Chicken Scratch
/Here’s a nice prediction idea that came to me via Nathan Wilson. It’s the sort of thing I like in that it’s couched in a sort of typical magical performance, but then it takes an unexpected left turn.
Imagine
You have your friend scroll to a random article on the home screen of CNN or the NY Times or any site like that.
You ask them to think of any word in the headline to the article they randomly scrolled to and to concentrate on that word.
You grab a nearby piece of paper or napkin and—after a few moments of focusing—you write down a word.
“Does the word you’re thinking of start with an E?” you ask.
No.
“It’s not ‘Egypt’?” you say.
No.
“Damn. This was one of those mornings I woke up, and I felt like my mind was really on top of things. You know? Like I’ve been practicing this stuff and some days I really feel like my mind is processing things and anticipating things on another level. Today was one of those days, so I thought I might get this one. Can I see the headline? I want to see if I can pick out the word you’re thinking of.”
Your friend shows you the phone.
“Hmmm…,” you say. “No. I’m not getting it. Was it ‘mystery’? That’s just a guess. No? Oh… ‘unravel.’ Okay.”
You look more closely at the phone.
“Wait… what is that? This picture…? I’ve seen that before.”
Your face scrunches up a little as you try and put the pieces together.
“What the… wait…,” you grab the prediction you just wrote and turn the paper over. On the opposite side of the paper or napkin is a doodle you were distractedly doing earlier in the interaction.
Your doodle matches up with the image from the article they randomly selected.
“Fuck, that’s crazy. I knew I was feeling some kind of weird energy today.”
Depending on how they respond, you can go deeper into describing the different “energies” associated with reading someone’s mind as opposed to “seeing the future.” And how you’re not really familiar with these things enough to differentiate them all. But you definitely felt something weird this morning… etc., etc.,
Method
This is just a presentation for Inertia by Marc Kerstein.
I think the key is to make your doodle abstract. It’s not like, “Oh, I was drawing a picture of a bear in a tree and you randomly stopped on a bear in a tree!” No. You’re just drawing simple lines and shapes that end up matching with the image they’re looking at in an impressionistic way.
Looking at the image upside down first can further delay exactly how closely your image matches, to sort of give an extra bit of drama to the final reveal.
Below is Nathan’s original email to me…
During dinner, you absentmindedly draw on a napkin. You never bring any attention to it, just doodling. I then have this presentation to get people to think of words and try to mentally send them to me. But instead of them writing it down this time, I have them scroll through a news website and find an interesting word. This, of course, is Inertia.
The trick continues by you messing up the word, and when they show you the image, you seem confused. You aren't confused that you got the word wrong—mind reading is hard—but that the image looks so darn familiar. That is when you look at your napkin and realize that your doodle is a pretty close match to the image of the headline they selected.
I have only done this once, and it was presented more as a trick with a prediction in an envelope I gave them earlier that day. But the doodling seems way more interesting to me.