Simply astonishing...

Mindhacker Daniel Sinclair won’t just read your mind. He will totally blow it!

He did mine – during our interview.

I had to type a word into my phone. And then type another word. I did my bestest to be utterly inscrutable. I kept my phone below my desk.

But Daniel rapidly told me both words. I am still not quite sure I have recovered from the shock!

You can enjoy his remarkable skills when Daniel performs at this year’s Brighton Festival with a date on May 17 at 7.30pm in the Komedia Basement.

Tickets on https://www.brightonfringe.org/events/comedy-hypnosis-mind-reading-mentalism-show/

Blending jaw-dropping moments, comedy and music, Daniel is promising to take you on a rollercoaster ride through your mind as you laugh out loud, offering two shows in one night.

“I got into it by watching Derren Brown when I was younger and thinking how did he do that, and I just thought I would try to research it. It took over my life at one point and I just found it so interesting. I met somebody called Justin Tranz who had played Vegas for a decade. He showed me how to do what is called an induction and I tried it. I didn't really know what I was doing but I tried it out on a group of people and I got them to forget their names or become more confident. I got them stuck in their chairs. And actually with hypnosis you can make people really relaxed and what comes out is they become really super confident. One of the women proposed to the person she was with. She had been holding it back in and then it came out when she was hypnotised.

“I think we all pick up on signals from other people. You think of that typical English thing of asking how someone is and they say that they are good but you look at them and you can tell that they aren't good. I think it's just something that we can all tap into.”

Daniel got someone to hide something in the theatre and just by holding their hand and sensing the muscle vibrations he was able to locate it.

Obviously as he says there is such a thing as a poker face where people have studied certain psychological skills to make sure that they betray very little. But if you are determinedly trying to hold something back, you might actually be making it more readable by holding it so tightly in your mind. As Daniel says, it’s along the lines of the old ‘Don't think of a black cat’ and of course that's what you think of.

“I think we are all giving a lot away without realising it. And I think that can make people vulnerable.”

Daniel cites the Cold War techniques which were used to read people and to trigger them. As he says, things will come out: “I was doing a show last week and I was picking up on the fact that someone in the audience had stolen some paper from work and that they'd been doing it for several months. I said ‘Put your hand up if it's you!’ but no one did!”

But Daniel is convinced he was right, based on the rest of the evening where he had been picking up on really detailed things that people were responding to, for instance that there was someone in the audience with a child called Stewart who was getting married and was thinking about changing his job.

“I started with hypnosis when I was about 18 and then I paused it for a bit and then when I started after college I started doing holiday parks and realised that I could put the skills to use. I started working in the holiday parks and then in my first year I did the Edinburgh Fringe. I had five people on the first date but by the end of the month I was filling up the room which had a capacity of about 50.”

And so it grew. Last year he was filling a 300-seater.

Tickets from the Brighton Fringe.