Derren Brown has a show on the SciFi channel called "Mind Control". On the show he conducts various situational type tricks using the audience. These range from reading people’s minds to beating them at tic-tac-toe whilst blindfolded. He is not a magician and he does not use camera tricks or other paraphenalia.

Last week he had a teacher read a story out loud to her class. When she was done the teacher was asked to think of an object. He promptly drew a picture of what she was thinking about (a Teddy Bear). Of course she was amazed. He then proceed to reveal how through reading the story, her mind had picked up an a subliminal message in the text. That message was "teddy bear". 

This show is interesting from two perspectives; the first is obviously the showmanship and sheer entertainment value of the demos. The second is that in large part the participants are more satisfied with the explanation that there is some "magic" going on. Most of the people his mentalist tricks work on seem to be pre-disposed to ignoring rational thinking and seem to gravitate towards the notion of "I don’t know how that happened, therefore it must be magic".

And of course we have Asimov’s great quote which was that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

Checkout some sample clips here [LINK].