Magician’s mind games: ‘The door of magic is closed, but it’s not locked’…
THE magic isn’t so much that Katherine Mills knows what you’re thinking. The magic is that she knows how you think.
The English mentalist and magician has made a career out of making people’s minds play tricks on them.
It means she can “guess” your bank PIN code, predict which car you’ll pick out of a car yard, “read” your mind about the activity you’re thinking about that you did a week before you met her, all without you saying a word.
She can even crack the code of your safe by inviting you to lie about what it is.
She knows how to get into your head. A student of psychology and social sciences for years, she knows the cues: verbal, and non-verbal, that not even you know you’re giving out.
And she knows how to interpret them, reinforce them, elicit more of them, then subtly use the power of suggestion to make you think your reaction was all your idea.
That’s the magic of mind games. Combine them with a love of performance and visual sleight-of-hand magic tricks and you get Mills: the first female magician to get her own show on British television, and one of only about 100 female magicians to be granted membership of the 1500-strong Magic Circle, a British organisation dedicated to promoting and advancing the art of magic.
“How do you do it?” is the question Mills and mentalists and magicians across the world always get asked. Read more…