If I play a game with you, and I place a pea under one of two shells and ask you to guess which one it's under, how many questions do you have to ask to know the answer?

Woman: One question.

Sure. You say "Is it this one?" If the answer is "yes," you know. If the answer is "no," you know it's under the other one.

If I have four shells and one pea, now how many questions do you have to ask to know the answer?

Man: Two.

Right. You only need two, because you can chunk the problem you are going to solve. "Is it under these two?" When you get the answer to that question, your second question is "Which shell out of the remaining two is it under?" If you have eight shells, you need three questions, and so on.

This kind of guessing strategy is very effective for what you are going to do. You can always divide the world into exclusive binary classes. "It's a man./It's a woman." "He's inside./He's outside." "He's older than you./He's younger than you." "He's close to you./He's not very close to you." "He wants to be close to you. / He doesn't want to be close to you." Language allows you to make these absolutely artificial distinctions that divide the world up into binary choices; it's either this or that.

Woman: Do you feed the person both options?

You start by feeding one possiblity. "It looks like a man." You then wait for the response, to find out if your partner accepts or rejects what you say. He might have already selected a man, in which case what you said is congruent with his experience. Alternatively, he may not have made a choice yet, either consciously or unconsciously. When you proposed a man, he may have considered it and accepted it. Or, he could have chosen a woman, but when you waited, he made a substitution and found it acceptable.

The other class of responses your partner might have is to find what you say not acceptable, in which case you simply change. "Oh no, the mists have cleared away now, and I can see that it's a woman."

The whole point of this exercise is for you to give yourself an opportunity to notice that you can use a person's unconscious nonverbal signals to guide you to a description of an experience in that person's life history that you don't know anything about. In his perception of the process, you will have somehow gotten information that you couldn't have gotten in normal ways, and it will seem "psychic."

As soon as you have calibrated to your partner, you can begin with the general category of "an important person." Everybody has an important person somewhere in their life, so that's a good way to get started. Then you can use binary categories. What are some additional binary categories you can use?

Woman: Short/tall.

Man: Happy/unhappy.

Sure. These are all pseudo–categories, but they are categories everybody operates with all the time, "Concerned about you./Not concerned about you." "It's night./It's daytime." I want you each to have a list of at least six binary choices such as these before you begin.

At the end of using these binary categories, you can practice using Ericksonian patterns by doing a process instruction. You could do the whole thing with just Ericksonian patterns. There are plenty of "psychics" who actually do just that. You could say "And that event from your past contains some information, some learning that you hadn't realized was there, … Because the meaning which that event has for you now may be different than the meaning you drew from it , . . at the time. … So that as your unconscious mind makes sense out of your past … in a new way … it doesn't matter if it allows your conscious mind to appreciate that understanding … a lot … or a little… . Your unconscious mind can apply that new understanding … in a meaningful … and surprisingly delightful way … to some experience … that will occur within the next forty–eight hours."

Or, once you've described the important person, you can say "And I don't know if you've realized that there is an important message which that person had never verbalized to you, but always wanted to relate … that could be useful to you now… . And as you watch and listen to them now … you can begin to hear what that message is… ."

When you use Ericksonian patterns, you can use this same yes/no feedback system to guide what you say. Make sure that you stay out of content.

After going through an experience like this with you, it will take a relatively sophisticated communicator to know what you actually said. His internal experience projected into the crystal ball will be so rich and detailed that he may mistakenly think that you specified the entire experience that he actually created internally. You mentioned some appropriate variable, and he filled in the specifics. Typically at the end of this, unless you've got someone really sophisticated, he will say "How did you know those things?" And of course the answer is, you didn't.

Woman: You are not getting verbal feedback from them at any time?

No. The point of this exercise is for you to learn to trust your ability to see nonverbal signals and to use those to guide what you say. Using the binary category approach, you will get more specific by following the yes/no signals down the binary tree. When using the Ericksonian approach, you will stay completely general, but still use the nonverbal feedback to know if and when the nerson is following you. If you notice particularly powerful involuntary responses as you go along, then you know to emphasize nominalizations in that general area. You still have no idea what his experience is, but as long as you have rapport, the person will be perfectly capable of filling in rich detail for himself and making it a very meaningful experience.

Crystal ball gazing is designed to refine your ability to make visual palm–reading instead. When you do palm–reading, you hold the other person's hand, and learn to feel the difference between your partner's "yes" and "no" responses when you are calibrating.

Ann: I do psychic readings for people and get information outside of the sensory channels. Are you saying that being psychic is really doing this?

I have no objections to notions of ESP and other psychic phenomena. At the moment the word "psychic" in the psychological realm has about the same meaning that the word "viable" has in the medical world. It's a term for things that are powerful somehow but we don't yet understand what they are or how they work. Some psychics certainly do their readings in the way I've described this exercise.

My hope is that there are hundreds of information–passing channels between human beings which lie outside of our recognized five senses and which I don't yet know anything about. I don't know. I do know that I now see and hear and tactilely feel things that I would have considered in the realm of psychic phenomena a few years ago.

I would be delighted if I could discover extra channels. One of my programs for discovering whether there are other such channels is first to refine my sensory channels as much as I can, and then model people who can do "psychic" phenomena. If I am getting the maximum amount of information I believe I can get out of the normally recognized channels, and I am getting other information as well, then I've got some evidence that there might be other channels.

Go find someone outside to try this exercise with, and find out how accurate you can be using just nonverbal feedback. Take about ten minutes.

*****

How did you do?

Woman: I made a mistake at the beginning. My partner got right into it. His head was starting to go down toward the crystal ball. I said the person was a woman, and his head jerked back up and he said "I see a man."

How did you respond to that?

Woman: I said "Oh, yes. I see now it is a man out there." OK, good. Calling something a "mistake" instead of an "outcome" or a "response" is an unnecessary judgement on the part of your how good you want to be in doing these kinds of things in order to motivate yourself to become increasingly more adept, I respect that. Do recognize, however, that what may seem like a "mistake" to you, may be totally unrecognizeable as such to the other person. You know what steps you are planning to go through. If for some reason you don't carry out that plan, that may or may not be apparent to other people. I recommend confidently utilizing whatever extra pieces of information they give you as you go along. "Of course you see a man, and examine carefully the expression on his face."