Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [19]
Figure 1.3. A palm reading chart
It turns out that you can tell the handedness of a person because the dominant hand is a little larger and more muscular. That gave me an opening to tell my mark, who was left-handed, that she was right-brain dominant, which means that she puts more emphasis on intuition than on intellect, that she is herself very intuitive (Rowland says that a great ruse is to flatter the subjects with praise about their own psychic powers), and that her wisdom comes more from real-world experience than traditional book learning. She nodded furiously in agreement.
According to the various palm reading “experts,” you are suppose to comment on the color and texture of the skin, hair on the back of the palm, and general shape of the hands. Any major discrepancy between the two hands is supposed to be a sign of areas where subjects have departed from their inherited potential. The psychic should also take note of the shape of the fingers. The outer phalanges of the fingers (the fingertips) represent spiritual or idealistic aspects of the person, the middle phalanges everyday and practical aspects, and the lower phalanges the emotional aspects of personality. I found it most effective to rub my fingers over the mounds of flesh on each finger segment while commenting on her personality.
For this reading I threw in a few high-probability guesses, starting with the white car. It turns out that this subject’s ninety-nine-year-old grandmother had a white car, which gave me an opening to comment about the special nature of her relationship with her grandmother, which was spoton. Then I tried the out-of-date calendar, which did not draw an affirmative response from my subject, so I recovered by backing off toward a more general comment: “Well . . . what I’m getting here is something about a transition from one period in your life to another,” which elicited a positive affirmation that she was thinking of switching majors.
This subject’s assessment of my reading was slightly more positive than the first subject’s, as was my own self-evaluation, but no one was yet floored by anything said. I was still gathering steam for the big push to come.
The Astrological Reading
My third subject was another young lady, age twenty, and was my toughest read of the day. She gave monosyllabic answers to my incidental questions for extracting information and did not seem to have much going on in her life that required psychic advice. I downloaded an astrological chart from the Internet (figure 1.4). It was constructed some time ago for a guy named John, born May 9, 1961. My subject was born September 3, 1982. I haven’t got a clue what the chart is supposed to mean, but since it doesn’t actually mean anything I began by explaining that “the stars incline but do not compel,” and then I just made up a bunch of stuff about how the conjunction of having a rising moon in the third house and a setting sun in the fifth house is an indication that she has a bright future ahead of her, and that her personality is a healthy balance between mind and spirit, intellect and intuition. Her nods indicated agreement.
I tossed out a bunch of high-probability guesses and got about half of them right (including the line about wearing her hair longer at a younger age), then closed the reading by asking her if she had any questions for me. She said that she had applied for a scholarship in order to participate in a foreign student exchange program in England and wanted