Sleight Of Mind

Sleight Of Mind is the art of using another person’s emotions, feelings, learned behaviours, conscious and subconscious thoughts in order to trick, confuse or surprise the person in some manner. Used commonly by magicians and mentalists as a form of misdirection, sleight of mind has been around for as long as hypnosis itself, and takes advantage of the way the mind analyses and interprets information.

A magician using sleight of mind to distract while performing a trick.

For the purposes of covert hypnosis, having a good understanding of Sleight of Mind is essential for learning ways to overload a person’s mind with message units, a critical concept to invoking a Trance within a person. Within the Sleight of Mind section we’ll be covering specific techniques to cause confusion, misdirection and puzzlement within our subjects. You will find the techniques you learn here to go hand in hand with the mental techniques taught in the Mental Magic category.

An intricate maze representing the confusion and puzzlement Sleight of Mind aims to create in a person's thoughts.

So, just how does Sleight of Mind work exactly? As humans, we’re conditioned to certain thought processes and ways of thinking that are not easily altered. We’re so used to behaving and thinking in a certain manner, that we end up having a natural trust in our communication with people. If something during the course of our communication does not go according to plan, it will cause us confusion. Sleight of Mind is about playing upon this confusion, quickly and decisively, to create the illusion that there was no confusion, to continue the conversation exactly as it was, misdirecting the subject from any act that may have occurred. This act may have been the planting of a subconscious suggestion, or it may have just been a way to cause confusion in itself so as to create an overload of message units within the subject (you will learn more about message units within the Trance and Suggestion categories).

A puzzled expression on a person's face, illustrating the moment of confusion created by Sleight of Mind.

One of the techniques that we can use to cause confusion in a subject is to ask a question that has two opposites contained within it. An example of this may be “do you feel your arm becoming as heavy as a feather?”. The keyword ‘heavy’ is normally associated with objects of a heavy weight, while a feather is normally associated with lightness. Whilst the sentence itself is not grammatically incorrect, it is rarely used in such a manner, and thus confusion is caused within the subject, even though they may not give any obvious reaction to it.

A feather and a heavy weight on opposite sides of a scale, symbolizing the contradictory suggestion used in Sleight of Mind.

Sleight of Mind is all about bringing out a person’s usual expectation within a sentence, and then altering the sentence in such a manner so that the sentence is still correct, yet not what the person expected. This can be interpreted as a form of misdirection, as you’re momentarily causing the person to analyze a specific word in the sentence, whilst diverting their attention from the actual meaning of the sentence. In the example given before, the keywords ‘heavy’ and ‘feather’ would be anchored within the subject’s mind, and as we delve into more advanced studies, we could work with these two keywords without the subject even being aware of it.