On Magic

After seeing the mentalist last night, as well as numerous magic shows both live and televised, I'm skeptical on all things "magical" including Paul Draper's mind reading. I feel that it was him just using visual cues to "read" someone. With the exception of maybe 3 males, all the subjects and volunteers he selected were young white females. Perhaps he's sexist and racist, but I think these are the people he feels most confident in reading because he "struggled" with many of the male mind readings. Also, I think a lot of tricks were just completely based off of research on human reactions/behaviors. For example, by making a sign that the third chair would be empty in the seating assignment trick, he has effectively cut the probability of him being wrong by half as he can count from the left or right to name the empty seat the 3rd (2nd) chair. If they don't sit in the correct formation right away, he has a handful of speech tools to convince them to move. Similarly, thinking up a particular flower has a good probability of being the same as how many flowers does the common person know anyways besides roses, daisies, tulips, and sunflowers? The big red curtains might have had an effect on half the room guessing red too, not to mention red is a primary color and is the first color of the color spectrum.