The episodes of "Mentalist" mostly have some fabulous moments that exemplify really elegant use of either NLP or Hypnosis or Cold-Reading techniques. Patrick Jane, an ex-trance-medium/psychic, -turned law enforcement 'mentalist' who consults for a California investigative unit. But many of the tricks/techniques he uses involve sensory acuity, calibration, truth detection, confusion tactics, questions for reducing a pool of suspects, and more. These scripts could easily be written by or about an NLP Master Practitioner or trainer.
Season 1, Episode 18, openly dealt with NLP in both good and bad ways. Not only was NLP mentioned explicitly in the script (rather than just USED by the main character!), but NLP was portrayed for being both a useful and an easily-abused tool. The line of that episode surrounded an NLP-trained murderer who'd used NLP to help accomplish her crimes. What's strange is that while utilizing NLP to describe some of the most elegant behavioral techniques Patrick Jane uses throughout the series. NLP looked more than just a bit forced, sounded more than just a bit dry and boring, using too much jargon.
- "Shoulder Tap" - In this example, the Mentalist elicits a state of focused from several teenagers, anchors one of the teenagers while suggesting to "do exactly as I tell you", and then fires the anchor while redirecting the teenager.
- "True Statement" - In this example, the Mentalist gets a witness who found a body to their initial story, by changing their state from one of defensiveness to one of "avoidance of further humiliation." Any decision is possible in the right emotional
- "Personal Photos" - One of my favorite examples -- a visual form of truth detection / hidden information gathering. The Mentalist deducts that a subject is hiding information, and then leads that person on a nonverbal walkthrough of the space. It's an NLP-ish nonverbal form of "am I getting hotter or colder?" Beautifully shown!
