A variety of magic in which the magician makes audiences believe that he or she has special powers to talk to ghosts, read minds, move objects, predict the future, see through blindfolds, and control other people's decisions. (Book 3)
Parapsychological activities, such as telepathy and mind reading; the belief that some mental phenomena cannot be explained by physical laws.
Mentalism is an ancient performing art in which the practitioner uses mental acuity, principles of stage magic and/or suggestion to present the demonstration or illusion of mind reading, psychokinesis, precognition, clairvoyance or mind control. One of the earliest recorded performances of a mentalism act was by diplomat and pioneering sleight-of-hand magician Girolamo Scotto in 1572.
In psychology, mentalism refers to those branches of study that concentrate on mental perception and thought processes, like cognitive psychology. This is in opposition to disciplines, such as behaviorism, that see psychology as a structure of causal relationships to conditioned responses and seek to prove this hypothesis through 'scientific' methods and experimentation.
In philosophy of mind, mentalism is the view that the mind and mental states exist as causally efficacious inner states of persons. The view should be distinguished from substance dualism, which is the view that the mind and the body (or brain) are two distinct kinds of things which nevertheless interact (somehow) with one another. Although this dualistic view of the mind-body connection entails mentalism, mentalism does not entail dualism.