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A blustery November Saturday saw Psycrets return to Hitchin for its sixteenth Tabula Mentis, subtitled Entangled Minds.

Opening the day’s lectures was Atlas Brookings, whose ‘Train Tracking’ has been one of the biggest and most exciting releases to happen in Mentalism for some time. Not trains running today, though! Instead Atlas treated us to a number of other naked mentalist techniques that he uses, including his signature superhero divination effect.

Most valuable, though, was an insight into how Brookings chooses to present progressive anagrams, a technique I know many people shy away from for its apparent transparency. His handling of them shows a deep understanding of their weaknesses and so he is able instead to create effects that make absolute sense, and are capable of deep astonishment.

Looch set a conversational tone which happily remained for the rest of the day. He included in his lecture a number of confessional accounts of when things have gone wrong for him, showing how bad experiences are often what we need in order to become better performers, better businessmen, and even better people. This led to several members offering their own horror stories.

He was also keen to demonstrate that the simplest way of improving one’s performance is to keep in mind that it should always be about your audience. More weaknesses in method were patched up in Looch’s talk too, as he provided a wonderfully simple way of improving a technique with business cards, again by taking an illogical practice and changing it to make it make perfect sense.

After lunch we were treated to a live rendition of Stephen Young’s incomparable Yorkshire Christmas. There’s also a version of it on YouTube should curiosity get the better of you.

We then moved a couple of counties along as we were treated to the mind-reading styling of Newcastle’s Michael Murray. Starting off with a performance of his version of Out Of This World using a borrowed shuffled deck, he went on to outline a number of principles that he uses to rationalise process, to build rapport, and to use non-verbal communication as a means of creating false mistakes. Murray spoke at length, at speed and with passion, ably demonstrating why he has a reputation for being one of UK mentalism’s most prodigious thinkers.

Marc Spelman finished the day off with another generous talk. There’s a word that Marc uses quite a lot, which is “dynamic” and the more you learn about his thinking the more you see its importance, to not think solely in terms of method or effect but actually the framing, sensibility and, yes, dynamic of an effect that can be used both to bury the method and to create an emotional weight that might not otherwise exist.

Keen to continue the sense of dialogue between the speakers and the audience, Spelman joined in with the confessions, imparting the lessons that he, too, had learnt in the crucible of real world performances. The theme of handling required peculiarities of method came up again, too, as Marc gave his solution to the unnatural act of having a business card returned to your wallet. Lastly he spoke of how we have a tendency to collect methods of getting information, but put much less thought into how we reveal that information in an entertaining and interesting way. The day was a much more conversational affair than we have seen of late, and it was interesting to see how this led to themes emerging throughout the different talks - of learning from our mistakes, of rationalising our strange methods, of making what we do as much about our participants and audiences as possible. Hopefully this sense of dialogue will persist, as it brought with it a real sense of community and society.