The ultimate mind trick is to accurately read someone’s mind and know what they are thinking, with out any fancy card forces or magic tricks. This is often achieved by frauds and scam artists using a technique called ‘Cold Reading’. When I first learnt NLP I modeled ‘Cold Reading’ from two sources and found it to be extremely effective at making people think that you could read their mind and tell their future.
At one party I went to I took out a normal deck of cards and used them as prop while I used cold reading to read all my girlfriend’s friends. Later in the night many people came up to me and professed that I had been the best fortune-teller they had ever met (this was in an Asian culture where people going to a fortune teller, was quite common).
For me I did it as fun exercise to check the ability that I had modeled and I deliberately set up an empowering future for all of the people I worked with, yet unfortunately many people use it, to claim to speak to the dead, talk of magic abilities and generally to get large sums of money out of people.
While we can read many of the things in peoples minds (such as they way they are thinking and style of their thinking), we are still unable to read their exact and precise thoughts. UNTIL NOW that is.
As science gets better and better at learning how our brains work we are starting to see some truly amazing milestones in the technology of brain scanning.
This story from CBS 60 Minutes shows exactly how far technology has come to being able to make this simple little feat available to computers and perhaps in the future everyone, including the government.
What is really interesting in this story is the whole concept of reading people’s intentions. Will the future be something like the movie ‘Minority Report’? Will people be scanned before getting on a plane to see if they have the intention to blow up that plane?
As the rate of our technology advances, I wonder if we are advancing at the same rate as a society to handle the many ethical issues related to this kind of technology.
The future is always interesting.
Tagged as: 60 Minutes, Cold Reading, Mind Reading, Mind Tricks, NLP
