I Know What You’re Thinking

The introduction opens with a personal tragedy. On 12 April 1986 the author's brother Christian dies in a parachuting accident. A few weeks later, clearing Christian's room, Thorsten finds the magic props Christian had bought and is hooked on «a world without limits». All the pocket money goes on tricks; on a trip to America, too young for Siegfried and Roy's show, Thorsten is smuggled in by a parent in a woman's disguise; in the 1990s comes the French magic championship. Later, during translation studies, Havener turns to body language and hypnosis and goes on stage as a mentalist. The book is dedicated to Christian.

Chapter 1, on the limits of perception, is the most useful part. Havener offers simple experiments: count the blue objects in the room, then name three green ones without looking. Reading jumbled-letter text, missing repeated words, George Miller's «seven plus or minus two», suddenly seeing your new car model everywhere — all nicely show how attention filters the world. The core idea: «The world is what we think it is.» Our expectations shape what we see.

In the second half of the chapter the problems begin. Havener summarises well-known psychology studies (teacher expectations raising students' grades, Richard Wiseman's «lucky and unlucky people» experiment) without citations and oversimplifies the results. The book states that «first impressions are almost always right», then a few sentences later that character cannot be judged from appearance. Claims that yellow hands signal liver problems and «a tendency to depression», or pale hands anaemia, cannot be taken seriously medically.

The stage stories, though, are genuinely interesting. From an oval mark on a spectator's neck and the short nails on the left hand, Havener deduces a violinist — but doesn't say so outright, starting instead with general statements («you appreciate culture and aesthetics, you value harmony») and advancing as each is «confirmed». It is a textbook case of cold reading, and the book shows it honestly. In another show, unable to find a hidden object, Havener realises the volunteer is deliberately thinking of the wrong direction and rescues the evening with humour.

Chapter 2 explains the «ideomotor movement»: when we think hard about a direction, our body moves imperceptibly toward it. Havener relishes the history of the trick: J. Randall Brown; Washington Irving Bishop, who drove a carriage blindfolded across a city to find a hidden object and is said to have died during an autopsy; and Erik Jan Hanussen, first favoured and then murdered by the Nazis. A «mind-reading» experiment with eight objects on a table follows. This is the book's most entertaining and most honest part.

Overall, the book is short, quick to read and offers an interesting window onto stage mentalism. Yet in the afterword the author says «I am not a scientist» and «I described many techniques without explaining them». The candour is welcome, but readers should expect entertaining stage memories and a few useful observations rather than systematic knowledge.

• Lively, humorous stories from the stage
• Simple perception and «mind-reading» experiments to try at once
• Intriguing figures from the history of mentalism (Bishop, Hanussen)