The first time I used ESP cards in a performance, I made every mistake it was possible to make with presentation. The effects worked. The audience was impressed. But the experience felt like a science experiment, not a human moment. And I could not figure out why until I stopped thinking about the props and started thinking about what the props were communicating before I ever said a word.
ESP cards — the ones with the simple geometric symbols, circle, cross, wavy lines, square, star — carry a visual language that predates any individual performer. They look like something from a psychology lab. They look like something a researcher in a white coat would use to test subjects behind a two-way mirror. They communicate “experiment” and “test” and “statistical analysis.” They do not communicate “personal connection” or “wonder” or “this is about you.”
And that is a problem, because mentalism lives and dies on personal connection. The moment your audience feels like test subjects rather than participants in something extraordinary, you have lost the emotional core of the experience.
The Laboratory Trap
Here is what I was doing wrong. I would bring out the ESP cards, explain what they were — their history, how they were designed for parapsychology research, how the symbols were chosen to be simple and unambiguous. I thought this context was fascinating. I had spent time studying the history of ESP research, the Rhine experiments at Duke University, the decades of controversy around whether extrasensory perception could be demonstrated under controlled conditions. It was genuinely interesting material, and I delivered it with enthusiasm.
The audience listened politely. They found it mildly interesting. And then I performed the demonstration, and they were impressed by the outcome but oddly unmoved by the experience.
The problem was that I had framed the entire piece as a test. A laboratory test. Here are the tools, here is the protocol, here is the history of the protocol, now let us see if it works. The audience was watching to see whether the experiment would succeed or fail. They were evaluating rather than experiencing.
This is the exact dynamic Ken Weber warns about when he distinguishes between puzzles and extraordinary moments. A puzzle invites analysis. An extraordinary moment bypasses analysis entirely and hits you somewhere deeper. My ESP card presentation was a puzzle. A well-constructed, historically grounded, technically successful puzzle. But a puzzle nonetheless.
The Turning Point
The shift happened when I stopped presenting the cards and started presenting the person.
I was performing at a small gathering after a conference in Graz — maybe fifteen people in a lounge, informal, conversational. I had the ESP cards with me but had been debating whether to use them, because the last few times had felt flat. I decided to try something different.
Instead of opening with the cards, I opened with a question. I asked the person I was working with — a woman named Claudia, as it happens, who worked in pharmaceutical research — whether she had ever had an experience where she knew something before she had evidence for it. A gut feeling that turned out to be right. A phone call she somehow expected before it came. The sense that someone was watching her before she turned around.
She thought about it. She told a brief story about a time she had been driving and suddenly felt compelled to take a different route, only to learn later that there had been an accident on her usual path. It was a small story, nothing dramatic, but it was her story. And the people around us were listening, because personal stories are inherently more interesting than historical lectures about J.B. Rhine.
Only then did I introduce the cards. Not as scientific instruments. Not as tools from a laboratory. But as a simple way to test whether that intuition — the same kind she had just described — could be demonstrated in a more deliberate way. The cards were not the point. They were just a framework for exploring something she already believed she had experienced.
The entire energy of the demonstration changed. She was not being tested. She was being listened to. The cards were not clinical props. They were a conversation piece, literally — a way to continue the conversation we had started about intuition and knowing.
When the demonstration succeeded, her reaction was not “Impressive trick.” Her reaction was closer to “I knew it” — a kind of delighted validation, as if the demonstration had confirmed something she had always suspected about herself. The other people in the group reacted to her reaction, which was warm and personal and authentic, rather than to the mechanics of the demonstration.
That evening taught me more about presentation than months of practice had.
The Prop Problem, Generalized
ESP cards are just one example of a broader challenge in mentalism: the props look like they belong to the performer, not the participant. A deck of regular playing cards is universal. Everyone has handled playing cards. They are familiar, personal, part of people’s lived experience. ESP cards are none of these things. They are specialized, unfamiliar, and they belong to a world the audience does not inhabit.
This creates a power imbalance that undermines the intimacy mentalism depends on. When I hold up a set of ESP cards, the implicit message is: “I have special tools, and I am going to use them on you.” When I hold up a borrowed ring or a napkin with someone’s writing on it, the implicit message is: “Something is going to happen with your object, in your world.”
The fix is not to stop using ESP cards. They are effective tools for certain demonstrations, and their simplicity — five distinct, easily recognized symbols — makes them practical in ways that more complex props are not. The fix is to change the implicit message the cards carry.
Five Things I Changed
The first thing I changed was the introduction. I stopped talking about the history of ESP research entirely. No Rhine, no Duke University, no parapsychology laboratories. Instead, I introduce the symbols as what they look like to a non-specialist: simple shapes. “Five simple shapes — a circle, a cross, waves, a square, and a star. Nothing complicated. The kind of thing you might doodle on a notepad during a meeting.” This grounds the cards in the audience’s world, not in a scientist’s world.
The second thing I changed was the language. I dropped every word that sounded clinical. “Test,” “experiment,” “demonstrate,” “probability,” “statistically” — all gone. Replaced with words that sound human. “Let us try something.” “I am curious about something.” “Think about this for a moment.” The shift from clinical to conversational is subtle but it transforms the frame. The audience is no longer subjects in an experiment. They are participants in a shared experience.
The third thing I changed was the physical handling. I used to lay the cards out on a table in a neat row, like a researcher setting up a controlled test. Now I hold them casually, spread them in my hands, let the participant touch them and handle them before we begin. The cards should feel like they belong to the moment, not to a protocol. Letting the participant interact with them physically before the demonstration begins transfers a sense of ownership. These are no longer my props. They are our conversation pieces.
The fourth thing I changed was the focus of the demonstration itself. Instead of framing it as “Can I read your mind?” I frame it as “Can we communicate without words?” The shift from “I” to “we” is crucial. Mind reading is a one-directional power dynamic. The performer has power, the participant does not. Communication is bidirectional. It is collaborative. It turns the participant into an active partner rather than a passive subject.
The fifth thing I changed, and this was the most important, was what happens after the reveal. In my old presentation, the reveal was the climax. I showed the match, the audience reacted, I moved on. Now, the reveal is the beginning of a conversation. I ask the participant what they experienced. What they felt when they chose a symbol. Whether they had any sense that something unusual was happening. I am genuinely curious, and that genuine curiosity — as opposed to the performative curiosity of a mentalist character — creates a moment of authentic human exchange that the audience responds to more than the effect itself.
What Derren Brown Taught Me About Props
In Absolute Magic, Derren Brown makes a point about conviction that extends beyond the performer’s inner state to the performer’s relationship with their tools. If you treat a prop as a trick device, the audience reads it as a trick device. If you treat it as something meaningful, the audience reads it as something meaningful. The prop takes its emotional temperature from the performer, not from its physical appearance.
This means that the same set of ESP cards can feel clinical or personal depending entirely on how the performer handles them, talks about them, and integrates them into the human interaction. The cards are neutral. They are cardboard with symbols printed on them. The meaning — “laboratory test” or “personal exploration” — is something the performer creates through presentation, language, and conviction.
I have seen performers use identical ESP cards to completely different effect. One treats them like tools and the demonstration feels like a science fair project. Another treats them like invitations and the demonstration feels like a shared secret. Same symbols, same cardboard, same basic demonstration. Entirely different experience.
The Broader Lesson
Every prop in mentalism carries a default message that you need to be aware of and deliberately counteract or reinforce. Envelopes say “prediction sealed inside.” Clipboards say “write your answer here.” Blindfolds say “I cannot see.” These default messages are not wrong, exactly, but they are impersonal. They tell the audience about the mechanics of what is about to happen. They do not tell the audience why it matters or what it means.
The presentation work — the real craft of mentalism, as opposed to the method work — is the process of replacing impersonal default messages with personal, human ones. Why this envelope matters is not that it contains a prediction. Why it matters is that three minutes ago, this person made a completely free choice, and somehow that choice is written on a piece of paper that has been sitting on the table since before they arrived. The envelope is incidental. The human impossibility is the point.
ESP cards taught me this lesson because they were the most obviously clinical prop in my kit. They forced me to confront the gap between what the prop communicated on its own and what I needed the experience to communicate. Closing that gap — through language, through handling, through focus, through genuine curiosity about the person I was performing for — was one of the most valuable presentation challenges I have faced.
The cards are still in my kit. They look exactly the same as they did when I first bought them. But the experience they create is unrecognizable from those early performances, because the experience was never really about the cards. It was about the person across the table, and whether I had the skill and the sensitivity to make them feel like the most interesting person in the room.
Five simple shapes on cardboard. Everything else is presentation. And presentation, in mentalism, is everything.