How To Read A Person's Mind - A Simple Trick
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How To Read A Person's Mind - A Simple Trick

A simple trick to read a person's mind.

Do you believe that it is possible to read a person's mind? I am going to attempt to do so and try to guess what you are thinking about - all you need to do is follow the instructions below. By the end of the instructions, all going well, I will have proved that I could read your mind and know what you were thinking. Do not worry though, I will reveal afterwards how it was done - by passing on that knowledge to you, dear reader, and you will be able to amaze your friends and family with this mind reading 'trick'.


  • Think of a number between 1 and 10.
  • Multiply that number by 9
  • If you have a two digit number add those digits together. (Example: if you have 72, add 7 + 2, until you are left with a single digit number)
  • Multiply that number by 2.
  • Subtract 10 from that.
  • Divide that number by 2.
  • Give that number a letter of the alphabet (1 = A, 2 = B, 3 = C, etc etc)
  • Think of a country that starts with that letter.
  • Now think of an animal that starts with the last letter of the country you chose.
  • Now think of a colour that starts with the last letter of the animal you chose.

At this stage, you should have a colour, an animal and a country in your mind - I am now trying to read your mind to find out what you are thinking. Mind reading takes a lot of effort and can be mentally draining. Nonetheless, I think I now know what you are thinking of;


An orange kangaroo from Denmark?

All being well, I have just successfully read your mind and correctly deduced what your answer was. Hopefully, anyway.

How does it work?

To start with, it is nothing more than simple maths, followed by some misdirection and ending with the hope that the person you are doing the ‘trick’ to will choose the most obvious answer.

The key to this trick is getting the person to end up with the number 4. The tricky bit appears to be how you would get them to end up there but it is rather simple with some easy maths. The way this ‘trick’ works is that any number between 1 and 10 multiplied by 9 will either give the number 9 anyway or will give a two digit number that when you add the two digits together will leave 9. No matter what number the person thought of, at this stage they have 9 in their head. Your job is now to get them to have 4 as their number instead. In the above example I used 3 different steps to achieve this, but you are free to use as many different steps as you want (although, it is best to keep it quite simple). Using simple maths and a bit of misdirection here will leave the person thinking that they have had a free choice in arriving at the number 4.

The next stage of course is to give the number a letter of the alphabet – it will always be D. Although, there are other countries that start with the letter D they are obscure enough to not come straight to mind – Denmark is probably what the person will think. Similarly, not many animals start with the letter K and the obvious choice would be Kangaroo; a colour that starts with O – is anyone really going to say anything other than Orange.

It really is as simple as that. Although there are no guarantees that it will work every single time (there are some people that will choose one of the other countries that starts with the letter D), it will work in the main and leave people thinking that you can ‘read their mind’.

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Comments (6)

Clever and interesting read and write. The power of suggestion, too. Cool article.

lol, cute, my dad was a mathematician and he would pull this on just about anyone, its a bit different, but basically the same. Thanks for the memories...

Just wait until the kids get home from school...hehe. I'm gonna 'amaze' them with my new found 'powers'..:-)




Didn't quite read my mind - I had Denmark, so one point for that. However, I had Koala and Aqua...sorry :)

It doesn't work on stupid people like me, who arrive at the number 5.