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The Effect: My Mind Boxes by Kenton Knepper from Kernow Magic
http://www.kernowmagic.co.uk/item--My-M ... 00392.html


Cost - £9.00


Difficulty
(1=easy to do, 2=No sleights, but not so easy, 3=Some sleights used,
4=Advanced sleights used, 5=Suitable for experienced magicians only)

Hmm... probably 3. The ‘practical’ bits are as sleight-requiring as you make them, but I’d expect most people here to make them around 3, and then there’s also performance/spec control aspects that need deftness and pluck.

They say
This is a very commercial presentation with loads of other possibilites! The prop is the classic Lubor Fiedler’s Gozinta boxes. These boxes however are black with silver printing on them.

One box says My Mind and the other box Your Mind. When the performer takes the nested boxes apart, he looks inside the Your Mind box and finds the spectator’s chosen card. But now the fun begins... The performer pushes a card out face down from the deck. He peeks at the card. He puts the spectator’s Your Mind box inside his My Mind box. Now that your mind is inside my mind, you should be able to name the card I have in mind the performer says to the spectator.

Sure enough, now that the spectator’s mind box is inside the performer’s mind box she can read his mind! She correctly names the face down card.

I say

Skip this first paragraph if you completely visualised the effect as described above. If it seemed a bit clipped and vague, however, let me lay it out more fully here. The magician has a deck of cards and a small (a couple of inches) black plastic box on the table. It has ‘Your Mind’ and a drawing of a brain on it. He has the spec select a card from the pack and remember it. He then explains that to find out what the spec’s card is, “I need to get my mind inside your mind.’ He shows the Your Mind box, and opens it. Inside is a red box, with ‘My Mind’ (and a drawing of a brain) on the side of it. (So, ‘My Mind’ was indeed inside ‘Your Mind’ - geddit?). He opens this red box and inside the spec’s card is revealed (as a miniature card, or as the name written on a piece of paper, or whatever). The magician then picks a card from the deck (cuts to it, say, or spreads the pack face down and takes one) which he doesn’t show to the spec - he merely looks at it himself then puts it aside, on the table, in full view. He explains that for the spec to know what card he has chosen, ‘Your mind needs to get inside my mind.’ He places the My Mind box inside the Your Mind box. (This, obviously, is ‘impossible’: My Mind was originally inside Your Mind, so it must be smaller, now the situation is reversed - the sizes of the boxes have somehow spontaneously swapped.) He asks the spec if she can visualise a head opening and thoughts coming out of it - thoughts that could reveal the magician’s chosen card. The spec says, ‘Yes.’ The magician asks the spec what suit she sees. The spec replies. ‘And what number?’ the magician asks. The spec replies again. The magician turns over the card he’d chosen: it is the one the spec saw coming out of the ‘thought-spouting’ head.

Review

For the first stage of this trick, you need to force a card. You know how some tricks will suggest a (or a few) forces? You know how other tricks will use that ‘use your favourite force’ line? The instructions with this trick say, “Force a card. If you don’t know how to force a card you shouldn’t be doing this trick.” That, in fact, is fair and accurate, but needs stressing as something costing just nine quid and coming in a packet with two little plastic boxes could give off the scent of a total beginner’s, self-working packet trick. It’s not. The Gozinta boxes pull off their Tardis turn without requiring any skill, of course, but the rest of the presentation is down to you, OK?

Basically, you get a three-phase trick: first revelation, box size oddity, and then second revelation. I don’t want to give too much away, but I think it’s required if I’m doing a review - which people might use to decide whether or not to buy - to mention that the final ‘the spec reads your mind’ stage, is not quite that. It’s a dual reality-based thing. Onlookers will perceive that the spec has read your mind, but the spec herself won’t see it like that at all. I stress: it’s dual reality, not instana-stooging. The spec could well be intrigued, in ‘How on earth did he do that?’ fashion - and believe that this is the point - but she won’t remotely imagine that she’s reading your mind. The importance of this is that, though you might well do this stage for ‘a proper audience’, you very, very probably wouldn’t do it as described for your mates in the pub, or a few friends eating together if you were table-hopping (as I believe you pros call it). I took me only a couple of minutes to think of another way of slanting the final stage for pubs or family gatherings, but that’s not ideal, because it means you don’t end on that big, utterly baffling high note: you essentially end on ‘another reveal’, similar to and as - but no more - baffling than the first one.

Overall

Difficult. It’s relatively inexpensive, you get the boxes (which you could use in other things you might think up for yourself), there are three phases (and one isn’t ‘yet another card thing’) and you get Knepper’s clever, brain-frying (for onlookers) final phrase. On the other hand, unless you have access to the right situation - some kind of stage performance, or you own TV spot, basically - only My Mind Boxes Light is sensible/feasible, and that’s a little flawed.

So, for AHs I’d say 7.5/10, but for those with a proper audience at their disposal, 9.5/10 (that last stage is a killer, and yours for a mere nine-hundred pennies too).

Excellent review there and thanks for that! For £9.00 it sounds like a bargain!

Excellent review and I agree entirely with the observation that it's tricky to find the right occasion to show this.

I loved the idea and worked on it to add a couple of quirks of my own (one of which is taken from another Kenton Knepper piece). One I know is a winner, as it got a great reaction, but I must admit I'm not 100% sure if the other additon was worth it.

Part-Timer wrote: I agree entirely with the observation that it's tricky to find the right occasion to show this.

Squinting with the concentration required to go through this without giving a specific 'thing' about Mind Boxes away, I'll mention - on the off chance that it's any use to you - the alternative final stage I use.

After the box bit, I put the pack of cards down in front of the spec - or (I'm not sure which is better, in terms of 'feel') have placed a second pack there at the very start, where it's remained, untouched, right up until now. I ask the spec to cut the cards - cut them twice, in fact, just to be doubly random. I ask them to place the cut-to card aside without looking at it; so it's sitting on the table alone, face down. I then reveal that, though they thought they were controlling the cuts themselves, because Your Mind was inside - enveloped by - My Mind, it could actually control their actions. Precisely. Not once, but twice. I then reveal the card it was making them cut to (you need to have Mind Boxes to understand exactly what I mean by this), asking them to interpret what card the power coming out of the mind was making them choose - doing this rather than simply stating it, I feel, ensures they realise that it genuinely can be only one card. Then, I ask them to turn their cut-to card over... Brrr-tsh!

I think this is reasonably strong, and adds a variation from the first stage's 'mind reading'; both of these aspects come from the feeling that they were, somehow, actually physically controlled. "How on earth did you make me cut to that?" is the usual reaction (rather than the less affecting mind-set that would be revealed by it being, "How did you know I'd cut to that?").

(Oh, BTW, if you haven't realised already, I use a simple Cut D****r Force.)

(Actually, an amusing piece of hokum I put in when a spec is about to 'be made to cut to a particular card', and the spec is a woman, is to take her hand in both of mine while I ramble about something or other for a few seconds. I press my index finger not anywhere near painfully, obviously, but a little hard somewhere on the large thumb muscle at the heel of her palm. I do this without comment, and with a vague sense that - by covering the action with various hands, talking, and never glancing at the hands themselves but fixing her eyes - I believe she won't notice the pressure because of my clever distraction tactics. In these cases (I haven't done this with Mind Boxes, as I'm being 'explicit' about controlling the spec's hand), I offer no explanation about how whatever has happened in the effect happened - it's just magic. After I've finished, almost always, the spec will start poking and peering at her own thumb, trying to figure out how I 'programmed' it to cut to a particular card. And, naturally, I'll lie in bed later remembering this, with a huge smile on my face.)

Im tres intereste (french) about this effect.
Do you think it would be suitable, usable for a mentalism show I am doing in about a month? Its a stage show, and my hands will be projected onto a screen behind me (so no shifty moves can be involved). I am 15 years old. I can work some new ideas around it, but what do you think?
Buy?
Im ready to...

ouch-kabibble wrote:Im tres intereste (french) about this effect.
Do you think it would be suitable, usable for a mentalism show I am doing in about a month? Its a stage show, and my hands will be projected onto a screen behind me (so no shifty moves can be involved).

Hard to say. On the 'for' side, you have to do a couple of things to bring about a choice and a selection (how you do these things is not included in the trick's instructions, it's simply assumed you'll know methods). There's no reason for super shiftiness, though - you can select simple methods - so that's not a problem. Also the fixed angle, and the 2D view, brought about by using a projector screen is not a handicap, and arguably a big plus, for the box size bit itself.

However, the box bit is more magic than mentalism, isn't it? It's an (apparently) physical change. And once you remove the box bit you have general mentalism stuff that you don't need Mind Boxes to perform.

Possibly, for nine quid, I'd say the boxes allow you to spin some plots and introduce a change from just endless cards and notepads so it might be good for you to get them. But go from the position that you'll be getting a quirky little prop and (the possibility, if the wind's with you, of) a nice plot with a killer ending: DON'T think, "With this I'll definitely be getting a centrepiece effect, and one I couldn't remotely approximate without it."

Nice suggestion for the ending, Sexton Blake. I was going to post the second bit I've added, but realised that posting either embellishment I make pretty much gives something away.

I think you've also made some very sensible comments on the use of the boxes in a stage show.

However, I'm going to be bullish (for once) and say to ouch-kabibble that it's really not a great choice.

Sexton is quite right that the effect is more magic than mentalism. I had some serious doubts about ever doing it (especially with what happens at the end of my version), but decided that it was OK for a small group of friends, who know I do magic. There is a mentalism element, but part of the effect is the boxes themselves. If you frame the effect so it is their actual card in the box, then it's definitely magic, albeit with a mental slant.

I think there are many other effects far more suited to a mentalism stage show than this. Yes, it could work, but why not go with something that's more appropriate?

By the way, why would you be doing something funny with your hands, if you are using the power of the mind? Focusing on your hands rather suggests that you might be doing something (even if you aren't). Don't make me go and get Mr Browning.

Fair points, and Ive decided against the boxes, for Part-Timers reasons.

In my defence for the camera, it is there for the audience to see what is happening, but will also act as a convincer to show that I am not using sleight of hand. I wont mention that it's for 'catching me out'.
If Derren Brown* used it then surely I can!

*On his latest tour*


*which was astounding


Ouch-Kabibble