Cultural guest, mentalist Jose Ahonen knows how to play with the human mind, and fears that artificial intelligence will play with it in the future.
*\”Annoying dude.\”*
Card tricks at close range confused people so much that he was often told he was annoying.
*\”My job is to make you forget my job.\”*
This is what Ahonen’s business card says these days. He is a mentalist whose show plays more with the human mind than with magic tricks.
According to Ahonen, a mentalist is a kind of magician. Whereas a magician does visual tricks, a mentalist focuses on the human mind, reading thoughts and influencing people.
Ahonen, 45, is one of the few professional mentalists in Finland. He is a showman who performs at corporate events and at his own gigs.
According to the master of deception, supernatural and unexplained things are interesting to people again. Answers are sought from them in difficult times.
– They are a tangible departure from everyday life and the reality we live in.
A magician for adults
For a long time, magic had an outdated stamp in Finland. The magicians who conjured things from top hats in the circus mostly came to mind.
According to Ahonen, things have changed especially in the last ten years. Magic is performed in the same way as stand-up at our own club nights. They are also visited by a younger audience.
After that, he devoured all the books related to hypnosis that he could find in the library. At the age of 18, he did his first hypnotizations.
After a few years, Ahonen became interested in magic tricks. As he delved further into magic, he discovered mentalism.
Ahonen always tells the audience just to be sure at the beginning of his own show that nothing seen or experienced is supernatural. He just creates the illusion of it.
– You shouldn’t believe anything, because I might be lying. Everything is cheating, lies and psychology, Ahonen tells the audience.
In his performances, Ahonen asks people on stage and gets them confused when, for example, he is able to tell what number or memory they are thinking of. He seems to know it, even before the person asked to the stage answers.
– Mentalism is the magic of adults, Ahonen summarizes.
Secret knowledge fascinates
According to Ahonen, becoming a mentalist is a lonely road. Information about skills and techniques is not readily available. You have to dig everything yourself.
Ahonen talks about esoterica, i.e. secret information, which is meant for only a few.
He has read several books on magic and mentalism and has learned from other mentalists.
Canth organized evenings in his home where the spirits living in the afterlife were invited to a conversation using a Ouija board with letters and numbers.
People’s knowledge of the world around them more than a hundred years ago was different than it is today. At that time, supernatural things were thought to bring something more to the world of Christianity and new technology.
The attempt to contact dead people is not a new thing in human history. It has been done by shamans and mediums in different cultures throughout the centuries.
According to Ahonen, the phenomenon always repeats itself at turning points in the world and in desperate times. The popularity of spiritism grew in Finland, for example, during the continuation war and the recession of the 1990s. The same has happened now.
In his performances, Ahonen asks the audience how many have tried spiritualism. Usually quite a lot of people refer, and to the mentalist’s surprise, hands are raised when he inquires if someone has experienced something supernatural in the situation.
– Death is an incomprehensible thought. It brings out emptiness. It is comforting to think that we could communicate with those who have left the crowd.
Supernaturality brings security
Many young people are currently looking for direction in life from Tarot cards or horoscopes.
Some people put a self-help-type note on the refrigerator door with life instructions, which they then follow.
According to Ahonen, people have a need to control their destiny.
– It arises from some insecurity and the need for control.
The pandemic brought with it isolation and loneliness. Then came the recent wars. On top of that, we are still worried about artificial intelligence and influencing information.
The human mind cannot keep up with that.
Our world of thought is built in such a way that if something is not understood, imagination fills in the missing gaps.
And if that’s not enough, answers are sought elsewhere.
Jose Ahonen went in search of new perspectives on mentalism when he started working on the book *Yli livälden*, which was published this year. While doing it, he met, for example, clairvoyants and energy healers.
He says that he didn’t come across any real scammers, but while doing background work, he did find a lot of scumbags in the spiritual realm. Money is made with people’s anxiety.
– Those who do their job well and want to help people, they don’t advertise their services terribly. They have a good psychological eye, human knowledge and intuition.
Artificial intelligence challenges the mentalist
Artificial intelligence is starting to affect all of our lives little by little. Speech, images and text can be produced in such a way that the creator is no longer human.
When the content of the messages is produced by a machine, what can you trust anymore?
Ahonen has experimented with artificial intelligence with pictures. He has noticed that even now it is really easy to go astray in concluding whether the picture is real or a fantasy created by artificial intelligence.
In Ahonen’s opinion, everyone needs to be very careful about what they see or hear in the future.
– Are there elements behind the message related to earning money or political influence. That’s when you have to question and do background work on what it’s all about, Ahonen thinks.
Artificial intelligence has been estimated to reduce human work.
It can also apply to mentalists. Artificial intelligence can instantly make a conclusion about a person based on background information and predict this behavior.
This is what search engine and social media algorithms already do.
However, Ahonen believes that artificial intelligence will not displace humans in entertainment, whether it is theater or music.
That’s where man meets man.
– When a person tells stories, we listen to it with a different interest than if it were told by a robot.