Discovery Channel Series: Deception with Keith Barry

"Deception with Keith Barry" is a new show on the Discovery Channel. Keith is a mentalist who can "read minds." Of course, mentalism is a type of magic act, not actual mind reading. The show airs on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. Eastern.

One of the greatest tricks Barry did was guess the price that a random person would pay for a car. The way Barry describes it, there are involuntary body movements that he uses to figure out the price. It's still an amazing trick, though.

Another trick was to get two dealers to secretly pick the color of a car and a third to pick the car model. A red and yellow BMW (what they said) then fell from the sky and landed on the dealership lot. I found this one a bit silly, as it would have been obvious that a crane was there ready to drop a car from the air. This was simply not believable, calling into question the integrity of the entire show.

Nonetheless, he showed how you could give clues (trigger words) to get someone to pick a color. For example, he mentioned a "lemon" car, and that made someone pick "yellow." I am still skeptical of this trick, as two car salesmen heard that clue. But each one picked only one color. There is no way to say that each salesmen would have picked a different color than the other. Perhaps the trick was done more than once until the result came out perfectly.

The rest of the show had similar tricks. For example, Barry has a blue car with white polka dots drive by just as he asks a person to pick a necktie color and design. This subconsciously gets the person to pick a blue tie with white dots on it.

These tricks make for an interesting show. The problem I see with mentalism is that the mentalist needs a particularly willing subject. Once a subject is aware of external cues, he can easily defeat that subconscious influence.

Keith also explained how car salesmen use similar techniques to sell cars. But this is also highly dependent on the auto buyer being inexperienced with negotiation. An experienced buyer would never make a car-buying decision based on subtle cues or neurolinguistic programming (NLP) or any other similar methods.

"Deception" was fun to watch, and it certainly does make someone aware of how they can be taken advantage of if they are not careful. This may make someone a more seasoned consumer in general and aware of the possible effect of mind games in relationships and even business.

After a couple of episodes of this, though, it seems like it will get old. There are only so many mentalist tricks that can be done before they get repetitive. And Keith Barry is just especially good at the kind of memory techniques (pnemonics and such) he displays on the show. The average person can use such methods to improve memory but is not going to pull off such feats to the same degree.

I can't see Deception with Keith Barry being very interesting for the typical person for more than an episode or two. This is particularly true with tricks like the car falling from the sky. There's no way those car salesmen would not have seen what was going on unless they willfully ignored it.

The mentalism tricks are still highly impressive. But like other kinds of magic and illusion, there is a need to constantly improve the trick. It is difficult to do that with a mentalist because the trick is always going to be using cues to subconsciously influence the subject. Finally, there is simply no way that a mentalism trick will work every time. What you see on the show Deception with Keith Barry is an edited version of reality that includes only the times when the tricks actually worked.