The Beast Within Examples
The Beast Within ExamplesExamples of HumanBehavioralPatterns that are part of our nature.
Stories include:
ConvinceYourBrotherHeHasPsychicPowers
One summer when my brother and I were kids, I convinced him he was psychic. I am two years older than my brother, and at the time, he was 12.
I had from an early age been interested in stage magic. Early on, this meant learning how they used props and gimmicks to produce illusions. But as I grew older, I started to realize that the real trick with magic was using people's assumptions and willingness to believe. In other words, it was manipulating people, not just stupid linking rings or silk handkerchiefs.
It was around that time I decided it would be funny to pull a prank on my brother. The initial conversation went like this:
I would ask him to guess the number I was thinking of, he would come up with a number, and I would indicate (most of the time) that he was right. I was smart enough to know that he would never believe he had flawless psychic ability, so I introduced a few errors every now and then to make it more believable.
Once I had suckered him in, I decided to see how far I could take this. We started to do experiments. I had him put a piece of aluminum foil on his head because I wanted to see if metal would block his psychic ability." No, it didn't, but through experimentation we found that clear plastic wrap did attenuate his abilities somewhat. We then did a distance check where we repeated the same experiment using walkie-talkies. Guess what-- he was psychic for up to 100 feet away!
I was learning about basic electronics at the time and had some test equipment. In one of my more inspired moments, I gave my brother the probes to an analog multimeter set to measure ohms. I told him to touch the metal leads. Of course, skin resistance caused the needle to move. As we continued in our psychic experiments, I would eye the needle and write down meaningless numbers. Boy, was he impressed. (Note this was several years before I learned about Scientology...)
This kind of thing went on for the rest of the day-- right up until Mom came home from work. My brother wanted to demonstrate his psychic abilities to our mother, and asked her to think of a number that he would guess. He guessed wrong. Not discouraged, he tried again and missed again. A third time and he missed again. My brother looked disappointed and had a frown.
Mom could always tell when I was up to something. She only had to look at me and the growing smile on my face to know that I was being evil again. She yelled at me, "John, what's going on here?!" My brother then explained it all-- that we had discovered he was psychic, but that for some reason he couldn't read Mom's mind-- maybe because she was a grown-up...
Mom figured it all out in a millisecond and gave me a look that I would end up seeing many times after that.
[Now explain the effect described in my home page then! -- VickiKerr]
-- It should be noted that the use of magical principles to con someone is called "Charlantry" and one who does so a "Charlatan". This is universally despised in the magic community. So maybe you learned less then you thought you did.
-- Jeff Kesselman
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See also TinFoilHat and StealthTinFoilHat.
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(last edited October 14, 2010)
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