You'd like to have psychic powers, wouldn't you?

Go on. Admit it. Life would be easier if you could read the mind of your friends and lovers. And you could be rich overnight by divining the insights of the best stock pickers alive.

But the reality is that psychic powers do not exist. Or at least, there's no meaningful evidence to suggest that they do.

Yet the question is, why do so many people believe in psychic powers? Why are tarot readings and crystal divinations and all kinds of claptrap so attractive to so many people.

Perhaps some of the answer to these questions involves working memory. So in this episode of the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast, let's talk about how.

 What is working memory?

Working memory is the system that is responsible for holding and processing new and already stored information - for a short time.

Having working memory is important for reasoning, comprehension, learning and memory updating.

As a term, working memory is generally used synonymously with short term memory. Yet, the two concepts are distinct and should be distinguished from one another.

Whereas working memory is a theoretical framework that refers to structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information, short-term memory refers to the short-term storage of information, and does not entail the manipulation or organization of material held in memory.Given these facts about working memory, it seems clear that it plays a roll in why people believe the psychics and their readings.

Here's why ...

First off, psychics overwhelm their clients with questions. By asking them to access so much about their past (sometimes including their past lives), it can be difficult, if not impossible to remember the questions the psychic asked.

As a result, the person sitting for the psychic reading will only remember the hits and not the misses. "Hits," just to define this term, is the word used to describe any time a psychic gets something right. "Misses" refers to any time the psychic gets something wrong.

As we'll see, talented psychics use language as a tool for increasing the recall of hits and obliterating our memory of the misses.

Magicians know how to use this effect as well. For example, they use what is commonly called misdirection. But in reality, they use ...

 Focused Attention

Houdini, of course, noticed this and worked to debunk how psychics work. He was especially concerned because by using your focused attention, you are not misdirected as such. Rather, your attention is directed to the wrong things. The audience then remembers only the big moves the magician makes, and should they have spotted the small moves in which the dirty work is done, the cognitive overload of the big moves erases the memory of anything else.

In fact, the most rewarding compliment a magician can hear is, "but he didn't do anything." In these cases, the big moves have been so natural or ordinary that they have no meaning for working memory to grasp onto.

But "misdirection" isn't the best word for this technique. A better term would be focused attention. To "misdirect" is to draw attention away from something. But sleight of hand works best when concentration is so focused on innocent movements that it cannot pay attention to the dirty ones.

Psychics use the exact same process, but in this case, instead of calling it sleight of hand, we should call it ...

 Sleight Of Mouth

https://youtu.be/qKy8kCLPYR0

Psychics often hide their moves by asking questions that for most people will generate "yes" answers.

Drawing from Ian Rowland's excellent The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading, here are some of those questions. Follow along and think about how many of these questions would generate a yes from you.

Have you recently come across some old photographs, some in albums, some that still need to be properly arranged?