There is a category of mentalism effects that I think of as personality-forward. These are effects where the method is almost beside the point — where the entire experience lives in the performer’s character, their interaction with the audience, and the theatrical space the effect creates for conversation, humor, drama, and connection.
The book test, design duplication, and the mental epic are three of the most personality-forward effects in mentalism. They are not the most technically demanding. They are not the most visually spectacular. But they are, in my experience, the most generous — they give the performer room to breathe, room to be themselves, and room to create moments that feel genuinely personal rather than mechanically impressive.
I want to talk about each of them, not in terms of method — that is off limits and always will be — but in terms of what they offer the performer as vehicles for personality.
The Book Test: A Conversation Disguised as an Effect
The book test, in its simplest description, is this: a spectator opens a book to a freely chosen page, reads a word or passage silently, and the mentalist reveals what they read. The audience sees an apparently impossible demonstration of thought reading.
What makes the book test remarkable as a performance piece is not the impossibility. It is the time.
Most mentalism effects are relatively brief. The spectator thinks of something, the mentalist reveals it, and the moment is over in sixty to ninety seconds. The book test, by contrast, creates a natural, unhurried interaction that can last three, four, five minutes or more. There is the selection of the book. The opening to a page. The reading of the passage. The performer’s apparent process of receiving the thought. And then the reveal, which can itself be stretched and dramatized.
During all of that time, the performer is on stage with a spectator, doing nothing but talking. There are no props to manipulate, no cards to deal, no objects to produce. There is a book, a person, and a conversation. And the quality of that conversation is what separates a forgettable book test from an unforgettable one.
I started performing book tests about two years ago, and what struck me immediately was how much space they gave me to be myself. In my card magic days, the performance was structured around the mechanics — do this, say that, execute this move, deliver this line. The effect dictated the performance. With the book test, the performance dictates the effect. I can be funny. I can be philosophical. I can riff on whatever word or concept emerges. I can share a personal anecdote that connects to the reading. I can ask the spectator questions that reveal their personality to the audience.
The book itself becomes a conversation starter. I tend to use books that are meaningful to me — books about innovation, about psychology, about the history of ideas. When a spectator opens one of these books, whatever passage they land on becomes a jumping-off point for genuine discussion. The mentalism is not the whole experience. It is the punctuation at the end of a conversation that was already interesting.
This is what I mean by personality-forward. The effect does not work despite the performer’s personality. It works because of it. A book test performed by someone with nothing interesting to say is flat and procedural. A book test performed by someone who can riff, connect, and create genuine moments of shared engagement is one of the most powerful pieces in mentalism.
Design Duplication: The Effect That Makes the Performer an Artist
Design duplication — where a spectator draws something and the mentalist reproduces it without having seen the original — is, on its surface, a demonstration of thought reading. But in performance, it is something more interesting. It is a demonstration of connection.
The reason I love design duplication as a performance piece is that it makes the invisible visible. In a thought-reading demonstration, the reveal is verbal — the mentalist says a word, names a card, identifies a number. The audience hears the impossible. In design duplication, the reveal is visual — the mentalist turns around a drawing that matches what the spectator drew. The audience sees the impossible. And visual impossibility, in my experience, creates a different quality of astonishment.
But the real gift of design duplication is the process. The performer stands at a board or holds a pad, apparently concentrating, apparently receiving impressions, apparently translating mental images into drawn lines. This process is pure performance. It is acting. It is the creation of a dramatic moment that exists entirely in the performer’s behavior, their facial expressions, their commentary on what they are apparently perceiving.
Some mentalists play this straight — serious concentration, furrowed brow, whispered descriptions of shapes and colors. Others play it for comedy — exaggerated frustration, self-deprecating humor about their artistic skills, deliberately terrible drawing that somehow ends up matching. The effect supports both approaches equally well because the drawing process is entirely in the performer’s hands. The method is fixed, but the presentation is infinitely flexible.
I tend toward the comedic end. I am not a natural artist — my drawings are genuinely terrible — and I have found that leaning into this weakness creates more audience engagement than trying to hide it. When I stand at a flipchart, squinting at nothing, muttering about how the image is coming through but my hand is not cooperating, the audience laughs. They are entertained by the process. And when the final reveal shows that my terrible drawing somehow matches the spectator’s image, the laughter transforms into astonishment.
This is the personality-forward principle in action. The effect creates space for me to be the specific person I am — someone who is analytically sharp but artistically hopeless, someone who can read a room but cannot draw a straight line. My particular combination of strengths and weaknesses becomes the entertainment, and the mentalism effect is the framework that supports it.
Mental Epic: The Effect That Keeps Building
The mental epic is a prediction effect presented on a large board divided into sections, where multiple predictions are revealed to match multiple spectator choices. What makes it special as a performance vehicle is its cumulative structure.
Most mentalism effects are single-moment experiences. There is one reveal, one gasp, one impossible moment. The mental epic has three, or sometimes more. Each reveal builds on the last. The first match is surprising. The second is startling. The third — the one that proves it could not have been coincidence, could not have been luck, could not have been anything other than genuine impossibility — is devastating.
This cumulative structure gives the performer something invaluable: an arc. The performance has a beginning, a middle, and a climax. There is rising tension. There is dramatic development. There is a narrative shape that audiences instinctively respond to because it mirrors the structure of every story they have ever heard.
And within that arc, there is enormous space for personality. Between each reveal, the performer has time. Time to interact with the spectators who made the choices. Time to build anticipation. Time to be funny, or dramatic, or philosophical, or whatever their natural mode of performance happens to be.
I have seen mentalists perform the mental epic as a rapid-fire demonstration — bang, bang, bang, three matches, thank you and good night. It works, in the sense that the audience is impressed. But the performers who use the mental epic to its full potential are the ones who treat the space between the reveals as the real performance. They use those moments to connect with the audience, to build character, to create the emotional context that makes the reveals meaningful rather than merely impressive.
In my own performances, the mental epic has become one of my favorite pieces specifically because of this spaciousness. I use it in keynotes as a demonstration of pattern recognition and prediction — concepts directly relevant to my consulting work. The three predictions are framed not as demonstrations of psychic ability but as demonstrations of how patterns in human decision-making can be understood and anticipated. The audience is engaging with ideas while being entertained by impossibility, and the cumulative structure gives me the time and space to develop both threads simultaneously.
The Common Thread
What the book test, design duplication, and the mental epic share is this: they are all effects that require the performer to fill time with personality.
A card trick is dense with procedure. Pick a card, look at it, put it back, shuffle, cut, reveal. The mechanics structure the performance. The performer is executing a sequence, and the personality exists in the gaps between steps.
These three mentalism effects are the opposite. The mechanics are minimal. The structure is loose. The personality is not in the gaps — it is the substance. The performer must be interesting, engaging, funny, warm, or dramatic enough to sustain several minutes of interaction that is not procedurally driven. If they cannot, the effect sags. If they can, it soars.
This is why I call them personality delivery systems. They are frameworks that exist to showcase who the performer is as a human being. The impossibility provides the reason for the audience to pay attention. The performer’s personality provides the reason for the audience to care.
Choosing Your Vehicle
Not every personality suits every effect. This is something I have learned through trial and error that I want to share because it might save someone else some awkward performances.
The book test suits performers who are verbally fluent, who can improvise, who enjoy conversation, and who have enough cultural knowledge to riff on whatever text emerges. If you are naturally quiet or prefer structured scripts, the book test’s open-ended nature might work against you.
Design duplication suits performers who are comfortable with physical comedy, who can make their apparent process of receiving impressions entertaining, and who are not embarrassed by their own limitations. If you cannot laugh at yourself, the drawing element can become stiff and uncomfortable.
The mental epic suits performers who understand dramatic arc, who can build tension, and who have the patience to let each reveal land fully before moving to the next. If you tend to rush through material, the mental epic’s cumulative power will be lost.
I perform all three, but the book test is my strongest because my natural mode is conversational. I like talking to people. I like riffing. I like the unpredictability of whatever text emerges and the challenge of connecting it to something meaningful in real time. This suits who I am — a consultant who makes his living through conversation, an entrepreneur who builds relationships through dialogue, a person who is more verbal than visual.
Your strongest vehicle will be the one that aligns with your natural mode. The one that feels less like a performance and more like an amplified version of who you already are.
The Deeper Lesson
Here is what these three effects have taught me about mentalism more broadly: the best mentalism effects are the ones that get out of the performer’s way.
Effects that demand constant procedural attention — “now turn the card over, now deal three piles, now spell your name” — put the performer in the role of an administrator. They are managing a process, and the audience is watching the process, and the performer’s personality is filtered through the mechanics of what they are doing.
Effects that create space — time, silence, openness, room for improvisation and interaction — put the performer in the role of a host, a conversationalist, a human being who happens to be doing something impossible. The audience is not watching a process. They are engaging with a person. And that engagement is where the extraordinary moments live.
I did not understand this when I started. I thought the most impressive effects were the most procedurally complex ones — the ones with multiple phases, multiple reveals, multiple opportunities for impossibility. I have come to believe the opposite. The most impressive effects are the simplest ones, performed by the most interesting people.
The book test is simple. Design duplication is simple. The mental epic is simple. What is not simple is being the kind of person who can fill those frameworks with genuine human connection, humor, warmth, and theatrical intelligence.
That is the work of a lifetime. And these three effects are the vehicles that make it visible.