King Files

He reprogram people’s minds and read peoples intimate thoughts using advanced psychological principles.

Keith Barry is a brain hacker. Its the term people have coined especially for him and it sounds dangerous.

He doesnt read minds and he doesnt believe in psychics, but what he does believe is human observation, deduction, neuro-linguistics, probing, hypnosis and magic can make people think he is hacking into their brains. And on Wednesday, he tried it on me.

"Really, there are no tricks to what I do - there used to be, years ago I started as a magician, and I do still use some magic techniques - but Im reading you, your eye movements, everything about you to find out what you are thinking at any moment in time."

The Irishman started as a child, wandering around the playground trying to guess what people were thinking, before moving onto bigger and more sophisticated routines.

"You start with simple shapes, numbers and colours and you would fail 50 per cent of the time, then you would get better and better and better through practice.

"What I do is a learnt skill, but Ive done it through 20 years of practise, 10, 20 hours a day sometimes. It does take that kind of effort."

By the age of 20, Barry was studying psychology and hypnosis and went on to win almost every magic award going. But it was the head that had his heart.

"Im fascinated by the human brain, especially the subconscious mind.

"Once you understand the subconscious and how it functions and how it works, then you can start to manipulate it and hack into it."

Hes studied and created his own sleeper agent to prove the US government ran the secret assassin programme, and hes used his skills on some of the worlds most famous faces, like Ellen De Generes, Elijah Wood and Rachel Hunter.