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by **kolm** » Aug 4th, '11, 20:08

A good chunk of what Derren does can be found in 13 Steps, or I'm told if not in there then in some other mentalism book (but I find if it's not in 13 Steps I don't want to know because the trick is so damn good)

If you want to do mentalism without the gimmicks and literally be able to do a trick naked or over the phone (both Tomo's words... he worries me at times...) then I'll second/third the suggestion of Naked Mentalism

Craig is right, it's not a new concept at all, but that doesn't mean the book isn't worth getting. Because it is. So go and get it, unless like me you're waiting for book 3 to come out so you can try and get a bulk deal :p

(Disclaimer: Tomo kindly let me have a copy of the naked book test a long time ago, and I promised to review it on here. I never did. Sorry)

by **Duplicity** » Aug 4th, '11, 20:18

Craig - if those naked methods were published/available to purchase publicly; could you maybe list one or two please. As for "what I saw on Dynamo", what we see happen, may not be completely what happened. Why would they show p**-****? It would make no sense theatrically. Everything you need is in Practical Mental Effects and 13 Steps.

by **Part-Timer** » Aug 4th, '11, 20:41

cc100 wrote:The second point, I'm not too sure about. The kid did not write anything - it was nothing to do with the billets collected in the glass container at the front. You might be right that I misremembered the effect, as it was a year or so ago. However, I am fairly certain that it wasn't a billet switch.

I didn't go to the same live show, but was this the bit where Derren did something liked asking for someone who was very visual, with a vivid recollection/imagination to come out and think of a moment from his childhood? I'm not sure, as you've said that the person who did this was actually a child, but both times I saw it, Derren asked someone for a childhood memory.

It's possibly a bit that was added in the second year of the run, though.

Duplicity wrote:Craig - if those naked methods were published/available to purchase publicly; could you maybe list one or two please.

Some of them were contained in this book. Definitely available publicly (I got mine in the WH Smith in Bournemouth in 1981 or so): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tricksters-Hand ... 000691084X

Naked methods include:

Doing readings. The most obvious prop-free one being palm reading, but "intuitive" readings have been around for ages.
Psychological forces.
Equivoque.
Hellstromism.
Pencil reading/sound reading. Not purely "naked" in the strictest sense, perhaps.
Progressive anagrams (memorised).

What Jon did was to take the existing stuff on psychological forces to the next level (in particular with his word/book test). Great works, but there have been plenty of "naked" techniques before.

by **cc100** » Aug 4th, '11, 20:53

Part-Timer wrote:
cc100 wrote:The second point, I'm not too sure about. The kid did not write anything - it was nothing to do with the billets collected in the glass container at the front. You might be right that I misremembered the effect, as it was a year or so ago. However, I am fairly certain that it wasn't a billet switch.

I didn't go to the same live show, but was this the bit where Derren did something liked asking for someone who was very visual, with a vivid recollection/imagination to come out and think of a moment from his childhood? I'm not sure, as you've said that the person who did this was actually a child, but both times I saw it, Derren asked someone for a childhood memory.

It's possibly a bit that was added in the second year of the run, though.

Duplicity wrote:Craig - if those naked methods were published/available to purchase publicly; could you maybe list one or two please.

Some of them were contained in this book. Definitely available publicly (I got mine in the WH Smith in Bournemouth in 1981 or so): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tricksters-Hand ... 000691084X

Naked methods include:

Doing readings. The most obvious prop-free one being palm reading, but "intuitive" readings have been around for ages.
Psychological forces.
Equivoque.
Hellstromism.
Pencil reading/sound reading. Not purely "naked" in the strictest sense, perhaps.
Progressive anagrams (memorised).

What Jon did was to take the existing stuff on psychological forces to the next level (in particular with his word/book test). Great works, but there have been plenty of "naked" techniques before.

It was exactly that part of the show Part-Timer. Can you remember if any billets or other props were used in it? From what I remember, none were used.

by **Duplicity** » Aug 4th, '11, 21:36

I was talking about purely psychological forces - no more, no less. Palmistry and so on are systems and oracles.

by **Beardy** » Aug 4th, '11, 22:23

cc100 wrote:
Part-Timer wrote:
cc100 wrote:The second point, I'm not too sure about. The kid did not write anything - it was nothing to do with the billets collected in the glass container at the front. You might be right that I misremembered the effect, as it was a year or so ago. However, I am fairly certain that it wasn't a billet switch.

I didn't go to the same live show, but was this the bit where Derren did something liked asking for someone who was very visual, with a vivid recollection/imagination to come out and think of a moment from his childhood? I'm not sure, as you've said that the person who did this was actually a child, but both times I saw it, Derren asked someone for a childhood memory.

It's possibly a bit that was added in the second year of the run, though.

Duplicity wrote:Craig - if those naked methods were published/available to purchase publicly; could you maybe list one or two please.

Step 3 then. Whatever.

It was billet and envelope switch. I remember it vividly. Whilst the guy/girl was writing it down he started talking about seeing a punch and just show to misdirect. Hence you forgetting

Source: I had no life and saw the show 5 times, across both years
Some of them were contained in this book. Definitely available publicly (I got mine in the WH Smith in Bournemouth in 1981 or so): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tricksters-Hand ... 000691084X

Naked methods include:

Doing readings. The most obvious prop-free one being palm reading, but "intuitive" readings have been around for ages.
Psychological forces.
Equivoque.
Hellstromism.
Pencil reading/sound reading. Not purely "naked" in the strictest sense, perhaps.
Progressive anagrams (memorised).

What Jon did was to take the existing stuff on psychological forces to the next level (in particular with his word/book test). Great works, but there have been plenty of "naked" techniques before.

It was exactly that part of the show Part-Timer. Can you remember if any billets or other props were used in it? From what I remember, none were used.

by **Part-Timer** » Aug 4th, '11, 22:59

cc100 wrote:It was exactly that part of the show Part-Timer. Can you remember if any billets or other props were used in it? From what I remember, none were used.

Yes, I can remember. And, it seems, you cannot. :wink:

(I hope that answers your question, in a round-about way, but I don't really like dissecting another performer's works.)

Duplicity wrote:I was talking about purely psychological forces - no more, no less. Palmistry and so on are systems and oracles.

There was nothing to indicate that. No one here is a mind-reader you know.

Craig was not limiting himself, but talking about an existing range of techniques. This thread is about doing mentalism without props, not solely about psychological forces.

Have a guess at what tricks were in the book I linked to earlier. Yup, psychological forces. There were at least four of them in the book, as I recall.

Surely Psychological Subtleties came out before Jon's books.

by **Duplicity** » Aug 4th, '11, 23:12

Yes. However what I think seperates Naked Mentalism from the rest is that its explained why they work. And the sheer amount of the devils too. Of course there's been other books that reveal (pretty much) the same ones over and over. The Secrets of the Psychics (if i remember correctly) is another.

My point, however clumsily made was; that Naked Mentalism is a proper treatise on the subject - which hadn't been written about in such a way before.

by **kartoffelngeist** » Aug 4th, '11, 23:38

There were plenty of people doing card tricks before RRTCM (for example) came out, but it's still as good a place as any to start out...

Naked Mentalism seems as good a place as any to start on psychological forces and the like. Though obviously there are other sources...

by **cc100** » Aug 5th, '11, 09:41

Suppose that does indirectly answer my question Part-Timer, I guess there was some trickery involved that I didn't pick up on. Apologies Beardy/Chris, you were most probably right there. It is quite disappointing though, as I was hoping it was done without any writing, switches, etc. I guess this is a good example of the fact that the methods used to achieve certain effects in magic often disappoint.

by **Antera** » Aug 5th, '11, 09:59

As far as body reading goes i see some interesting work done on people regarding numbers.

If you give people a range of numbers , say 1-50 , people will, in general look upwards when thinking of a higher number and down when thinking of a low number. Some serious work was done on this at one of the Universities last year and it ahs been published. Maybe Prof. Wiseman was involved, the guy who advises Andy Nyman...ill have to look it back up

by **Part-Timer** » Aug 5th, '11, 10:07

Duplicity wrote:My point, however clumsily made was; that Naked Mentalism is a proper treatise on the subject - which hadn't been written about in such a way before.

That may very well be correct. To be fair to Craig, though, he wasn't claiming that there had been a previous in-depth book on the subject. He was saying that there have been techniques for performing propless mentalism around for ages. That is also correct.

I think there was a bit of confusion in this thread between "mentalism you could do naked if you had to" (or wanted to...) and "Naked Mentalism", the books.

That suggests that Tomo chose a cracking name for his works.

cc100 wrote:It is quite disappointing though, as I was hoping it was done without any writing, switches, etc. I guess this is a good example of the fact that the methods used to achieve certain effects in magic often disappoint.

Is it disappointing, or is it a good example of how a performance may be structured in such a way that even the magically-minded may forget a crucial element of the method?

by **cc100** » Aug 5th, '11, 10:22

Not disappointing in that sense, I'm not saying that the method used detracts in any way from a brilliant piece of mentalism. Rather, I was just hoping that body reading can actually be used to create an impromptu, propless mentalist effect. All the examples I put forward seem to rely on other methods - brilliantly disguised and performed, of course, but disappointing from a theoretical point of view. I'm hoping you understand what I mean.

by **Mr_Grue** » Aug 5th, '11, 10:50

cc100, you should take solace in the fact that you remembered the effect as being entirely propless. It demonstrates what can be achieved with props and a bit of psychology. The idea is to construct an effect in such a way that it's easy for the dirty business to be forgotten; the simplest way would be to make that moment brief and inconsequential. I'm not aware of there being anything in the literature that looks specifically at how to produce misremembered effects, but there are snips here and there on Get Nyman, on Hillford's Monsters of Mentalism DVDs. Michael Close's essay on assumptions in magic is worth a look too.

by **Tomo** » Aug 5th, '11, 12:33

Interesting thread. In Naked Mentalism, I uncovered and explored the common principle underlying a type of impromptu psychological force. Some instances of this force were collected by Banachek in Psychological Subtleties. Burling Hull had done some work before that, but why they work was not understood in any depth. I showed why they work, and introduced a concrete measure of how certain they are to work. This research enabled me to massively expand on Banachek's original collection of forces with dozens of new instances that have never been in print before. It also led to the realisation that it might be possible to create a general approach to mentalism that mimics more closely the way in which a psychic works. I cheekily called is approach "Naked", and went on to test it further by creating a new form of book test.

Rather than reiterate what I wrote all those years ago, here's the first page of Naked Mentalism. It explains exactly what the Naked approach is:

The Naked philosophy of mentalism is that the effects you produce should have no apparent cause. You could perform, if you wish, naked, to prove there’s no subterfuge. There’s nothing up your sleeve, nothing to peek, crib, write, burn, tear, or erase. In fact, you’ll use nothing more than your mind to obtain your results. Just like a real psychic.

Psychology holds that natural paranormal ability is the subconscious mind spontaneously providing conclusions based on its model of the world, imperfect and incomplete. Some people quite naturally interpret these spontaneous conclusions as psychic insight.

In contrast, you’ll use accurate models of aspects of the world as the source of your apparent paranormal ability. Your hit rate will begin far higher than a real psychic and will improve steadily as you learn to apply the ideas within this book. The rare misses you do encounter will be genuine, and your reactions will be genuine too.

There’s a lot to take in and learn. It’s not simply a case of repeating a carefully worded script and having people do what you want. What you get out of this book lies entirely in your hands.

Before you abandon this book in disgust, let me explain the power it potentially hands to you. You could send a spectator into a library. She could select any book from any shelf, call you, and you can tell her what’s on the page she selects, as if you were looking through her own eyes.

Banachek and I exchanged copies of our books at Tabula Mentis in London in April last year. Top bloke.

Now... I have had 9 PMs telling me about a single post in this thread, which I see has now been edited by a mod. If the usual suspect still insists on misrepresenting what my book contains, what it is about and where it sits in relation to other works, we can safely draw the conclusion that it is being done deliberately. The problem is, every time he slags my work off, I get a spike in sales as he draws yet more free attention to something that has sold steadily for over 4 years now. So, er, thanks for the free publicity and please do keep it up! :lol:

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