Suggestible

It’s amazing how suggestible the human mind is. Well, not quite amazing, but still impressive. I’ve just been over at a friend’s who’s a fan of psychological magic tricks, and he managed to successfully predict two different cards chosen by myself and another person. When I say ‘predict’, of course what really happened was that he placed the suggestion in our minds to choose the cards that he’d already decided on beforehand.

It’s not overly difficult to do this; you just have to pay attention to body language signals and also use subtle hand movements and phrasing. However, to see it done successfully is very impressive and provides an interesting counterpoint to my thoughts about free will.