Dear Mentalists: The Art of the Pre-Reveal and the Pickle Jar Approach
/You asked your friend to think of a famous person and write it down on a business card. Your friend is thinking of Brad Pitt. You’ve peeked this information.
You start to concentrate on their thought…
“Hmm… it’s an actor, I think. A film actor, primarily. At least that’s what I think I’m getting. He’s not old, but he’s been around for a while. I get the sense he’s been in a lot of public relationships. Hmm… he was in Fight Club. No… no… not Ed Norton. Hmm… who could it be. Wait.. it’s coming to me… Brad Pitt!”
This is only a slightly exaggerated version of the type of bad pre-reveals people give in mentalism. And by “pre-reveal” I mean the information they give before they (supposedly) know the actual information.
I once saw a trick where a guy had someone think of an item from a group of, like, 20 items. The person was thinking of an airplane. And the guy was picking up details of what they were thinking of. “It’s manmade… it’s a vehicle of some sort, I think.” Well, only two items in the group fit that description, so it was obvious where this was heading. He should have just said, “Well, it can only be the plane or the car then.” But instead he kept getting his “impressions.” “It’s big. Very big, actually. Am I seeing this in the air?” At that point it’s just like, get the fuck on with it.
We think of bad mentalism as saying, “You’re thinking of an actor… it’s Brad Pitt!” And so we think we need to add some process to the revelation. So we act as if we’re picking up on details as they become clearer and clearer. This, I think, seems more real, but it’s not great dramatically. It reduces the impact of the final reveal.
If you’re performing one-on-one, the other person already knows what they’re thinking of. If you give details and get closer and closer to that thing, then they soon realize exactly where this is going. It become anti-climactic.
Similarly, if you’re performing for an audience and they don’t know what the person is thinking, you don’t want to give so much detail that they’re ahead of you at the end. That too is anticlimactic. And sort of silly if they can jump to the correct conclusion with no psychic powers before you can put the pieces together with yours.
So what I find works best is to give information that is correct (or will be perceived as correct) but doesn’t give too much clarity. That way the people you perform for still get a sense of surprise when you name what they’re thinking of.
Three Ways to Give Information Without Giving Too Much Information
Let’s again say they’re thinking of Brad Pitt. Here are some techniques to give information without it being clear that you already know what they’re thinking.
Vagueness
This is sort of obvious. The idea is to just use hits that don’t actually reduce the pool of potential correct answers all that much.
“I feel this person is still alive.”
“I think it’s a male, yes…. oh… well, actually it could be a female with a strong masculine energy.”
“This is someone you might see on TV.”
That last statement, “Someone you might see on TV,” is just another way of saying, “Someone famous.” It’s the kind of statement you can make without even knowing what the person wrote down yet.
Tell Them What It’s Not
A good source for “hits” that don’t give too much information is to reveal what it’s not. The moment you say, “This is an actor,” we all know that a lot of people will jump to Brad PItt. He’s one of the most commonly thought of actors.
But if you say:
“I don’t think this is a politician.”
“I don’t get the sense this is a historical figure.”
“I don’t see really long hair.”
You are giving them hits by excluding some things, but you’re not really drawing a bullseye around any one particular thing yet.
Similarly, if you have a list of objects, saying “You’re thinking of something manmade,” might eliminate half of the objects or more in one “hit.” That’s too much for me. I would instead say something like, “Okay, I don’t get the sense this is something you’d find…like…in your backyard or something.” That’s still a statement with some meaning. It might eliminate the tree and the flower, or whatever, from your list. But it doesn’t narrow you down too much.
Retroactive Hits
“I think maybe… is this an athlete? Like a boxer? No? Hmmm….”
Later when it’s revealed to be Brad Pitt you say, “Ah! Okay, that makes sense. I think I was picking up on the fighting from Fight Club. That must be where the ‘boxer’ idea came from.”
Coming up with these retroactive hits is very easy with actors because you can just “pick up” on one of their better known roles and misinterpret that.
You can also do it with inanimate objects by asking them to build out a picture around that object in their mind. So you might say, “Is this an animal you’re thinking of?” They say no, and later on it’s revealed they were thinking of a tree. At that point you can say, “Hmm… I’m trying to figure out what I was receiving from you. Did you think of a bird in the tree or a squirrel or something?” If they were, this seems like another hit. If not, it doesn’t really matter because this comes after you’ve already successfully completed the effect.
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So, how close do you want to get to the final reveal in the pre-reveal stage? For me the answer is about 25% of the way there. Any more than that and I think it feels like a foregone conclusion before the reveal, rathe than a surprise.
Now, for this to make sense, you may need to change what you imagine the process of “mind reading” to be. You might think it doesn’t make sense to only get 25% of the way there, and then you make the leap to the correct answer. You might think it’s more “realistic” to get more and more information, gradually zeroing in on more specifics, until the point that you finally get the right answer. But that’s only “more realistic” if you imagine reading someone’s mind is like reading a sign in the distance. First it’s a blurry jumble, then as you get closer and closer you can make out more details, until finally you can read the sign or see the picture clearly. If that’s how you think of mind-reading, then it makes sense that your pre-reveal is a sort of linear progression of greater detail.
But I would argue that it might be more interesting—and certainly more dramatically satisfying—to not think of mind-reading that way. Consider an Agatha Christie novel. In one of those, are the detective’s insights of greater and greater specificity until it’s clear who the killer is? Do we have half the answers halfway through the book? No. There are hints and red herrings for the first 95% of the book. Only at the very end do you see that it all came together and the investigation “worked.”
I think this pace is a more interesting way to do a reveal. And there’s really no reason mind-reading can’t follow this formula. Instead of a picture gradually becoming clearer, maybe it’s more like opening a really tough pickle jar. You kind of work at it and work at it, and maybe you’re making some progress, but it’s hard to tell and then eventually—in a moment—the jar pops open. Maybe mind reading is like that. It’s not immediate. But it’s also not a linear progression. It’s sort of a struggle—is this working, is this not—and then, in a flash of insight, you have it. With that model of how mind-reading works, you can still “show the process” while keeping the ending in doubt and maintaining the surprise of your successful reveal.
