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A GenePoool.com Essay
Cold Reading
Several months ago I found myself without a costume at a halloween party. It wasn't really a big deal-- I'm not much of a costume person-- but to cover my own butt (and since I was wearing all black anyhow) if someone asked I told them I was dressed as a psychic. This turned out to be a decent conversation-starter, so I ran with it for a while. I even considered giving out readings, but balked when I realized it would be much more difficult to do any readings in a setting where people aren't dressed like they normally do, and who don't actually believe I have genuine powers. You'll understand what I mean later.
About halfway through the night I ended up in a very long discussion with a man about my age who was, I thought (and I'm sure he'd agree) a very intelligent man with no predilection toward the mystical. He described the time he went to a medium, right before he proposed to his wife. He was worried about whether he was making the right decision. He had not told ANYone that he was planning to propose. To his amazement, in less than twenty minutes the psychic had determined the cause of his distress, assuaged his fears, and told him to go right ahead and propose.
Then he asked me to explain it.
Let's reconstruct the scene from the perspective of the medium. Before he even enters the room, we know something about him, namely, that he is concerned enough about something to make an appointment in the first place.
He enters. He is clean-shaven, handsome, and neatly dressed. He has enough income to spare to spend it on a lark (i.e., throwing it to a fortune-teller.) We probably know if he drove here and, if he did, in what sort of vehicle. So, although he has yet to open his mouth we know he has a job, and we have a fair idea what end of the social strata he resides in. We also know he is fairly conservative, as we see no earrings, and no chains or jewelry. We also see no wedding ring, and no tan line on his ring finger. He looks healthy, and he is not overweight. We shake his hand. He has a firm handshake, with smooth, non-calloused skin and clean nails.
This is remarkable amount of information at hand. We have standing before us a single white male in his mid-twenties with a white-collar job, in good health, who is nonetheless worried about something. Perhaps we chat with him informally for a few minutes just to get an idea of his language skills and perhaps gain a greater understanding of his educational background, but this isn't entirely necessary, because we already know enough to begin.
The first step is to ask, simply, what would a healthy, single, middle class white male be worried about? It could be something very obscure, but as of right now this is a game of probabilities. And the probabilities are few.
He's coming to us because he wants to know something. This could be one of two things. He either wants to know what will happen with something specific-- and beyond his control-- in his future, or, he has to make a decision and is unsure if it is the correct one. Just playing the percentages, this is probably something important, because, after all, he is paying for this, so he is in all likelihood not very interested in knowing if it would be a better idea to have cereal or toast for breakfast next week. If it's a decision, it's an important one. If it's a future event that he has no control over, it's an event that's going to affect him in a major way.
We can reduce our list of possibilities from there. His concerns probably aren't financial, because it looks as if he's well employed. He also probably isn't worried about his health because he seems very healthy, and given his age it's not very likely he has a serious health problem. (Not impossible, of course; we're still dealing in likelihood here.) His parents, however, are probably in their late forties to late fifties, or older. It IS possible he's worried about the health of one of them. He's also unmarried, and given his age and social strata, it's possible his concern has to do with something of a romantic nature.
And keep in mind, he still hasn't opened his mouth yet.
The game from here on out is very easy to play. Our list is down to Parental Health or Romance. What we want to do is get him to give us the answer without coming out and asking him. This first step is to gain his confidence in our abilities, and the easiest way is to give him information we already know.
"I sense that you have a great concern," we might say. We can go on at length about this concern and how deeply it's affecting him, and how much he wants to know the answer to it. We can also rule out what we've already decided has nothing to do his problem, something like "it's not money, no it's more important to you than money." This really has little to do with finding out what we want to know beyond getting him to trust us and to respond positively to our probings.
The real meat gets brought out when we use our first "try-on." A try-on is an innocuous phrase that begins with "I feel that..." or "I want to say that..." The phrasing is intentionally vague. Say we guess wrong and think his mother has a health problem. We try "I feel that this has something to do with your mother..." We are dead wrong in our guess, but then again, he doesn't know we're aiming for a health concern. The key to the try-on isn't in what WE say; it's how he responds.
If we've done our job adequately well, he can fill in the blanks for us with something like "yes, she's talked about this a lot." If this had been a health issue his response would have been very different. ("Yes, she's not well," for example.) If he's still wary of our scrying abilities and just comes out with "no" that's okay too. Since we put the words "I feel" in front of what is otherwise a definitive phrase, we have enough wiggle room to get out of this very easily. "Well I do sense that she is very close to this," might do just fine. It doesn't for a moment suggest that we've missed, and better, we're right. She will be close to her own son's wedding. Best of all, this works even if his mother is deceased: "close to this" can be taken literally or spiritually.
We're almost there. We try another try-on, like "I feel great love, but much confusion..." This is an absurdly vague statement, but it works perfectly, because, like everything else we've said, it invites him to fill in details, and make our prediction fit his life.
And that's really the key to the entire thing. We want to make the "sitter" give us what we need to know, and we do this by inviting him to add details on his own. We stress from the outset that in order for this to work he has to be a willing participant in the process, and then make statements that sound as if we know exactly what we're talking about. As soon as he provides us with specific information, we say something to the effect of "yes, I sensed that too!"
Is it really this simple? Yeah, pretty much.
The process I'm describing is called a "cold reading." If a medium is meeting someone for the first time, and they have no background information at all on him or her, then they're doing this "cold." The opposite is a "hot reading," which is what you might think it would be; the medium has specific information on the subject. Hot information can be obtained a variety of ways. Many mediums keep extensive records of obituaries from all over the country. They network to one another for information, and they even publish this information in directory form. Lamar Keene, a former psychic who published a tell-all book called the Psychic Mafia described one such directory called the Blue Book, which was a frequently updated list of information on thousands of regular visitors to mediums across the country. Sometimes the hot data comes from the sitters themselves. A sitter might write to a psychic with specific information about, say, a loved one who has passed on, and then months later receive an invitation from that same psychic, inviting them in for a reading. By then they've forgotten what they wrote, and they may have even forgotten that they wrote at all.
I find cold reading far more interesting, if only because of the obvious skill involved. It's also interesting for what it tells us about our own memories. In one study researchers interviewed satisfied customers of a local medium, where the sitters recounted how amazed they were that the medium knew so much specific information about them. Tapes of those same sessions revealed that the specific information the sitters were referring to came from THEIR mouths, not the medium's, but they simply don't remember it that way and are amazed when they hear a tape of the session.
If you call any of the manifold copycats of the Psychic Friends Network (PFN actually went bankrupt; I don't think they saw it coming) the very first thing you have to do is provide specific information: name, sex, age, race, marital status, address, income, and the like. ALL of this information is at the fingertips of the person who eventually comes on the line to speak to you. They already know very well what the most common concern is for people LIKE you. If they want to seem especially psychic they may even feed some of that information back to you as if they gleaned it mentally, and you'll probably fall for it. Why? Because you already want to believe. You're a co-conspirator. Never mind that in all likelihood the person at the other end of the line is working from a script.
There are variations on the cold reading that are even more entertaining. There's a fellow named James Van Praagh who is brilliant at it. He does crowds, (such as talk show audiences,) which introduces a whole new element, which I call the Shotgun Reading. Simply put, if you stand in front of fifty people and announce that you sense there is someone named "Mary" who wishes to speak with an audience member, you've got a GREAT chance of being right, because there's bound to be someone among the fifty people who knows someone named Mary. Mary could be alive or dead, it really doesn't matter, and once an audience member identifies themself you're going to find that out fairly quickly by using leading questions and plenty of try-ons. Even better, if you happen to be on television when you're doing this, the producers are probably going to make you look a whole lot better. There have been many cases of professional psychics-- including Van Praagh-- stepping up in front of audiences and lunging about with key words, names, random pains, (i.e. "I sense pain in the chest area...") and striking out completely. Television producers don't show the misses, because it's not good television, so what you see is usually only the hits.
I think the most fascinating aspect of the cold reading is that there's no reason to assume the practitioner is even aware that they're divining information through such mundane techniques. Some of them may be out-and-out charlatans in the sense that they know very well they're presenting themselves as being something they are not, but the majority of mediums, psychics, etc., are perfectly sincere when they say they don't know how they get their information; it just "comes" to them. Often, the psychic wants to believe just as much as the sitter.
I'd love to say the man at the party was utterly convinced by my explanation, but I don't think that was the case. My saving grace might have been that he had a tape recording of the session, and I urged him to go home and listen very carefully to find out who really provided the details. And on the bright side, when they voted on the best costumes at the end of the night, I got one vote.
I may not be psychic, but I think it was his
wife who voted for me.
© 2000, Gene Doucette
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