Mind Reading In 30 Seconds
December 11th, 2011
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I want to try a little experiment, if you have a minute.
Think of a two digit number between 1 and 50. Both digits should be odd, but not the same number. Don’t scroll down until you’ve picked a number.
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Just keep thinking about your number…
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I’m starting to see it now…
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Is your number 37?
I saw this on a TV magic show a long time ago. A guy was doing this to random people on the street, and there were only two different reactions. Either he’d be wrong, and they’d wonder why anyone would even try such a dumb trick, or he’d be right, and they’d be amazed.
Although it might seem that there are many possible numbers that fit the given conditions, there are only eight (13, 15, 17, 19, 31, 35, 37, 39). And for whatever reason, people pick 37 far more than its fair share – the show claimed it was more than half the time.
So the trick doesn’t always work, but when you guess someone’s number with complete confidence, it’s hard for them not to be impressed.
We know that “people don’t do random,” even when it comes to meaningless things like picking a number. I’d wager that 35 is a common choice and 13 is not, though I couldn’t really tell you why. I actually picked 37 the first time, and changed it to 39 only because I realized that 37 was too obvious.
People have wonderful abilities of intuition and pattern recognition, but a downside of this is the tendency to see meaning when it’s not there. Sometimes a random number really is 19, despite our desire for it to be 37.
Oswin Craton has a nice article about extrasensory perception, and how he was able to make many people think they had some degree of ESP with a test involving questions like the 37 thing.
(However, beware of the straw man argument – out of all the people I know who say they’re psychic, none of them claim to be mind readers.)
Please leave a comment with the number you picked – I just want to see how often this works.
December 12th, 2011 at 7:30 am
My wife and I both picked 13. Interesting article though!
December 12th, 2011 at 10:51 am
Funny how this works!
Without thinking I took 37, and when I realized it had to be odd numbers and you wanted me to scroll down I knew you would guess right. I decided not to change it to 47 so you could proove your mindreading, and then when I came at the bottom of the page I even realized that 47 was not a possible answer
Anyway, this thing works!
December 12th, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Holy crap! As soon as I saw the words “between 1 and 50″ I immediately thought 37, and that was before I saw the additional instruction that both digits should be odd!
December 12th, 2011 at 5:46 pm
I said 13, couldn’t tell you why.
December 12th, 2011 at 11:19 pm
I picked 15…
December 13th, 2011 at 5:32 pm
19… sorry…
December 14th, 2011 at 7:20 pm
My thought process was 33, wait that doesn’t fit the rule. 35, no 37 (not sure why). Needless to say cool trick!
December 14th, 2011 at 10:16 pm
13
December 15th, 2011 at 1:36 am
I picked 39. My first # was 49 and then I read that both numbers had to be odd so I switched to 39. Interesting read.
December 26th, 2011 at 11:29 pm
37… and I think I even saw this on Derren Brown’s show long ago too!
December 28th, 2011 at 4:35 pm
I too picked 13. Nice post.
January 8th, 2012 at 9:33 pm
35
January 12th, 2012 at 3:56 pm
I gave this some thought before finally settling on 37. Needless to say, after I scrolled down my jaw hit floor !!
March 18th, 2012 at 2:05 am
I immediately picked 13. Seems like the easiest and most obvious answer to me.
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May 16th, 2012 at 2:19 pm
35