TED

The Art of Reading Minds | Oz Pearlman | TED

Mentalist Oz Pearlman opens by throwing away his own billing: he cannot read minds, he reads people, and he narrates every read as he makes it. He picks three strangers with a clap test, calls one of them as thinking of a dead man from the absence of warmth and the hands lingering in his pockets, then lands on Alexander the Great off a first name too long to count and a confused reaction to the words last name. Halfway through he stops performing and hands the room the only part of the craft that transfers: you never forget a name, you never knew it, because at the moment it was said you were composing your reply. His fix is lifted from the back of a shampoo bottle, listen, repeat, reply, with three ways to reply that pin a name in place, one of which he cheerfully admits is a lie. The finale removes him from the reveal entirely, using an 87 cent Frisbee with a 1.5 star review thrown blind into the audience to pick the stranger who says the name out loud.