When I saw the post here, "Can dogs perform mentalism?" I was reminded of something I read in the May/June 2005 issue of Skeptical Inquirer. I'm not sure how much this has been covered here; I did a search and found one reference to it (http://www.themagiccafe.com/forums/search_post.php?topic=95974&forum=15&post=3917138).

The basic story is here: http://skepdic.com/cleverhans.html

In my view this is a good example of the importance of healthy skepticism. And of course, scientists, like all other humans, are not beyond being fooled.

From the skepdic.com article:

"The horse truly was clever, not because he understood human language but because he could perceive very subtle muscle movements. More important, Pfungst discovered that people can unconsciously communicate information to others by subtle movements and that some animals can perceive these unconscious movements. It was only a matter of time before psychologists would be investigating nonverbal influence among humans."

Skepticism is not about being negative and shooting things down, it's about trying to understand things in an accurate way.

I also thought of this story straight away.
I have google report on certain search items to me
every day using it's API.
I get automatic links sent to me in response to questions I set,
like having your own search engine work over night.
One of my queries is Marc Salem.

Well, I received a link one morning (2 or 3 mornings ago)
with Marc Salem's explanation of the Clever Hans Horse story and
it was a wonderful story that made sense in the context to
what he was doing.

I deleted the link with the Salem interview but mentally remembered
the story because it fitted in so well.

So I can't offer the interview link, but you might find it with a search.

Tom

Thanks Jim, a good article, with lots of links to more, perhaps threads of this nature would be more welcome with the sideshow folks?

Corona.

By sideshow folks, do you mean psychic readers?

No I meant the 'Believe it or not' section.

I thought it was relevant to this forum, as one could use something like this (non-verbal communication)for a mentalism effect.