I'm my opinion and you may disagree with me, but I think in terms of methods, mentalism is easier than learning say card or coin sleights.
A billet switch is no more or less difficult than a false transfer of a coin. A handful of basic card sleights can be retooled to use business cards. The mechanics of mentalism are more minimalist than magic, there are fewer of the knuclebusters. The fundamental mechanics are really very similar, and that's what leads a lot of people to believe the two genres are essentially the same thing.
The difference becomes clear in the performance theory. Harlan Tarbell's essays on the subject make that quite clear. I can always tell a wannabe mentalist who has never read Tarbell. In fact, those essays are kind of a sore spot for a lot of moralists.
As long as I'm here, I might as well address a couple other posts I skimmed past before.
i started on youtube then i started buying dvds like trilogy dnd surfaced chad nelson mystique d+m tricks volume and volume 6 daniel garcia + some dan and dave on demands like twizinser by helder guimareas and some more
This is the equivalent of attempting to cook dinner when the only things available are pickles, beer, dried parsley and beer. This is why I've told you more than once to get books. Books in Arabic can be hard to track down, though I do know that Mark Wilson's Complete Course is available in French. And like I said, getting them in English will help you perfect your English anyway.
Given that, would you perhaps agree that a performer could present a simple card force or, indeed, Out of this World in a way which would still fall withing the parameters of mentalism?
Derren Brown did a variation on Out of this World that straddles the line between mental magic and mentalism, though I'm inclined to say it was closer to mentalism. Instead of playing cards, he gave a mortician a collection of photographs of people and asked him to sort them into piles of living and dead based purely on intuition. When the two piles were completed, Derren turned them over to show the word "living" or "dead" written on the back of each one, and indeed they were all sorted into the correct stack.
It takes the mechanics of the card trick, but the setting and end goal and subtly shifted to imply that there is an almost preternatural mental phenomenon at work. I've been experimenting with similar ideas with my business cards, though I haven't yet settled on anything I like that I'd be comfortable showing to an audience.
so spell by shin lim is just a card trick and not a mentalism how ?
i think that it is all about the presentation when david blaine asks stephen hawking to think of a card and it is in bottom of the deck if he snaps his fingers and say your card will be now in bottom so this is magic but if he says i predicted that and i did it from begining this is mentalism right ?
It's a bit more involved than that. Saying, "I predicted that," is mental magic, not mentalism. It's still a bare-bones suspension of disbelief presentation.
Consider a drawing duplication. A magician gives a slight dramatic pause, duplicates the drawing perfectly, applause. Good fun in its own right. But a mentalist would sit there maybe with his back turned or blindfolded or something. The drawing process is slow, uncertain. Perhaps he's framed it as telepathy. Perhaps he's framed it as remote viewing. Either way when the drawing is finished, it's damn close but not perfect.
A mentalist must pick one primary ability (in my case I've chosen telepathy) and a secondary one that he uses much less often (I chose clairvoyance). He then sticks with it. You don't ask a mind reader to bend spoons for the same reason you don't ask Iron Maiden to do stand-up comedy or juggle, amusing as that mental image might be.
Furthermore, the mentalist is not perfect. They have about an 80% success ratio. If I'm trying to read someone's mind to get the serial number on a bill, I get about two numbers incorrect first before correcting myself. "Six... two... seven? No... no...... one..." This makes the act look more real. There are a lot psychological and cultural factors that go into explaining this. For example, why do we assume that all predictions are vague, not wholly accurate, or can only be understood after they've already come to pass? Millennia of conditioning due to the fact that real-world prophets were all either insane, drunk, stoned, or otherwise chasing dragons while hopped up on who-knows-what. The Oracle of Delphi, to name one, was believed by scholars to have been breathing poisonous cave fumes that induced hallucinations. And at the risk of offending a few people, some theologians theorize that John of Patmos wrote the Book of Revelations influenced by hallucinations caused by ingesting fly amanita mushrooms (yes Skyrim fans, those are a real thing), which were native to the island of Patmos in that time. A lot of ancient prophets were really just a prototype for Timothy Leary.
I digress. The point is that the performance theory separates magic and mentalism. And the divide may seem minor, but it's actually a pretty severe one. Admittedly some mentalists do use mental magic to make their shows more commercial and reign in bigger clients. Richard Osterlind for example. But figuring out how to do it properly takes a fair amount of intuition that can only be gained through performance experience.
