I can guarantee that there are no indifferent people in the audience at his speeches. The first shock among the audience gives way to distrust, a desire to catch the artist cheating. Then comes the excitement, the desire to understand what is happening, to find the truth.
… On the stage - a short, well-built man. He asks one of the spectators: "Think, please, the capital of the state and mentally say this word." In a few moments, this word seemed to be read in my thoughts. "Washington)" - the artist's unmistakable answer follows. It is just as easy to guess the number, the name of the composer.
Then he complicates the task for himself. “Hide this needle and the book” - A few minutes later, the artist returning from behind the scenes finds in the huge hall first a needle and then a book. And in the book - a word conceived by one of the spectators on one of the pages. All this the artist does blindfolded, accompanied by volunteers from the audience.
For just a few moments, the artist looks at the table in which the audience has written twenty numbers. These moments are enough to remember the numbers. It is enough moments to calculate the sum of five four-digit numbers, raise to a power or extract the root of an eight-digit number. The memory of this man retains information from one and a half thousand pages of the "Encyclopedic Dictionary" - these are thirty-five thousand names and surnames. The performance is absolutely amazing when the artist demonstrates the ability to do four different things at the same time …
Who is this person? Artist Yuri Gorny. In a conversation with him I try to find out what is the secret of the miracles that have just happened on the stage.
- Are your performances a concert number, a well thought out and organized trick? Or a demonstration of a rare natural gift, something like a scientific experience?
- In my opinion, science and art were divided completely unfairly. They do not just walk side by side, but complement each other, such as sports and art. I consider myself an artist. What genre? My performances are called psychological studies or experiments. And this is the terminology of science. This genre is new, not widespread, and few perform in it. But there is no trick or trick in my performances. This is a demonstration of ability
human brain: memory, intuition, attention.
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- Do you deliberately create an atmosphere of simplicity on the stage? During the program, the feeling is created: you are, as it were, observing what you are doing …
- I want not only to surprise and excite the viewer, but to engender in him the desire to know his intellectual capabilities. After all, my program is called: "Your possibilities are a man!" And various mystical attributes, mystery, fogging seem ridiculous to me.
- And yet it is not difficult to be convinced that what you demonstrate on stage is completely unique, accessible to units naturally endowed with extraordinary abilities and phenomenal memory. It turns out that you, to put it mildly, mislead the audience by showing them, no, not even a crane in the sky, but a firebird, to catch a ko
completely impossible?
- I can tell you that as a child I was the most ordinary child. He was no different from his peers, he did not achieve brilliant success in school subjects either. True, if he was seriously interested in something, he very quickly achieved success. And sports fascinated me most of all at that time.
Then he met Ilya Nikolaevich Tsentlin. He interested me in studying the human psyche. And then I began to purposefully prepare myself for such performances. Sports activities, or rather, endurance, health, performance, which I had thanks to these activities, helped. I had to literally absorb a huge amount of information, train my brain hourly.
Sport developed one more quality in me - motor memory, a subtle sense of movement. "Mind reading", the ability for which, as it sometimes seems to the audience, I have - in fact, not mind reading, but the perception of a person's motor manifestation. I catch the micromovements made in the process of thinking, and from them, using the familiar deductive method, I guess what is planned, mental commands.
- You mentioned the deductive method, which in the majority view is associated with the stories of Edgar Poe and Conan Doyle. What did you mean by linking the method of deduction with your presentations?
- Good knowledge of people. The behavior of a person in some situations is stereotyped, or rather, it depends on his temperament, type of activity, range of interests, etc. This, by the way, is the basis of the testing method. So I try to determine what kind of person came on the stage, how he should behave, what he can think of approximately. Quickly analyzing previous experience and new information, impressions, I determine what the "fairy tales" will be like.
- What you say, in my opinion, is also a perfectly developed intuition … Yuri Gavrilovich, now you have slightly lifted the veil over the secret, which, undoubtedly, despite all the simplicity of behavior on stage, still surrounds everything that you are on do it. But "reading movement", in my opinion, is no easier than reading minds, perhaps more materialistic. The question of the need to possess a phenomenal memory remains. Or will you be able to explain here how you can memorize 20 digits in 2-3 seconds?
- It's hard to talk about memory. This ability of the human psyche is not fully understood. There are many different theories about the nature of memory. One thing is clear: it is laid long before the birth of a person. When we are born, we only demonstrate different abilities to remember. And like all abilities, these can be developed and improved. As in sports, you can grow records by improving your skills, but at the same time, natural, physical data that will help or interfere with the results will necessarily affect.
Remember the number when they show me a table with numbers? The book "A small book about great memory" tells about a similar experiment with Shereshevsky. He memorized numbers in 30-40 seconds, I - in 3-4. Shereshevsky's memory is associative. I kind of photograph what I see and then reproduce it. According to my methodology, I taught several people. Within two weeks, they could memorize such information in 30-40 seconds.
- Do you never forget anything?
- How can I forget. In ordinary life, I am an absent-minded person. If I don’t have a mindset, then I don’t remember unnecessary information so as not to overload my brain. But in order to forget what has already been deposited in memory, a serious willful effort is needed. After each concert, it is far from immediately possible for me to get rid of the information that I receive here, demonstrating the ability to memorize.
- It seems to me that willpower is of decisive importance in everything that you have managed to achieve …
- The training that I arrange for my brain is not always enjoyable. It is sometimes very boring. The many kilometers of jogging that athletes make in order to have good physical fitness is also not a pleasant activity. But they are necessary.
In general, I read with great pleasure, a lot. I am trying to learn more from the most diverse areas of human knowledge. All this helps to better understand a person, the secrets of his psyche.
- And yet you have not completely convinced me that almost any person can develop such phenomenal abilities.
“But we have already set some restrictions. Not everyone, but only those who have good physical fitness, good health, great willpower, to train themselves daily for many years. You can also add: you need a healthy lifestyle. All this is also in the hands of man. But not everyone can say that he used these rather simple recipes to achieve success. Sometimes even daily exercise becomes an insurmountable obstacle … Now, probably, everyone knows that a person uses only a small part of those physical and intellectual resources that he is endowed with by nature. And this, in my opinion, is very sad …
From the book: "MYSTERIES OF THE TWENTY CENTURY". I. I. Mosin