Sources, Methodology, and Editorial Boundaries

Series date: September 16, 2026

Sources, Methodology, and Editorial Boundaries

Find the research, historical accounts and practitioner sources used in this mentalism series, with the limits that apply to each kind of evidence. Individual articles link their factual claims to the relevant sources below.

Original research

• Blinded by magic: eye-movements reveal the misdirection of attention. One video-trick attention experiment.
• Priming psychic and conjuring abilities of a magic demonstration influences event interpretation and random number generation biases. Read its classroom framing finding alongside the later Lesaffre studies.
• Magic Performances – When Explained in Psychic Terms by University Students. Three later studies reported null framing and before-and-after effects in their designs.
• Explanations of a magic trick across the life span. One trick with children and an adult comparison sample; confidence did not reliably identify a correct explanation.
• Choosing in Freedom or Forced to Choose? Introspective Blindness to Psychological Forcing in Stage-Magic. Specific stage and laboratory card-selection tasks, not a verdict on free will.
• Magic and memory: using conjuring to explore the effects of suggestion, social influence, and paranormal belief on eyewitness testimony for an ostensibly paranormal event. Reported outcomes do not isolate perception, memory or response demands.
• The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility. Forer’s 1949 classroom demonstration with 39 students; the personality-reading script is not reproduced.
• The Magician’s Choice: Providing Illusory Choice and Sense of Agency With the Equivoque Forcing Technique. A task-specific investigation of equivoque and perceived choice.

Author abstracts only

• Mnemonic Training Reshapes Brain Networks to Support Superior Memory. The author abstract supports a limited mnemonic-training and connectivity finding; full methods and generalization were not assessed here.
• Expression of nonconscious knowledge via ideomotor actions. The author abstract concerns one semantic-memory task; read it with the later pendulum result.
• Expressing unconscious general knowledge using Chevreul’s pendulum. The author abstract reports no advantage in a different pendulum-based design.

Theoretical framework

• A framework for using magic to study the mind. Rensink and Kuhn offer definitions and theoretical proposals, including the study of wonder; these are not new experimental measurements.

Historical accounts and archival context

• A Magician Among the Spirits. Houdini’s first-person, partisan account requires attribution; it does not identify a modern performer’s method.
• Mind Reading (April 1896) — W. E. Skinner. Skinner’s 1896 description is historical testimony, not modern accuracy validation.
• Invisible Ink, William L. Clements Library. The Clements Library’s account accompanies historical letters; it does not establish contemporary performance methods.

Performer statements and practitioner accounts

• To Claim or Not to Claim. Brown’s authored description of older shows and selection for some television specials; reader comments are excluded.
• Manual for Cold Reading Workshop, TAM 2012. Hyman’s practitioner description is distinct from the other works appended to the manual.
• About — Oz Pearlman. Official biography and FAQ, treated as promotional self-description rather than independent verification.
• How Pro Magicians Use Multiple Outs. Adams’s category-level account of multiple possible endings.
• One ahead principle — Jon Finch. A practitioner glossary account of an information-sequence category, not independent performance testing.
• Learn a Mentalism Trick: Gift Card Prediction. Only the public category-level discussion is used; routine instructions are not reproduced.

Publisher and product descriptions

• Corinda Step Six table of contents, Conjuring Arts publisher. The publisher’s table of contents supports the existence of named categories, not a technical procedure.
• COGNI by Ricardo Montoya, public product description. A public commercial description of an impression product; its claims are attributed, not independently demonstrated.
• Perfected Center Tear by Richard Osterlind, public product description. A public commercial description of a reading category; no private instructions or customer testimonials are used.

Comparing findings without overstating them

Mohr and colleagues reported a classroom framing effect, while Lesaffre and colleagues reported null results in later studies with different designs and samples. The articles retain both findings. Differences between studies are not, by themselves, an explanation for the different results.

The two ideomotor abstracts also concern different tasks and apparatus. An advantage in one task and a null result in another do not establish reliable stage muscle reading or paranormal knowledge. The mnemonic-training abstract does not establish general intelligence, calculation transfer, name-and-face expertise or clinical benefit. Assessing methods, exclusions and effect sizes would require the full papers.

Historical testimony, performer descriptions and commercial claims answer different questions from controlled experiments. The articles attribute those accounts and avoid using them to identify an unexamined performer's secret. Philosophical arguments and ethical recommendations express the series' interpretation; they are not presented as experimental findings.

Consent, rights and corrections

The articles use linked citations and original paraphrases. They do not reproduce source scans, photographs, videos, private case studies or instructional scripts. A reference to a performer's public account does not imply that the series independently examined a particular performance clip.

For a proposed correction, use the site's contact page and identify the article, the exact passage and the primary evidence that bears on it. A useful correction distinguishes an inaccurate claim from a disagreement with an explicitly labeled interpretation.

AI assistance

AI systems assisted with drafting and source-bound editorial review. The first release also received additional automated editorial corrections. No claim of human expert review, firsthand performance attendance or verification of a particular video is made. Citations identify the evidence used; they do not imply that the cited authors endorse these articles.

Return to the series hub or start with the introduction.