“Can I try something with you? You’d be perfect for this. Recent research has suggested that our brains are a bit like icebergs. We can see and use the 10 percent or so visible to us, but there’s a huge amount of function and information we don’t ever consciously access because we don’t know how. Researchers are even now suggesting the idea that autism is actually the brain evolving and growing, beginning to access parts of itself that were simply locked off before. A scientist at Cornell University recently did some experiments with ESP and found that when the test subjects focused on big ideas and concepts they were far more successful at transmitting thoughts. Not everyone can do this, but you strike me as a fairly intuitive person so I’d love to do a couple of experiments that I read about.”

Use Xeno ESP function.
“Ok, that was great, I knew you’d be good for this. Now the second experiment is much more difficult, but Dr. Rhine has found that about 5-10 percent of the test subjects who succeeded on the ESP test, were able to complete this next bit.”

You can use any book test here that you’d like. I like the Yogi Book Test from Annemann’s Practical Mental Magic because it uses three books from which to “choose”. However, I don’t like the use of cards to get to a page number. So, you can use the method outlined in The Hoy Book Test or you can use the TOXIC force. I generally like to use the TOXIC method since I usually do this for a few people at a time and it gets more people involved. If I was doing it one on one, I’d probably use the Hoy method.

“Let’s use a couple of different books for this. Actually, ****, I think this uses three books, can you grab a third book of about the same size as these other two. Thanks.”

Use the equivoque method outlined in Annemann or do your own thing.

“Great, so we’ve got the book, and now we just need a page number. Dr. Rhine has some mathematical formula based on the test subjects’ answers to a previously answered questionnaire to determine what page the subject should look at, but I’m terrible at math, so we’ll just make up something simple. Uh, you give me a 1 digit number, and you give me a 2 digit number, and you give me a 3 digit number. Ok, we’ll multiply all these together and get page 226,000? ***, ok give me a 4 digit number and we’ll divide by that. Ok, that’s better, so go to page 82 and look at the first few words on the page. You want to choose a word that’s meaningful in some way and you have some connection to, so don’t choose “the” or “and” or something dumb like that.”

I generally will memorize 3-5 words that jump out at me in the first line or two. Perhaps these are “cemetery”, “crowd”, “kick”, “believe”, and “tasty”. You could have them write this word down now and get a peek at it using your favorite method, or do a kind of letter guessing thing until you know the word. Here’s what I do.

“Great, now close the book and go and stand over there and I’ll stand over here. I want you to think about your relationship with that word. So, if the word is “basketball”, maybe you think about the time you scored that winning three-pointer in the big game, or maybe about the time you got beat up after school by the basketball team because you wore white after labor day. I don’t know, just concentrate on something meaningful you associate with that word.”

“Good, now start to transmit me that memory. Concentrate on the most important details only.”

While I’m talking, I’m busy drawing an image of the words that I memorized earlier. So in this case, I might draw a crowd of priests all kicking a gravestone with one of them eating a hotdog and saying “Tasty!”. Underneath the picture I’ll write a caption as if this a New Yorker cartoon - “How many true believers does it take to get this guy to kick the bucket?” Pretend to be totally spent at the end of your sketch. Look down at it and bring it over to your spectator.

“I don’t know what kind of weird ass life you’ve led up to this point man, but you should seek some professional help. I mean a priest eating a hot dog? Freud would have a field day with you.”

Credit to Theodore Annemann, Marc Kernstein, and whoever created the TOXIC force