By Vinay. September 23, 2010
This is a continuation of my previous blog post on mind reading !!
So lets play sherlock homes.
I was pretty surprised when I saw the message
If you look at the information here, There are 3 things that Nakul dug out to catch our attention.
1. My name (Vinay)
2. Name of the Book (Black Swan)
3. The page number and the line (Uncertainty of the Nerd)
The name of the Book was quite easy to crack, I had to pick from a lot 4 books. The other 3 books were ordinary looking, almost the same size, similar kind of color on the cover but this Book the Black Swan was a lot brighter and catchy, slightly bigger in size,overall it had a superior feel and stood out !! So it was an obvious pick !! Its like asking you to choose one from Rakhi Sawant, Jennifer Aniston or Sherlyn Chopra. For the fairer sex, say pick from Brad Pitt, Niel Nitin Mukesh & Bobby Deol. The point is Jennifer and Brad are much better packaged and have a much higher probability of getting picked.
What kind of baffled me was my name in there. How could he predict that. You walk into a room of around 100 people where you just know a handful of them and you find your name being called out in the end . So did he know that I would be the winner right when in walked in ??
At snacks post the event, I picked up my plate and happened to spot Nakul in conversation with another person, I walked up to them and asked “Can I?” Nakul replied ” What if I said, I knew you would come here !!” Well thats the guy for you, he’ll play it so well with that smirk on his face that you’ll just stand and notice. I was curious and wanted to know how did he pick me? He said there are lot of clues that one could pick up and make such a decision, Like, when he asked people to volunteer, I was the first to stand up. Clues that we normally ignore, Nakul would pick it up and form a pattern. So it was clear that the inking my name happened during the event. But when ?
If you go back to the previous post when I said, the 8 of us went on stage and he asked us questions.
“Next he got to me, gave me the same probing look for a while, I was eager for my question and shrugged my shoulders. He said “I haven’t asked you anything yet” for which I replied “I didn’t answer anything either”. Nakul said “You did !!” I thought he was just acting smart “
Here Nakul was not interested in the answer, he was looking at how we answered it and more importantly our body language/facial expressions. Thats why the probing look (he did that to every volunteer on stage) So when we exchanged this..
Nakul: “I haven’t asked you anything yet”
Me: “I didn’t answer anything either”
Nakul: “You did !!”
I gave away information through my expressions. May be it was eagerness, smartness (I would like to believe), dumbness (I would not like to believe) which was enough information for Nakul to place a calculated bet on me. So when I thought that he was acting smart, Nakul was actually smart !!
He went around picked up the sheet where all the other info was there previously and he just inked in my name in the space, put it in the eighth envelope, sealed it and passed it to the judge. (In the show he will do it so seamlessly that you will hardly notice it)
As for the page number, it still beats me !! It was my friend Vivek who read out the page number and he was very sure that there was no slip up. Nakul stopped the very moment he was asked to.Unless all the pages of the book were numbered 122,123 😉 which wasn’t the case. He pulled a pretty good one out there. Full credits to him on this. But if any of you can help, then we crack it all 🙂
So now if you look at the whole thing what nakul was doing was just picking up clues. Just in the first couple of minutes (standing up to volunteer and with the simple questions on stage) he had made up his mind for a result that would present itself only half an hour later.
Books like Freakonomics and Blink will change the way you look at things. As per the mind reader The Definitive Book of Body Language is the best work on the subject so far !!
This entire episode opened up a new window for me. To pick up clues that we normally ignore and to read body language (I’m sure it takes time) closely that can help you deal with people. No I’m not thinking of picking a wife. Its a big plus for business. After all business is all about people skills.
btw, Nakul is an x-texhie who is now following his dream, Like he says, to be Mandrake the Magician !!
So whats stopping you from following yours?
Note: Article reproduced from Demystifying A Mind Reader !! – Royal Mysore Walks (WebArchive)
The Mind Reader 