MIND STRESS By: Tomas Blomberg

Mentalist introduces his latest study: “ The people we call mind readers are really good at extracting information from magnetic fields induced by currents in other people’s brains. When someone concentrates on something, and at the same time stress the mind, the currents in the brain induce extra-strong magnetic fields, which almost any person can pick up. At least, that is my hypothesis, and I have designed a portable test kit to do a scientific study.”

He displays (and shuffles) ten cards, each with ten three digits numbers on them. All the numbers are different, meaning that there are one hundred numbers in total.

Mentalist spreads the cards on the table and ask a participant to concentrate on one of the numbers. As a reaction test, she is asked to quickly put her finger on any corner of the card that has her number on it, not giving any indication of where her number is. She did not have to stress her brain, so no strong fields were induced.

Mentalist then shuffles the cards and asks the participants to continue concentrating on her number. He keeps eye contact with her as he deals the cards onto the table again. This time she has no idea where her number is, so when mentalist asks her to quickly find it, her minds clearly gets stressed as she quickly hunts for the card with her number on it. This stress apparently means that the induced magnetic fields in her brain are painfully strong, which allows mentalist to name her thought of number.

As an afterthought, mentalist removes a sheet of paper with two columns: Success and Failure. He adds another tick to the success column (of which there are hundreds of ticks), leaving the failure column pretty much empty. He quips, “I need to do the test a few more times to get some statistical significance!)