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Was thinking about Magic vs Mentalism and realized when doing magic we try to make it look easy and when doing mentalism we try to make it look harder.

Magic = Learning hard sleights/moves and making it look simple, or invisible.

Mentalism = In a lot of cases, knowing the information ahead of the reveal and acting like we are receiving the information or concentrating hard to read thoughts.

Has this been discussed before in theory material?

Good topic Derren Brown talks about this in Absolute Magic.

What are your thoughts on this ?

I think the difference here is that pretty much most spectators know that sleight of hand style magic is not actually real, where as there are many people that believe mentalists and mind readers are actually using psychological or NLP style techniques, rather than just knowing in advance.

So concentrating hard and struggling to read someone comes across as more believable than some great physical effort required to make a card come to the top of the deck.

I do find though that hollywooding a big physical effort with cards and coins goes down well with children.

Magic and Mentalism is all about making the easy look hard and the hard look easy innit?
I would say Magic = Creating the impossible
and Mentalism = Creating the improbable

The other month, Marc Paul was at Conjuring at the Court. He brought out an envelope. And he made a point about stateing that it wasn't a prediction. It was a forecast of eventual probability. That's not a direct quote, I may be remembering the wording poorly, but you understand the difference this has on the effect.

Magic and Mentalism are paired so close, but seem so far apart within this topic