Whether he’s moving a block of wood with his brain or guessing a hidden number and writing it on a blackboard without even touching the chalk, Craig Karges isn’t your ordinary mentalist.

“I’m going for freak outs,” Karges said.

The award-winning mentalist has appeared on several television shows including “The Tonight Show.” On Sept. 13, the self-proclaimed “extraordinist” appeared at Northern Kentucky University in the Student Union ballroom to play some head games.

“I do extraordinary things,” he said, noting he avoids the term magician, “because people expect you to saw people in half or pull a rabbit out of a hat.”

Instead, he uses mental games and mind reading to amaze his audience. And amazingly he did.

The 30-plus people in the audience filled the room with gasps as Karges stepped ten feet away and caused a block of wood to sway backwards and fall off a table.

Most of Karges’ sleight of hand, however, was actually about the mind.

“Now we’ve come to the mind-reading part of the program,” he said. “You might want to start cleaning things up.”

One mind game had members of the audience come up with three numbers. Then, another participant added them up to 1364, without revealing the numbers to Karges. The mentalist then waved his hands over a blank chalkboard he’d covered, which he never touched, and had another accomplice reveal it. It read 1364.

He continued to play mind games on the audience ranging from guessing what song they were thinking about to linking three people’s rings together and then unlinking them. He left the audience more than breathless.

“That was incredible,” Meaghan Daniel, a sophomore majoring in biology education, said, “guessing to the tiniest details.”

Her favorite part was when Karges was reading the minds of several members of the audience at once, including Eva Rusconi.

Rusconi, a sophomore business management major, said the show was “fantastic,” including when Karges revealed that she was thinking about Flo Rida’s “Low.”

Karges also left them mystified; neither had any idea how he managed his mind magic.