Blog Post #2

     I have always been interested in psychics and the possibility of people having psychic abilities. Growing up I have watched many psychic mediums on television and have been skeptic about the validity of these readings. However, seeing how mediums get such specific details and seem to know everything about the person who has passed made me believe that they were truly real. Now that I have watched the video of Derren Brown acting as a psychic medium and making such strong connections to the people in the audience really shocked me. I was in disbelief how he could just guess these specific details so correctly and how the audience members really believed he was connecting with their loved ones who have passed. It is still hard for me to believe that cold reading really works and that people make the stories the medium is giving them fit their situations. I feel that if that was me, I would not buy into it that easy if it was really that general. After watching Derren Brown, is is disheartening to me that these psychics are just lying to their clients and really do not know anything at all.  One medium that I grew up watching was the Long Island Medium on television and she really made me believe that there are people out there with these powers and can connect with those who have passed. I have never thought that she would be completely making everything up because I could not imagine someone being so unethical and basically using people's most vulnerable parts about themselves for money. I do hope that there may be some real mediums that can connect with the dead somehow, but after learning about cold calling and doing research I am finding that very hard to be true.

     Also, when it came to the video on mentalism with Derren Brown I was also surprised to see how well he is able to guess exactly what a person is thinking based on such little information given. He is extremely good at observing people's body language, tone of voice, and subliminal clues to basically performing magic tricks on the crowd. I saw a mentalist at an event at my work and he was able to guess the very specific event that my coworker had written down on a sticky note. We were all amazed on how he did it and was able to guess everyone else's correctly as well. Even though Derren Brown continues to claim that psychics are not real, he is very talented at reading minds and I do not understand how he is able to do it. He definitely has some sort of power or extreme skill that only very few have. Even if mind readers and psychics aren't real, there must be some gift that they share that allows them to do this. I have added another video of Derren Brown that I found very entertaining. 

https://youtu.be/Z3RD_hCevKA?feature=shared