Visions, The Online Journal of the Art of Magic

Thinking Allowed
by Jon Thompson

Jon Thompson’s journey into mentalism began in his thirties, prompted by a lifelong interest in psychology. Derren Brown came along, and people began asking if Jon could use his knowledge to do something similar. A familiarity with hypnosis led him to study NLP in search of principles
that would help him create effects akin to those he’d seen onscreen. Unsurprisingly, he got exactly nowhere fast. Nice one, Derren!

Eventually, he stumbled upon books such as Corinda’s “13 Steps to Mentalism” and Annemann’s “Practical Mental Magic”, but these left him disappointed at the gulf between cause and effect. Classics they may be, but these were definitely not what he thought mentalism was going to be
about.

This led Jon to use a blend of psychology and statistics to create an innovative approach to mentalism that abandons the usual apparatus and methods. Instead, “Naked” or method-free mentalism techniques deliberately model the natural, intuitive abilities of those who consider themselves genuinely psychic, but with vastly improved results.

A freelance technology writer by day, Jon is already the author of several works on both magic and mentalism: “The Stripper Deck”, “Naked Mentalism”, and “The Fully-Scripted Naked Book Test”. He’s about to publish his second volume of stripper deck magic, titled “Stripped and
Stacked”. Jon also wrote and appeared in the DVD version of his first book for the stripper deck, called “Strip – With Jon Thompson” (produced by Big Blind Media and available, as they say, from all good magic shops). He’s also currently working on volume 2 of “Naked Mentalism” and wondering where it will all end.