I remember a fairly simple card trick performed by David Copperfield where he used to flip through an entire stack of cards with the front face facing towards the camera. The point of the trick was that he could accurately predict which one you picked. What this meant in a more grandeur fashion is that he made millions of watchers pick a card which he wanted them to choose, in magic speak – “Mind Control”.

The trick was so darn simple yet so accurate that if you saw without reading any further your mind will be controlled by him. The basic idea behind the success of this trick was that David used to flip through the cards at a pace where you could see almost every individual card until he started flipping so fast that you couldn’t read out a single card since the change in pace. So hypothetically speaking say he wanted you to pick 2 of spades he would flip at a fairly slow pace until that card and increase the flipping speed.

Now the basic psychology of a human mind will be to go through all the available choices. So say you first see a “Queen of Hearts” and then see an 8 of clubs and then another card and another until you arrive at the last card you will be seeing until the duration of magic performance. What a person normally tries to do is prepare a mental list of available choices to make a random choice, when suddenly he or she encounters a surprising situation when they’re no longer able to see anymore items in the list. This may not seem such a big deal to them but the shocking change makes them virtually forget about all the items in the mental list except the last one, 2 of spades in this illustration. I could be off a little bit on my explanation, but hey; I’m not a qualified psychologist!