How'd He Do That?

Mike Wallace On Stage With Mentalist And Mind-Reader Marc Salem

(CBS)  Over time, Salem fine-tuned his skills, including an uncanny ability to tell when someone was lying to him. Whether Salem uses tricks or not, his abilities as a human lie detector have made him valuable off-stage, too. After a former New York City police commissioner saw him perform one night, he was offered a job to train the rank-and-file how to spot liars.

In 1998, lawyers involved in a big tobacco trial hired him to weed out jurors with hidden biases against smokers. Salem says it’s practically impossible to lie to him: "Even the most practiced liar, though, if they have an element of guilt, there's going to be what we call leakage."

"There is going to be information being given off. So, a politician can be trained and trained and trained and yet, their mouth is going to get a little dry when they're lying," adds Salem. "OK. There's gonna be the little bit of an adrenaline rush. … I would say virtually every thought we have has some physical manifestation."

"So to read somebody's thoughts, you've got to read their bodies?" asks Wallace.

"To read somebody's thoughts, you do need to read their bodies," says Salem.

And that’s the key to understanding his mental techniques. Salem believes that if we all used our observational skills better, we could do what he does. We could actually read other people’s thoughts.

But just as we thought we were close to understanding his special gift, he amazed us with one last piece of inexplicable, old-fashioned magic. Salem asked Wallace to hold onto an imitation leather bag. While Wallace was holding the mysterious leather bag, Salem went out into the audience and asked people to write down random numbers on his pad. He then selected one audience member to come on stage and add them up.

Salem: "Please understand over 155,000 different possibilities. Everybody could’ve written a 1, nobody did. … Mike, please open up what’s in there and you know what that is?

Wallace: Tape recorder?

Salem: Tape says something. What's it say? … The white one is the play button. Press it.

Wallace did. On tape, Salem said: "Good afternoon my friends. I’m sitting here in my home. I feel several people select a number at random. I get the overwhelming impression that the sum of these freely thought of numbers will be 1 – …6, 7 … No!! … that's 1, 6 – 9, 5."

"Aw, come on," says Wallace, as the audience applauds.

Do we know how he did that last trick? Nope.

Do we think he can actually read people’s minds? Possibly.

Do you know how he does any of it? Let us know!