Scott Silven: Thirty minutes with a mentalist has really unsettled this atheist sceptic

I am Dana Scully at the start of The X-Files.

That is to say, a sceptic. I’m an atheist, (Scully was actually Catholic), and believe every mystery has a rational explanation rooted in science, even if we don’t quite understand something yet.

I once met a palm reader who looked at my hand and told me that the three significant relationships in my life were my partner, my mother and my friends. Wrong on two out of three. She spun the same line on everyone else at the party.

But I met a mentalist this morning and I am reeling. How can one 30-minute encounter with a stranger throw someone off their axis?

His name is Scott Silven, a Scot, who at 13 years old, secretly took a 30-hour bus trip from Glasgow to Milan to attend a hypnosis course inside an Italian man’s home with a bunch of adults.

He told his mum he was going on a school trip and she didn’t find out until years later when she read the story in the newspaper.

He studied psychology and theatre at university, and Silven is the first person to tell you mentalism is not magic or supernatural.

“I think a lot of people think it’s psychic,” he said. “They think it’s that I am seeing inside people’s heads and reading every single thought inside their mind. To me, that’s not the case.

“I call it theatre of the mind. So, I’m using a variety of theatrical techniques to create what feels like real mind reading.

“It’s a culmination of all of those techniques that creates the experience of seeing inside someone else’s head. But every technique I use, whether it’s rapport or intuition, or a little hypnosis or some psychology and some theatre-making, all of those things are woven together to create the impossible experience of mentalism.”

So, Silven has basically just told me “how” he does it. So far, so rational.

Here’s what happened next, as best as I can tell.

At the start of the interview, he asked me to think of a childhood friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. His show at the Sydney Opera House is about lost things, so this is on theme.

My mind immediately goes to a primary school friend I’d dropped out of contact with in my mid-to-late 20s. Silven asked me to write their name, and the age I last saw them, in the notepad app on my phone.

I did that. And then he said he trusted me to not change my mind throughout our conversation, and then asked me to delete what I’d written while his back was turned.

He took my phone in his hand, and had it for about three, maybe four seconds max, while it was unlocked.

I don’t know that was important, but in the wake of our encounter, I’m now obsessing over every detail.

We talked for 20 minutes about his experiences as a mentalist, and how it’s about building rapport and connecting with people, a skill that Silven said everyone has, it’s just about honing it.

Because of Hollywood, when we think of mentalism or psychics, we think of detectives Patrick Jane or Psych’s Shawn Spencer, who were charismatic, hyper-observant and prodigious at deductive reasoning. I asked him if that’s him.

“I never consciously thought I was but I realised now because I’ve been doing it for so long. Maybe I have a slightly higher sense of intuition or rapport, and maybe I pick up things that other people don’t.

“But equally, I don’t think it’s anything special. I don’t think it’s connected to a higher power in any way. I really just think it was the conditions of growing up in that place in Scotland, of growing up near the woods. Scotland is a nation of storytellers, we’re all about connecting with each other in a deeper way.

“Those skills are pretty much real. When you see Simon Baker in The Mentalist, it is those skills that he is using to get inside people’s heads.”

Again, all very logical.

We talk about whether his line of work can attract extreme reactions from audiences and Silven said that, yes, “it is a world where stalkers are real”.

Recently in Nevada, he had to climb out of a toilet window because someone was stalking him outside the theatre.

So, there are definitely believers, and the more he tells them that it’s not psychic power, the more they think it is.

“For some people, sometimes they think that you’re a sage, and you’re going to offer all the answers to their life,” he said. “I wish I could, but I would do that in my own life, first of all, before I did it in theirs.”

Unsurprisingly, he’s a great dinner party guest, but he doesn’t roll out his talents, and doesn’t tend to tell people what he does when he first meets them. He also admitted it can be difficult in relationships, and he’s never dated anyone who has come to his shows or knows him through his work.

At the end of the interview, we returned to the task he gave me at the start.

He asked me to say aloud the friend’s name and think of a date – a day and a month – of a memory of them. I instinctively went to the last time I saw them, more than a decade ago.

I told Silven I can’t even remember the year, let alone a specific date. In my head, I start gaming it out. I pick February because I remember that the last time I ran into this former friend, I’d been in a shopping centre and I was on the phone with a work contact talking about an annual event that always took place in February.

I then pick the 16th because it was later in the month. I told Silven “February 16”.

He asked me if I was sure of the date. I said, “No, but it’s as good a number as any because I really don’t know.”

He then gestured to a packet of cards that had been sitting between us on the table this whole time. He asked me to look at the cards, really focus on them. He took the deck out of the box and started to spread them out in his hands.

He told me that a deck of cards is like a year – there are 52 cards and there are 52 weeks, there are four suits just like there are four seasons.

Silven said there are two cards in this deck that are faced down, and he pulled them out and put them on the table. He turned them over. Both cards were the jokers. Written on one was “February” and on the other was “16th”,

My first reaction was to loudly inhale and exclaim, “Oh, f—k off!”

Silven smiled. Obviously he wasn’t going to tell me how he did it, and the words he then used were actually more woo-woo than what he was saying before.

It became, “it’s really about you focusing on something and seeing if we can connect with her, otherwise, there’s every little that I’m doing. I’m just a conduit in the experience” and “it’s a little otherworldly, isn’t it?”.

I challenged him that he had been saying it wasn’t magic, to which replied, “but you tapped into something from your past, something you lost, a person you lost contact with and it felt right to see that date, thank you for connecting with me.”

Three hours later, I was convinced there had to be a logical explanation for it.

Was I hypnotised without realising it? But we never made any physical contact. Was it the power of suggestion?

I combed through our interview transcript and highlighted every instance in which a number came up in conversation – “I was four or five”, “I had £20 in my pocket”, “I did a hypnosis course at 13”, “think of a number between one and 10”, “most people say seven”, “five people in the course”.

None of that adds up to 16. And February was a month I arrived at through my own deductive reasoning, and not out loud.

Had he done something with my phone in the three seconds he held it? Waved his hands 16 times?

I can’t explain it. I am not yet Scully at the end of The X-Files. I’m still convinced that there has to be a rational reveal behind it, like in the Now You See Me movies.

But maybe I’ve left it open to the possibility of something else.

During our conversation, Silven told me about the core memory that led him down this path, an illusion his granddad taught him when he was a kid.

“He knew one trick that he’d learned in his army days,” he recalled. “He made me sign my name on a coin. He put the coin in my hand. He passed his hand over the coin, the coin vanished, and he pointed to the mantlepiece, and I ran over to the mantlepiece, and inside the little matchbox was the same coin, and I was hooked.

“He told me the secret to that illusion, pretty much that night because I had needled him relentlessly. It was a deeply disappointing secret, but I realised it was a really powerful thing.”

Sometimes, it’s better to not know.

Not because it might be disappointing but because why ruin the magic?

Scott Silven: The Lost Things is playing at the Sydney Opera House from June 11 to 29.