety-seven, and ninety-eight? Isn’t persuasion great? Now I’ll show you an image. What did you see, an old woman or a young one? Does it matter that you saw one and not the other? Probably not. Could I have persuaded your brain to see one instead of the other? Absolutely. Now unjumble these sentences and read them. 1. animals some to carrots like eat 2. hear long better ears 3. quickly hopping fun is 4. live burrow rabbits in deep a Take a look at this illusion. Which animal do you see? You should have seen a rabbit, given that your brain had been primed to think about rabbits by unjumbling the sentences above. This particular case is not very subtle, but it’s a good example of how you can be made to think about something or to want something by the power of suggestion. Influence. Persu

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