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Tricks
I took a small course in faking psychic powers and read several books about tricks like this. One mentioned that when you ask humans to pick numbers, there are certain numbers they pick more than others by a significant amount. He could have changed the variable from 500 as he saw the picked number.
Same way when they ask you to draw a picture. people almost always draw a tree, a house, a horse or stick people.
One cool trick I learned is the newspaper article trick. You have cut out a long newspaper article and start cutting of a 1/2 inch or so of the bottom. Ask a person while you cut more to say stop. You stop, drop the article to the floor. Ask them to pick it up and read the last sentence.
You ask them to pick one of the words in that sentence. When they do, you pick an envelope out of your jacket pocket and that word is written on on a piece of paper in the envelope.
Trick is you cut the article from the headline, then hold the article upside down, relative to the headline. By holding the article away from your audience they don't realize the article is upside down. So when they pick a word, they are actually picking from a sentence you have already determined.
The word in the envelope. A standard line in a newspaper article has 5 or 6 words other than "a," "the" or "and." People will pick a bigger word. You have those words stuffed in various jacket pockets. Just have to remember which word is in which pocket.
James Randi, Joe Nichols and others have written articles and books on how mentalists pull off their tricks.
Nichols books are fascinating. He dropped out of college to become a carnival fire eater when the eater got burned. Gave away a lot of trade secrets.
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