Interesting skill actually and is probably used in many areas of life
besides fortune telling. How much can we tell about a person and get
them to tell us without them realizing what is going on. But just
because this is sufficient for a refutation of mind reading, it is not
a necessary conclusion since it did not make mind reading an
impossible ability.
Cold reading is a technique used by mentalists and fortune tellers,
psychics, and mediums to determine details about another person in
order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject
than he or she actually does. Even without prior knowledge of a
person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal
of information about the subject by carefully analyzing the person's
body language, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual
orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner
of speech, place of origin, etc. Cold readers commonly employ high
probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals
from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right
direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance
connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from
missed guesses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading
