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DrTodd wrote:

nameless wrote:I'm looking to take my mentalism learning to the next stage but I'm torn between this and Sleight of Mind. Could someone who had both books do a quick comparison and tell me the strenghts and weaknesses of each? Is Sleight of Mind more Hypnosis based? Thanks.

They are complementary but different. With Naked Mentalism you will have a set of principles and facts to go out and perform effects with a bit if study and contemplation. With SOM you will have additional tools to understand your participants and some really good exercises to explore the power of the subconscious mind. I do not think it is an 'either or' judgement, but a 'both and'...

Thanks. At the moment it's a choice of one or the other for financial reasons, but I think I'll go with Naked Mentalism for now and pick up Sleight of Mind later on.

nameless wrote:

DrTodd wrote:

nameless wrote:I'm looking to take my mentalism learning to the next stage but I'm torn between this and Sleight of Mind. Could someone who had both books do a quick comparison and tell me the strenghts and weaknesses of each? Is Sleight of Mind more Hypnosis based? Thanks.

They are complementary but different. With Naked Mentalism you will have a set of principles and facts to go out and perform effects with a bit if study and contemplation. With SOM you will have additional tools to understand your participants and some really good exercises to explore the power of the subconscious mind. I do not think it is an 'either or' judgement, but a 'both and'...

Thanks. At the moment it's a choice of one or the other for financial reasons, but I think I'll go with Naked Mentalism for now and pick up Sleight of Mind later on.

Wise choice as it is more immediately gratifying:-)

Lulu.com is having a bit of a freak out this afternoon and not displaying all titles. Naked Mentalism is one of those affected, because I fixed a couple of typos and created a replacement revision. They say it'll be fixed ASAP, but in the meantime, you can still search for it, but I've also added a direct link on the BooksByTomo storefront.

Computers, eh? Who'd have 'em? I remember when the internet was all in black and white and went off at 10:30 every night after playing the National Anthem.

EDIT: A friend of mine was using the Naked Coin Prediction at the Glastonbury Festival. He's not sure whether it was the substances people were on, but he says that some honestly believed he was reading their minds.

EDIT 2: Hang on, the lulu.com thingy has finished its tantrum.

Firstly this is not a personal attack on Tomo I like the chap. But I am keeping this all about Naked Mentalism.

The idea of this book is the holy grail to mentalist isn’t it? No billets , no crib sheets and no ESP cards. It is all the mind pure mentalism. Well no.

Firstly to me it feels like it is a book of list and it is more or less. Ok there are some nice ideas but I just don’t think they are that workable in a sense. This may be due to the date being 30 years old or twice the age of some of our younger members. Times have changed.

The naked book test that’s what the book is about and what most people will buy it for. Only works some of the time. I tried it out on IM and well first 2 I got right 3rd one the word was MAkE and I got MADE. Second time I did it on some one else 3 words. And these words wasn’t even mentioned in the book. The 5th time word I kind of got a hit the word was Time. Then I tried this on my brother while he was in the room I went for MAKE and yep the word was MADE. So draw what you like from that.

Also I didn’t like the other effects in the book the gravity one and the one about controlling people on the TV. Just seems a bit convoluted to me.

Also there are a few typos and errors in the book and if I noticed them then. I shall offer this little snippet. .

The word “were” is only 49% as likely to come up as “were” even though the overall frequency of the table is remarkably high.

For £30 a bit of proof reading and all that jazz would go a long way.


There are some good things in the book too and has Tomo says it wont always work but to me and I am sorry to say this I could have got PS2 or something similar for the same money or neigh on and got a nice hard back book to boot.

Good idea though and I am not creative to or knowledgeable enough to write a book. So my hat is of to the man for that at least.[/quote]

ooooh, i've popped back in briefly as i've nearly finished what i had to...and it's nearly lunch-time...

anyway, Naked Mentalism you say?

well, firstly, i was lucky enough to read the preview editions, and i have genuinely used all the info...

the thing to remember is, well, personally speaking only, is that this kind of stuff needs to be worked on, not performed straight out of the box...patter is everything really....

for me, the lovely thing about NM, isnt the book test, as good and more importantly, as REAL as it feels; its not the main selling point...

right, take Psychological Subtleties, the rose/lion stuff I'm talking about here...thats great, but waaay too obvious for alot of people, from my opinion only...and how old exactly is that data?

but what Tomo has given you, is proven and workable words that you can use, that far exceeds PS1, and opens up many a door and presentational possibility...

all it takes it a bit of thought, a bit of testing, and some creativity really..

for example, image having a photoframe covered by a cloth, and you discuss with someone some standard things you'd expect to see in an action movie...you start asking them to visualise certain elements as they name them...

you pull back the cloth, and wallop...there's a small poster of a imagined film, all the images previously mentioned by the person are there on the poster...

thought, creativity, patter, which are the presentational cornerstones of mentalism as far as I'm concerned...

so there!

anyway, quick nose around and I'm away again..

Markdini wrote:The naked book test that’s what the book is about and what most people will buy it for. Only works some of the time. I tried it out on IM and well first 2 I got right 3rd one the word was MAkE and I got MADE. Second time I did it on some one else 3 words. And these words wasn’t even mentioned in the book. The 5th time word I kind of got a hit the word was Time. Then I tried this on my brother while he was in the room I went for MAKE and yep the word was MADE. So draw what you like from that.
.

[/quote]

What I draw from that is that if there is no force of book, no force or limitation of page etc., then those results sound bloody impressive!

I await my copy with interest.

And incidentally, I'd love someone to try the naked book test on me on IM, before I get the book myself. Please drop me a pm here

misterblack - no force of page or anything, thats the great thing about it...

it can work by text message if you word it correctly too...

but please, when you buy it, give the presentation proper thought and patter, this is not a "trick" in anyway, this, if done properly, can make you seen authentic, as if you really are peeping inside their mind...

and, as we all know, in mentalism, the odd close call, the occasional miss really does add to your authenticity...

and the fact you get all the data for different words, subjects and so on too, well, name me a book that enables you to properly create your own hands-free or naked psychological effects?!

and as for the age of the data, well, Psychological Subtleties is still a well respected book, and in general, the english language hasnt changed a great deal...look at how many new entries there are a year in the oxford dictionary for example...

abraxus wrote: and as for the age of the data, well, Psychological Subtleties is still a well respected book, and in general, the english language hasnt changed a great deal...look at how many new entries there are a year in the oxford dictionary for example...

Well acoording to this

The OED, as it's often called, is the only complete record of English from the 1500s to today. So, if you're a word, being inducted into the Oxford dictionary means you've finally made it. Every quarter, the dictionary adds about 250 new entries.

so that makes 30,000 new words since the research was carried out.

fair enough, but clinging onto that fact doesnt detract from the usability of what's in Naked Mentalism...look at how old the old psychological shape forces are for example...

i think all I'm saying is markdini, that this work takes time and effort to use to it's full...there's all kinds of things you can do to nudge people into mental-corners, as I'm sure you know...

if anyone is looking for 100% hit rates, instant "wins" and so on, please go and buy a self-worker...i'll shut up now!

Markdini,

Thanks for the typo. Looking at my records, 15 people read this book at various stages of its development. It was complex to write and indeed to get right, and we’re still finding odd little things. The good thing about Lulu is that it can be put right instantly. I do have a few comments on your post, however, which I’d like you to take the time to read.

First, no offence taken, mate. I know you’re an honest man without any malice and I respect your experience as your own. The near miss you got with made/make and the perception you have of my book makes me think that it’s really just a culture clash. You’re a serious magician and this is a book for serious mentalists used to a more fluid way of working than I think you were prepared for. You see, I published it at the behest of the working pros who hammered it in performance.

It’s kind of upsetting to read that you think this is simply a book of lists. I spent years discovering, exploring and developing the underlying models and their applications. I could have simply described the process of how to find new psychological forces and told readers to go find them. I decided instead to describe the science behind how to find new ones, how to measure their certainty, and gave you example categories of particularly strong ones to both demonstrate the concept and give you something to start with. Most aren’t even described anywhere else in the literature - and you have a way of finding more, backed by plenty of applications.

This is why I’m not sure where you’re coming from when you say that you just don’t think the material on psychological forces is workable. The responses people give haven’t changed in 30 years because we’re still talking about and imagining the same concepts we were 30 years ago. After all, they're forces, not free choices. In fact, I even go into the psychology of why psychological forces work at all, which also hasn’t changed for very good neurophysiological reasons. Any mentalist used to working with psychological forces will tell you that it’s all in the handling, and so I spend a long time detailing techniques for minimising misses via spec management, and converting misses to secondary hits or readings – anything to add to the experience. The applications given aren’t theory. They’re from real-world performers who road tested the material as well as my own applications for them. One presentation (“Abstract Connections”) even emulates the approach used very cleverly by a certain D Brown to force thoughts on the street. People have picked up on that and started using it with great success.

It’s the job of this work to emulate the powers of the psychic, not to produce 100% sure-fire hits, which is where there may have been some misunderstanding. As pointed out in the online preview, the harder you work the more you’ll get from this book. It’s not a case of repeating some carefully worded scripts. Take the book test as an example. I provide you with a sound statistical model of English, derived from a current analysis of the 100 million-word British National Corpus. You also know the mechanism laid out on page 54, as I describe how the underlying model developed, and how to get your hits from it, and yet you’re arguing that words your spectator should never even consider are relevant to that model. Page 54 shows why they’re not.

What really frustrated me was how close your results were and yet you saw them as failure. The approach I detail for the book test is to pull out the underlying concepts and weave patter around them, not simply to name a word. The example you gave was “Made” and “Make”. Well, surely you can see you have a very near hit indeed there. The approach should have given you all the ammunition you needed to claim a hit on the deeper, conceptual level. They’re the same word in different tenses, nothing more, so why not exploit that? I feel as if I’ve failed, not you, and that’s rather depressing.

As for not liking the lesser effects at the back, well, the idea behind the TV thing was, as stated, to get you used to looking “for hidden information you can exploit in your own Naked techniques.” That’s what these techniques are – the exploitation of hidden information. It also puzzles me when you say the TV bit is convoluted. How can something that happens automatically on the TV screen, and which you simply pre-empt, and which requires you to say just one simple sentence, be convoluted? Ditto “A Sense Of Gravity”. You just state you can feel fluctuations in the Earths gravitational field. Your spec will do the rest for you and prove you right!

Sod it. You can have a refund if you feel strongly enough about it. I do urge you to really get into the book test first, though. Learn to create those mental images that cover the concepts and which cover your misses with hits, get the specs thinking they’re making it so much harder for you by following your instructions when selecting a word, and you’ll soon see the difference.

Ok Tomo thanks for the offer of the refund, you are true gent. But I am going try some of this stuff out in a working envoriment or maybe at the next TM London meet.

I did like your imprvement on the Derren Brown coin thing and how you made sure you got the right coin.

Actually the type of mentalism I do is more Nyman/Spelmann stuff well certianly Nymans style on get Nyman rather then his Derren stuff. So when I am doing mentalism I usually have an out or two. So maybe I was seeing it with my "where is my out" blinkers on. The few tm people who met me will tell you a lot of the stuff i do is sure fire.

Give me a couple of weeks or so and lets see if it can change me mind.

Markdini wrote:Ok Tomo thanks for the offer of the refund, you are true gent. But I am going try some of this stuff out in a working envoriment or maybe at the next TM London meet.

I did like your imprvement on the Derren Brown coin thing and how you made sure you got the right coin.

Actually the type of mentalism I do is more Nyman/Spelmann stuff well certianly Nymans style on get Nyman rather then his Derren stuff. So when I am doing mentalism I usually have an out or two. So maybe I was seeing it with my "where is my out" blinkers on. The few tm people who met me will tell you a lot of the stuff i do is sure fire.

Give me a couple of weeks or so and lets see if it can change me mind.

No problems, mate. If you need any support, drop me a PM.

Markdini wrote:This may be due to the date being 30 years old or twice the age of some of our younger members. Times have changed.

That would be data!

So I guess you would eschew any concepts/abstractions or empirical referents if they are older than 30 years? What the **** is that? Much of magic and mentalism draws on ideas and methods from the ancient to the modern.

I contend it is simply not a book of lists, but of particular patterns of association that are prevalent in the human mind and in the English langauge, that if you study, you can use to your advantage. This is a treasure trove of material much akin to learning new scales and substitions in jazz. Now, go improvise and entertain!

DrTodd wrote:


That would be data!

So I guess you would eschew any concepts/abstractions or empirical referents if they are older than 30 years? What the **** is that? Much of magic and mentalism draws on ideas and methods from the ancient to the modern.

Well women over 30 get a good eschewing. Anyhoot I see the point your making Dr. And I am going to have a re-read of the book and see what I can come up with. Yes come to think of it , it is like being giving a load of musical notes and being told go make some music wich isnt a bad idea.

Markdini wrote:

DrTodd wrote:


That would be data!

So I guess you would eschew any concepts/abstractions or empirical referents if they are older than 30 years? What the **** is that? Much of magic and mentalism draws on ideas and methods from the ancient to the modern.

Well women over 30 get a good eschewing. Anyhoot I see the point your making Dr. And I am going to have a re-read of the book and see what I can come up with. Yes come to think of it , it is like being giving a load of musical notes and being told go make some music wich isnt a bad idea.

Excellent stuff Markdini! My first attempt at learning modal substitutions failed miserably, now they are second nature. I think that process is analogous to using Naked Mentalism.