Warehouse 13, Mr. Mental Mind Reading Fezzes Artifact

original movie prop

In third season episode Past Imperfect, a dangerous artifact is stolen from Claudia and Steve after someone renders them unconscious, and the only witness is a stray dog who may have chased the assailant's car and seen the license plate.  Artie has them bring the dog back to the Warehouse, where he proposes that they read its mind to get the license plate number using this bifurcated artifact, with the small fez acting as a visual memory transmitter and the large fez as a receiver.

Mr. Mental aka Raymond Fraser was a Depression-era mind-reading act who would send his monkey Coco out into the audience to look at a dollar bill or anything with numbers, after which Coco would return to the stage where Mr. Mental, who was blindfolded, would recite the numbers. Unlike with many of the artifacts stored at the Warehouse, this item is technological, not magical, and therefore more akin to a Tesla or Farnsworth than most artifacts. Fraser, who had a background in Neurology and also apparently was a century ahead of his time in Bioengineering, had created a paired transmitter and receiver of brain waves, allowing him to visualize simple concepts like numbers and letters retained in the visual cortex of some non-human mammals.

At one point, Claudia refers to the device as 'the first MRI'. In the real world, the vast majority of MRIs performed do not even attempt to recreate this functionality. Routine MRI shows structure exquisitely, physiology in a limited fashion and mostly by inference, and nothing regarding higher functions such as senses and memory. However, functional MRI (fMRI), although currently of limited clinical value, may one day help accomplish something that could be described as 'mind reading'.

Pair of large and small fezzes done in identical red velvet-like material with golden tassles. Each fez has an internal metal framework simulating an antenna coil, with easily screen-matched nonfunctional electronic components attached to the undersurface.

From VIP Fan Auctions & NBCUniversal.