Mind Freak

Keith Barry reads minds – hacks them, as he claims – through a process of interpreting a person's body language, and translating the psychology of their responses into a yes-no truth. With these carefully honed skills – or at least the illusion of them – he's built quite a hefty performing career out of what he does. “When I mixed all those different areas together,” Barry recalls, “I [started] to [consider] myself a student of human behaviour patterns. By reading people's body language, their eye movements, the subtle changes in their facial expressions – everything down to the changes in blood pressure, it appears I can hack into people's minds, where in reality what I'm actually doing, is using the five known senses to create the illusion of a sixth sense.”

Primarily, one wonders, and seeing what Barry is capable of, why isn't this a skill that more of us haven't stumbled upon? Surely, if we all had the abilities Barry does, then we'd be rich. “When you try to hypnotise people you'll fail, hundreds and hundreds of times. But you can try and figure out if somebody's lying by looking at the carotid artery in their neck, or maybe their pupil dilation. Most people will give up after the first or second time. But me, the more I failed, the more determined I became and the more I studied. Even now I study when I have downtime – when I'm at home anywhere from 12 to 16 hours a day, every day. I'll study anything about the physiology and neurology of the brain, down to stuff that I'm not even supposed to have knowledge of. I'll research, and find secret CIA brainwashing techniques, stuff someone like me is not supposed to get their hands on. I've just dedicated my life to it…you know?” Whether you're a sceptic or not, his extensive practice and what Barry does clearly shows.

The upcoming tour Brain Hacker is Barry's first time visting Australia. The show is “a mixture of hypnosis, mindreading, magic, comedy, profanity, and nudity.” (Nudity ? ) “It's about me hacking into people's brains,” he continues. “I'm planting thoughts in people's minds, extracting thoughts, and really influencing [them]. Really, I try and relate what I do to a safe, or computer. In other words, our brains our exactly like [these things]. Take the safe analogy, some safes are quite easy to hack into, and some safes are complex, and can be really difficult to break into. So, point is, you have to be a really good cracker. Some safes malfunction, and you can't crack into them at all. It doesn't really matter whether you believe it or not,” he says to skeptics on stage. “I'm going to hack into your mind anyway. I quite like the change of a skeptic from that moment in time to the end of a routine where their brain is completely busted.”

Keith Barry performs on Thursday August 16, The Tivoli.