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Saturday, March 22, 2008

6 Things You Should Know To Learn Mentalism

By Bradlee Carter

If you an aspiring magician looking to learn mentalism, then I think you will find this article useful. I've been a fan of magic and mentalism for 13 years and the art never ceases to amaze me. I'm going to go through 6 things you should know about mentalism to help you get started on the right track.

1. First of all, what is mentalism? Mentalism is a performing art that is different to magic in a way that it fools the mind of your spectator through mind reading, precognition, clairvoyance or mind control. If you're looking to learn magic, mentalism is a great place to start because of the fact that you can start with simple tricks that can be done in common places. Once you learn mentalism at the basic level, you can learn advanced techniques that require memorization and the reading of body language.

2. Presentation is VERY important when performing mentalism. Mentalism is all about mind control and mind reading so you have to play the part that you can actually read their mind. So you can imagine that you're going to have to have a bit of fluff built into your conversations with your spectators. If you watch the presentations of popular magicians, you will notice that they have a particular way of talking and presenting that makes their tricks very believable.

3. Persuasion is key to having a great performance. When you start to learn mentalism, your communication skills have to be persuasive. The reason why is because some tricks are very simple to do, but require you to persuade the spectator to think a certain way. When you prep your spectator with persuasive talk, your magic trick delivery will be absolutely spectacular.

4. Misdirection and concealment. This part of mentalism requires you to draw the eyes of your spectators whereever you want. Body control and hand movements are very delicate which will keep your spectators from looking at other parts of your performance. If you can master misdirection, you can pretty much do anything like make things disappear.

5. Mind reading. This is probably the area that mentalism is most known for. I would have to say that if you learn mentalism, you should take the time and learn many different techniques of mind reading and mind control. A good place to start is "prediction" tricks where you try to read what the person's mind and make a prediction before they make a choice or decision.

6. Card tricks. Mixing up your routine with card tricks is highly recommended when performing mentalism. A deck of cards add to the "randomness" of being able to read minds. Card tricks are nice because spectators are familiar with it, but can still be amazed which will help prepare them for other parts of your presentation.

Now I hope these 6 things will help you in getting started when you learn mentalism. I advise you to start reading and practicing everything that you learn. Start with easier tricks and then try more difficult ones that require memorization and attention to detail. Once you have those small tricks under your belt, stringing them together will make for an awesome performance.

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