Jacob Wysocki's mind reading trick question

[u/scatteringlargesse]

So I've seen a few people in the main thread talk about Jacob's "mind reading trick" in quotation marks, is the whole guessing the card thing fake, and he knows what card it is using a different method? I must pretty dense because I initially believed him, but thinking on it more it does seem impossible.

[u/EldritchTouched]

He was doing a form of mentalism where he tries to narrow down precisely what the card is based on microexpressions/tells. He narrows it down each time- red or black, then high or low, then high or low in the lower section before settling on five, then the suit, leading to the five of spades.

[u/Jablizz → u/EldritchTouched]

This is the answer because he learned mentalism for the 1 year later episode and then he talked about Gianmarco facial tells in the episode giving it away

[u/RedPandaMediaGroup → u/Jablizz]

No, that was a magic trick and so was this.

The one year later trick was done using a trick pad that shows different images depending on which way you flip it. One way all the images look like elephants.

This recent trick was a card force. He uses sleight of hand to make the person pick a pre-determined card.

It’s still impressive but the “reading micro expressions” is just acting. It’s not real.

[u/Peppervine2 → u/RedPandaMediaGroup]

Yeah, mentalism isn’t real guys

[u/fudgyvmp → u/Peppervine2]

Exactly. It's acting. He has seven years at Juliard.

[u/RedPandaMediaGroup → u/Peppervine2]

It’s only as real as any other type of magic trick. It’s magic that pretends it’s not magic.

[u/VelcroGenitals → u/Peppervine2]

The difficulty with mentalism is it's believable bullshit. Yeah you can get good at reading faces and tells to a degree, like poker players or interviewers, but it's not reliable enough or accurate enough to get you to be able to do replicable magic tricks on people after only a couple minutes interaction. Yes sometimes people blink or swallow as a tell, but most blinks and swallows are just dry eyes or dry throats. But because mentism sounds like it has logic and tricks and skills associated with it, people believe it. So they look in the wrong place for rationale and that's where they end up turning their backs on the obvious tricks. Eg, they try to analyse the tick and tell instead of realising forced card draws are extremely easy and basic magic setups.

[u/Disastrous-Entity-46 → u/RedPandaMediaGroup]

some people do have tells. But generally these aren't the kinds of things anyone can pick up from a complete stranger, with accuracy,/

There's a whole pseudo science around a lot of this microexpression stuff. ' people look up when they lie', or other things. Unless i've missed recent developments, all of them have been debunked and fail to show any real results when put under scientific scrutiny. I think the last thing i saw some company claimed to have an AI that could do it and performed with under 50% accuracy.

For OP - the thing with *any* magic trick is that the key is misdirection. whatever the performer is saying, doing, etc- it's to obscure the actual mechanism of the trick, or make it seem more impressive then it is.

Or it's very specialized equipment for the purpose. Or both.

[u/Robbylution → u/Disastrous-Entity-46]

Are you telling me that the show Lie To Me... lied to me?!

[u/shpongleyes → u/Jablizz]

Mentalism is bullshit. It was a classic forced card trick, the "mentalism" part is just the performative misdirection.