There is a single word that separates good mentalism from extraordinary mentalism, and it took me far too long to understand what it was.
The word is “think.”
Not “pick.” Not “choose.” Not “select.” Think.
The difference between asking someone to pick a card from a deck and asking someone to merely think of a card is, from the audience’s perspective, the difference between a clever trick and something that feels genuinely impossible. I know this now. I did not know it when I started performing mentalism, and the gap between those two states cost me dozens of performances that could have been better.
How I Used to Do Things
When I first started mixing mentalism into my close-up sets at corporate events in Vienna and Salzburg, I was still thinking like a card magician. My background was in sleight of hand. I had spent hundreds of hours in hotel rooms learning to handle a deck of cards smoothly. When I transitioned toward mentalism effects, I brought all my card handling instincts with me.
This meant that my “mentalism” often looked like this: I would hand someone a deck. They would shuffle it. They would look at a card. Maybe they would put it back. Then I would reveal the card. The reveal was impressive — people reacted well — but something about the experience felt incomplete. It felt like a good card trick dressed up in mentalism clothing.
It was not until I read Ken Weber’s chapter on mentalism in Maximum Entertainment that I understood why. Weber makes the point with surgical precision: mentalism, at its most effective, should be presented as if the performer truly could do what he claims. And the further you deviate from that ideal, the less convincing it becomes. In mentalism, convincing correlates strongly with entertaining.
That observation cracked something open in my thinking.
The Gap Is Psychological, Not Technical
Consider the two scenarios from the spectator’s point of view.
Scenario one: I hand you a deck of cards. You shuffle. You look at a card. You put it back. I concentrate. I tell you your card. You are impressed. But somewhere in the back of your mind, you know I touched the deck. You know there were physical objects involved. You know that somewhere in that chain of events, something tricky happened. You may not know what, but you sense that the deck was involved in the solution.
Scenario two: I ask you to think of any card. Just think of one. I never touch a deck. You never touch a deck. There is no physical object between us. I concentrate. I tell you your card. You have no idea how I did it. There is nothing to reconstruct. No deck to examine. No moment where something might have happened. The only objects involved were your mind and my words.
The second scenario is not just more impressive. It is categorically different. It moves the effect from the realm of “how did he do that trick” into the realm of “is this actually possible.”
That shift — from puzzle to potential reality — is the engine of great mentalism. And the fuel for that engine is the word “think.”
Why Physical Objects Create Explanations
The human mind is a relentless explanation machine. We see something impossible and immediately begin searching for how it was done. Darwin Ortiz, in his work on effect design, describes this as the audience’s unconscious search for causal connections. Every physical object in a routine is a potential causal connection in the spectator’s reconstruction.
A deck of cards is a library of potential explanations. It can be marked. It can be stacked. It can be gimmicked. The spectator does not know which of these is true, but the mere presence of the deck provides a comfortable mental framework: “He did something with the deck.”
Remove the deck, and you remove the framework. The spectator is left with nothing to anchor their explanation. No physical object to blame. No moment of contact to scrutinize. Just two minds and an impossible result.
This is why “thought of” effects are not merely a stronger version of “picked” effects. They are a fundamentally different category of experience. The audience’s internal explanation process — which runs automatically, whether they want it to or not — hits a wall. And when that process stalls, when the brain cannot find even a plausible theory for what just happened, the result is not frustration. It is wonder.
The Real Mind Reader Test
Weber puts it in a way that I find impossible to argue with. If a real mind reader existed, what would they do? They would ask you to think of something. They would not hand you props. They would not ask you to write anything down. They would not need you to look at a card or open a book to a page. They would simply know.
The closer your performance gets to that ideal, the more convincing it becomes. And in mentalism, convincing is not separate from entertaining — it is the foundation of entertaining.
Every prop you add, every instruction you give, every physical step in the process is a step away from that ideal. Some steps are necessary. Some effects require physical objects to function. But the principle holds: minimize the gap between what a real mind reader would do and what you are doing, and you maximize the impact.
I started applying this test to every mentalism effect in my repertoire. For each one, I asked: what would a real mind reader do in this situation? And then I asked: how close can I get to that?
The answers were sometimes uncomfortable. Several effects I had been performing with pride looked, under this lens, like elaborate card tricks in mentalism costumes. The spectator had to do too much. Too many physical steps. Too many props. Too many moments that screamed “the trick happens here.”
The Practical Challenge
Here is where I should be honest about something. “Thought of” effects are harder to perform than “picked” effects. Not always, and not in every case, but as a general principle, removing physical objects from a routine means you have fewer tools to work with. The deck of cards is not just a prop for the audience to interact with. It is, for the performer, a rich environment full of possibilities. Take it away, and you must rely on entirely different skills.
This is one reason why so many performers default to “pick a card” when they could be saying “think of a card.” The former is easier. The latter requires a deeper commitment to the craft of mentalism and a different set of performance muscles.
When I first tried to move toward “thought of” effects, I stumbled. My first attempts felt thin. Without the ritual of handling cards, without the visual presence of a prop, the performance felt naked. Where was the theatre? Where was the spectacle?
I was asking the wrong questions. The theatre in mentalism is not in the props. It is in the space between two people. The spectacle is the moment of revelation. The drama is the buildup — the pauses, the concentration, the apparent struggle of one mind reaching toward another.
It took me months to find my rhythm with this new approach. Months of hotel room practice sessions where I was not practicing my hands at all, but practicing my words, my timing, my ability to create tension and release with nothing but language and eye contact.
The Continuum, Not the Binary
I want to be clear that this is not an absolute rule. Not every effect can be a pure “thought of” experience. Some of the most powerful effects in mentalism involve physical objects — sealed envelopes, books, drawings on paper. The question is not “does this effect use props” but rather “does the audience believe the props are integral to the method.”
A book test, for example, involves a physical book. But if presented correctly, the book is not the method — it is the medium. The spectator reads a word, closes the book, and the performer reveals the word. The book is a conduit for a thought, not a suspicious object. The audience does not think “he did something with the book.” They think “he knew what I was reading.”
The distinction is subtle but crucial. The props that survive the “real mind reader” test are the ones that feel like natural containers for thoughts, not like magical apparatus.
Drawing something on a piece of paper passes the test. A real mind reader might ask you to draw something so they could have a visual target. An envelope passes the test. A real mind reader might use one to demonstrate that your thought was sealed and inaccessible. A deck of cards, in most contexts, fails the test. A real mind reader would not need a deck.
What Changed in My Performances
The practical effect of this shift on my work has been significant. When I perform at corporate events and keynote presentations now, I am much more conscious of the continuum between “picked” and “thought of.” I lean as far toward the “thought of” end as each effect allows.
The audience responses are qualitatively different. With “picked” effects, the reaction tends to be: “That was a great trick. How did you do it?” With “thought of” effects, the reaction is more often a pause, followed by: “Wait. How is that possible?”
The first response is curiosity about method. The second is genuine wonder. And genuine wonder — the momentary suspension of the brain’s explanation process — is the heartbeat of mentalism.
I have also noticed that “thought of” effects stick in people’s memories longer. Months after a performance at a conference in Graz, a woman approached me at a completely different event and said, “You are the person who knew what I was thinking.” She did not remember specific tricks. She did not remember props. She remembered that I knew what she was thinking.
That is the power of the “thought of” effect. It creates a memory that is not about the trick at all. It is about the experience. And experiences, unlike tricks, do not get filed away as “things magicians do.” They get filed as “things that happened to me.”
The Lesson Beyond Mentalism
This principle — that the closer you get to the ideal version of what you claim to do, the more powerful the experience becomes — extends far beyond mentalism. It is a design principle for any kind of performance, any kind of communication, any kind of experience.
In my consulting work, I see the same dynamic. The most persuasive presentations are not the ones with the most elaborate slide decks and props. They are the ones where the speaker seems to know the audience’s concerns before anyone voices them. The “thought of” version of a business presentation is one where the audience feels understood, not presented to.
But in mentalism specifically, the word “think” is the gateway to an entirely different experience. It costs nothing to say. It requires no additional props. It is, in every sense, a free upgrade from impressive to impossible.
And the audience will never look at you the same way again.