Figure 1: To create the appearance of highly advanced brain reading, we used techniques from the field of performance magic known as mentalism. This field uses similar techniques that a magician might use to misdirect an audiences’ visual attention to instead misdirect their sense of agency. That is, a free choice can be made to seem determined and a determined choice can be made to seem free. Above is an example of one such technique. A participant (A) is wearing an EEG brain imaging cap, and is filling out a survey on their consumer preferences. We claim to be able to decode their answers using only their EEG activity, but in reality the machine is not even turned-on. Before they finish, we pretend to consult the ‘readout’ from the EEG, and produce a written prediction of their answers. However, once participants have revealed their real answers, we secretly copy this to our sheet. We then reveal that our answers match theirs, which creates an extremely compelling illusion of accurate brain reading. As seen in (B) and (C)*, this trick is accomplished with a hidden thumb writer, a method that has been in use for over a 100 years.

*NB: We believe that understanding this method is important to help readers of our proposal assess our paradigm. However, out of respect for performers, we plan to be much more circumspect about such discussions in any of our more public communications about our methods.