Marc Salem - The Six Keys to Unlock and Empower Your Mind: Spot Liars & Cheats, Negotiate Any Deal to Your Advantage, Win at the Office, Influence Friends, & Much More

In memory
of my loving parents
In loving tribute to my family:
My wife, TovaYou are my muse and rock.
My brothers, Chaim and Avi, and their families
You are in this book far more than you can know.
The kids and grandkidsYou make me
understand hope.

(CBS) Wallace: Just about every week, at a theater somewhere in the world, hundreds of skeptical people show up to see for themselves the work and the performance of a man who calls himself a mentalista mind reader.

When they leave the theater a couple of hours later, theyre astonished. But they cant help but wonder, Howd he do that? A while back I was one of those skeptics, too. But after watching, I was hooked.

60 Minutes: We invited a random audience to see Marc Salem perform his magic at the Lyceum Theater in New York and set up cameras onstage for this unusual experiment.

Salem: What I want you to do is select three books, first to work with.

Wallace:... one, two, three.

Salem: Excellent, OK... Mike, heres what I want you to do. I want you to say stop at any point.

Wallace: Stop.

Salem: OK, look at the first couple of words in that page.... Lock those words in your mind. All right. Could you open your book to any page? OK. Hundreds of words facing you right now? Have you got one in mind?

Wallace: Ive got one.

Salem: OK, shut the book. I want you to stare at my forehead. Its easy to do, it goes to the back of my neck. See the first letter of the word youre thinking of. Mike, think of the first letter of any of your words. Just focus, Mike, just focus on the letter. Is that an A?

Wallace: Yes, it is.

Salem: Excellent.

Salem somehow read Wallaces mind, and he even guessed the womans first letter, which happened to be P.

How does he do it? Salem promises that hes not getting any help from hidden cameras or spies in the audience, and he offers $100,000 to anyone who can prove otherwise. His tricks are mind-blowing. Some of them are magic; others make you believe he actually can read your mind.

He was able to guess the serial numbers on a dollar bill from Wallaces wallet. He amazed a doctor from the audience by stopping and starting his pulse at will. He could identify objects while blindfolded. He made the hands on Wallaces watch move from 1:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. And he told an audience member whom he had never met where she went on her last vacation.

However he does it, its hard not to be taken in.

Is he psychic? No, I dont even know what psychic is. What I do isnt psychic. What I do isnt supernatural, says Salem. It has absolutely no relation whatsoever to those other realms, whether or not they even exist.

Can he read thoughts? Yes, I could pick up thoughts, says Salem. But a thought is not the same thing as a mind, OK? Let me make a distinction. To read a mind means I can go in there and pull out things you dont want me to get. A thought is something that youre focused on.

But if hes not a psychic, how does he explain his strange skills?

There was a wonderful experiment in the last century. Clever Hans, a horse that everybody thought was able to read thoughts. And people would ask Clever Hans, How much is two and two? And Hans would go four times. And it was amazing and Hans went all around the world, says Salem.

And then some scientists put blinders on Hans. And suddenly Hans was unable to do it. And its not that anybody was committing fraud. What it was, everybody would wait with tension till Hans reached the right number, and then relax. And thats when Hans would stop doing that. So I do think that, on that level sometimes, Im picking up things like a horse.

But its much more than that. His family always felt that he had some kind of special gift. Salem, whose real name is Moshe Botwinick, was the middle son of a prominent Philadelphia rabbi. As a child, he had a hypersensitivity toward people and his surroundings, always reading into subtle facial expressions and gestures. His family says he would routinely guess what his Hanukkah gift was before opening it, or where his parents were headed on vacation before they could even tell him.

Even at that age, I think I understood certain things about suggestibility. Certain things about probabilities, says Salem. And I think I took many a guess about things in the world around me. With limited amounts of information, I make connections that more often than not are correct.

Over time, Salem fine-tuned his skills, including an uncanny ability to tell when someone was lying to him. Whether Salem uses tricks or not, his abilities as a human lie detector have made him valuable off-stage, too. After a former New York City police commissioner saw him perform one night, he was offered a job to train the rank and file how to spot liars.

In 1998 lawyers involved in a big tobacco trial hired him to weed out jurors with hidden biases against smokers. Salem says its practically impossible to lie to him: Even the most practiced liar, though, if they have an element of guilt, theres going to be what we call leakage.

There is going to be information being given off. So, a politician can be trained and trained and trained, and yet their mouth is going to get a little dry when theyre lying, adds Salem. OK. Theres gonna be the little bit of an adrenaline rush... I would say virtually every thought we have has some physical manifestation.

So to read somebodys thoughts, youve got to read their bodies? asks Wallace.

To read somebodys thoughts, you do need to read their bodies, says Salem.

And thats the key to understanding his mental techniques. Salem believes that if we all used our observational skills better, we could do what he does. We could actually read other peoples thoughts.

Ive made a career out of tapping the hidden powers of the mind. Considered in the minds of many the worlds leading mentalist, Ive helped top wheeler-dealers determine whether to accept or reject million-dollar deals during face-to-face business negotiations. Ive judged the mind-set of potential jurors in some of the countrys biggest and most controversial trials. Ive trained some of law enforcements finest in the art of detecting lies, and have even gone head to head with a polygraph machine and won just by listening intently. And Ive stretched the credulity of thousands of audience members with the mental feats I perform in my on- and off-Broadway show called Mind Games.

Its not that Im smarter than all the people who hire me or come to see my show. Its not that Im smarter than you. I have simply learned to maximize my mental capabilities.

Welcome to the world of mind games. It is my world, but it can be yours as well. By learning how to control your own mind, you can learn to read your own thoughts and those of others as I do. Sound impossible? Ive been doing it for years.

Ive always been sensitive to other peoples thoughts. I used to sit in a dark room with my younger brother and try to guess what number he had in his head. Im still not quite sure what the process I used was, but I know from experience that ideas, thoughts, and notions can be conveyed from one person to another without being spoken. It could be that I knew my brother so well that I was able to anticipate what the next number he would think of would be. I think its also true that theres a psychological componenta logic if you willthat dictates such number sequences. (Try it yourself by asking someone to start thinking of numbers. After a minute or two, youre going to be able to anticipate some of those numbers.)