Extinct - An Interactive Effect
/I want to try something a little different with today’s post. Today I have a sort of interactive trick for you. If you’re distracted and aren’t able to give this post your full attention for the next few minutes, come back to it later. It definitely won’t work if you don’t follow along carefully. Read it straight through at a comfortable pace.
Besides your focused attention, you won’t need anything else to take part in this trick.
For real, don’t continue reading until you have those animals fully memorized. I know it’s not a huge task to memorize a few animals but it can be more difficult than you’d imagine. So burn them into your brain now. I’m going to test you on them at the end of this post and I want to see how well you retain them without being reminded.
Once you have them in your mind, I want you to give some thought to the animals you’ve had in your life. Don’t focus too much on a current animal, focus on one you’ve lost.
Recently I remembered a traumatic experience from my childhood where I went hunting with my uncle.
Generally, you assume when you’re going hunting that you’re going for a trophy or meat or maybe both. But my uncle was just sadistic. He just wanted to kill something. He didn’t care what it was. The second animal we saw he just <BOOM> obliterated it completely. It was just gone.
Ever since then I’ve been a little skittish about owning or being around animals. They just seem too impermanent to me. So I never had pets. No dear animals for me.
That’s pretty much my history with animals.
That’s also why I probably never got into tricks with rabbits or doves or anything.
Heaven knows I couldn’t handle a trick utilizing a gun or something like that. Too traumatized for that.
Each of you should now be thinking of an animal from your past. I want you take just a second and imagine, in your mind as that animal vanishes. That’s it. That’s all the preparation you need.
Do you want to experience the trick now?
Everyone should look at the gif below for a few moments.
Each time the center of the gif turns red. I want you to think, “Gone.” Do that three or four times.
Ready?
Okay, that’s the end of the set-up for the trick. In truth this is probably only going to work for about 35% of you. But I’ll still consider that a success.
There was a group of animals I told you to remember at the top of this post. If this has worked, some of you will have forgotten the deer.
Now, how did I do that? The gif, of course, has nothing to do with it. That’s just there to distract your mind. In reality this trick is accomplished with neuro-linguistic programming and the power of some Kenton Knepper style Wonder Words.
I kept on talking about a “lost” animal to prime your mind to forget one of the animals mentioned.
Some of you may have forgotten one of the other animals listed, but I attempted to focus you on the deer (without specifically naming it) by mentioning its position as the second animal in the list.
“The second animal we saw he just <BOOM> obliterated it completely. It was just gone.”
“Each of you should now be thinking of an animal from your past. I want you take just a second and imagine, in your mind as that animal vanishes.”
I even told you, “No dear [deer] animals.”
And, of course, I’m sure some of you noticed (at least on a subconscious level) that the first letter of the paragraphs between the list of animals and the gif spelled out FORGET THE DEER.
Hopefully this trick worked on enough of you that you will put a lot of time and energy into creating effects that are based solely on psychology and the manipulation of words, as many people were doing 15-20 years ago after Derren Brown came on the scene. I think this trick proves that the manipulation of thoughts via language and suggestion is a real thing that really works well enough to base workable tricks around. It wasn’t just a 10 year detour that the most gullible mentalists went on because they confused Derren’s presentations with his methods. With any luck, the success of this effect has shown how strong and truly powerful a method that is SOLELY psychological can be. And it’s so much better to use those types of methods than to rely on some cheap trick.