What are your thoughts on Darren Brown memorizing a book in 20 minutes? Is this possible? What do you think he did? Did he just memorize the key terms and only memorized only several pages based on predictions of what page a person may choose?
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No, it’s not possible to memorize a book in 20 minutes.
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What it is possible is to pretend to.
Memorizing a page here and there.
Then you say, go to page this X, or page Y… and you go on. The magic trick is not that difficult. If you’re trained with mnemonics it’s even easier.
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The librarian chose his own pages.
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There are some more comments about the video here:
See also:
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This is an example of what mentalists (magicians who perform psychic tricks without claiming any special powers) call “the book test.” It usually involves forcing technique that has probably but cut out in the editing. You can read about the procedure in books like Corinda’s Thirteen Steps to Mentalism
Thirteen Steps to Mentalism - Wikipedia.
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I’m not familiar with how he demonstrated it. If it was a word or two from any page you choose then it’s a book test.
Have him recite an entire randomly selected chapter.
He does a lot of NLP and cold reading stuff so I think you are looking at a magic trick.
Just because the person picks the numbers means nothing because that is the way a lot of NLP works and the magic of this is often that they have different orders for different numbers.