About Travis
Born in the “Magic City” of Barberton, Ohio, Travis has performed the mentalist art of psychic readings and spiritualism for over two decades and incorporates into his performances thought reading, predictions, and other demonstrations of extra-sensory perception (ESP), such as remote viewing, psychometry (intuiting information from personal objects), psychokinesis (moving or influencing objects or persons with the mind), and seance activity to contact the deceased. He performs for intimate house or dinner parties, gatherings small and large, corporate events, stage, parlor, and public venues. Travis uses a combination of psychological subtlety, suggestion, body language, and other mental skills to achieve his effects.
Taught at a young age by his father to “read” people, Travis honed his perceptual skills as a junior champion billiards player, where the ability to read one’s opponent and respond to verbal and body cues, as well as to crafty, subtle sharking is paramount. One must also negotiate the often duplicitous personalities of pool players used to making their living on the road, gambling, and hustling.
After touring professionally, Travis decided to pursue other interests: chiefly, the study of human behavior, knowledge, perception, and reality (all components of epistemology). He has taught in higher education for over 12 years (first at Rutgers University, now at Bellevue College), and he tries to instill the values of healthy skepticism and scientific exploration in his humanities and health sciences students.
Among his chief goals are to teach his students just how easy it is to be fooled. To believe an event happened as one sees it—“I saw it with my own eyes,” one says, with assurance—for one is certain one experienced it directly and remembers it fully—yet the vagaries of perception and memory are exploited, and at times quite easily. Magicians and mentalists are professional exploiters of this human perception and psychology—this knowledge, however, should not bring darkness to the conjuring arts, but, rather, an awareness that the things that happen to each of us are colored by layer upon layer of unconscious and environmental influence, an iceberg whose depths most of us have barely begun to perceive.
Travis is a member of the Global League of Magicians and Mentalists.
He currently lives in Seattle, with his spouse and two cats.
“Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening; the taste for the truth is an acquired taste that few acquire. . . .”