Covert Metaphor

 I’ve decided to add cold reading to this site’s categories. I think cold reading skills, psychological illusions and mentalism can only enhance the skills of someone studying conversational hypnosis, metaphor and persuasion.

Talk of cold reading has been mostly limited to the psychic underground. Recently magician turned psychological illusionist / mentalist Derren Brown made the term Cold Reading more accessible to the masses, but there has been a lot of really good material available for years to those that travel in magic and mentalism circles. Cold Reading is a technique which allows someone to covertly collect all kinds of information from a stranger. It’s mostly used in psychic and tarot readings, but I’m sure you can see the potential here.

The best introduction to Cold Reading, which is fairly new, is an online book offered by trickshop.com that allows you to create the impression you can read minds. There are many possibilities using Cold Reading in a persuasion setting. The better you can read people, the easier it’s going to be to calibrate.

So, the question is why does Cold Reading work? In psychological terms the answer is subjective validation or selective memory. When you throw out a handful of vague declarations about a person, they’ll usually attach significance to the things which they identify with, and tend to forget those things that didn’t really resonate with them.

John Wingert has produced an excellent audio product called Fake Psychic which goes deeply into the psychological aspects of Cold Reading, allowing the reader to adapt to anyone, as opposed to using canned scripts; which can be helpful in the beginning to learn, but it has its severe limitations.

 The truth of the reality is most people fail miserably when required to appraise their own individual personalities. Very few people make a study of their own lives. Learn basic psychology and the methods of differentiating personality types and you’ll have most people you cross think you’re a genuine psychic. So many want to believe!

admin :: Jul.01.2007 :: cold reading :: 1 Comment »

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