Mind Freeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaak! 

More or less distraction vs. mind control?

I've been a fan of Derren for sometime now and having read all but 1 of his books. (I own his latest and Absolute Magic) and as he says in his books and at the beginning of the show should bring up a healthy bit of skepticism. As a fellow magician I understand where he is coming from in fact, my line of study is what made me a fan of Derren, seeing as what he does was in line with most of my interests.

It's NLP to some extent... but of course just not that simple.

I love Derren Brown. I wonder whether his job is harder now (in England) that people know who he is. I like the way that he does what he says he does, misdirection, sleight of hand, suggestion and illusion to produce amazing effects.

A few years ago he did a series filmed in America where he went to several different groups, claiming different experiences/skils like a clairvoyant, someone who'd been abducted by aliens and seeing whether he could convince experts that he was what he said. Most of them thought that he was a natural, but in fact he was using suggestion and so on.

absoloutly love derren brown he kicks ass you should see the fulkl shows they will blow your mind. go onto youtube and look at the zombie one... the guy actually thought he was being atta cked by zombies!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i noticed in the jewellry one as he gave over the money he concluded the subway story with the phrase "take it take it its fine"

i think thats the trick.

I've seen him live many times and trust me, not one of the participants are stooges.

I've also been to watch his live shows and I can assure you that everything he does is real.

First of all, to select participants, he threw a ring in to the crowd, in totally random places, and his throws weren't carefully directed. He then moved on, in the second half, to people writing a note and placing it inside an envelope in a bowl on stage in plain view of everyone, what he did with these was truly amazing... Awe inspiring even... He then bandaged his head up at the end of the show and got someone to check he wasn't wearing an ear piece and went on for about another fifteen minutes totally blind with the same act.

If you watch his shows, read his books and watch him on T.V. you can learn how to do a few of his tricks... I can make people pick specific cards out of a deck of cards purely by suggestion and I'm a programmer, not a magician...

If you get the chance to see him live, don't miss it!

Great, at least until he gets caught and gets the sh** kicked out of him!

I can't see how that is real. How do they know what change to give him. That's ridiculous.

This man is simply one of the brightest con-men that I've ever seen. It's all about tricking people in short hand and being quick on your feet to get away before they realize their short fall. @ guest: for the change all he does is assume that the clerk assumes that he is giving him round dollars, i.e. if something is $5.78, the clerk thinks the guy gives him $6.00, thus the change from it. They don't look at the money because they are too distracted in the first place.

Yeah I am a genius at mind control. I knew I possessed this kind of skill when I could influence my teachers. If you do follow my tricks you can be seeing rewarding benefits.

I can accept it all, but this one in the Mind Control series:
How can he tell the exact amount of cash in my wallet, when I rarely know that myself? Just by asking non-essential questions.

I can't imagine any mechanism. Unless he sees - in my voice and body language - what I did the last week (or two) with the 100 euro I took out of the cash machine AND make calculations based on the things that I payed for.

This is either done by cheating or he made 1000 attempts and guessed wright few.

How on earth would anyone not notice the paper was plain!!! It could never happen here in Australia where our money is brightly coloured plastic. The jewellery store was especially hard to swallow. I have a feeling it was set up or something.

It's obvious that Derren Brown is an exceptional individual with finely developed skills. But, the more I'm exposed to his work, the more I wonder - exactly what skills are those? I once read an interview with DB conducted by a stage magic periodical in which the interviewer asked him to explain how telling the audience that he's doing something using NLP or "Photoreading" was any more ethical than telling them it was done using genuine psychic powers. The implication was that DB uses NLP, Photoreading, body language, and other "pop psychologies" as a form of conceptual misdirection. Once the audience has accepted the explanation, they stop looking for the real technique. In other words, he's using the same stage magic techniques of old, but has repackaged them in a more modern presentation. Those of you familiar with DB probably know that he's a strong advocate of critical thinking, which is why the interviewer was asking him to address the hypocrisy of criticizing other people for claiming psychic powers when he's similarly feeding the audience a different load of BS.

Makes you consider how the average person these days is probably much more willing to swallow an explanation couched in technical jargon borrowed from the field of psychology than an explanation based on the paranormal. Science is the new religion, etc. Anyways, sorry I can't find the link to that interview, but there's discussion of a similar nature out there on the web.

I dont believe on filmed "mind control" "magic tricks" shows

Derren Brown is the best in the world at his field. he is totally honest about his skills - never claims he can do anything like twats like david blaine

I knew Darren (fleetingly) when we were at Bristol University at the same time (early '90s). It probably wouldn't surprise you to know that his patter and style was just as good then as it is now. He's a very likeable fellow!

I believe the last bit was set up. The man was possibly hyptomised prior to going to work, or it was totally set up. Having worked a cash register and sold some relatively high priced items 500-1000 dollars. If someone is buying a high priced item they rarely pay cash, and I'd assume it would be very rare to buy a 4500 dollar ring with cash. The first thing you think is why is the person paying cash, is it fake. You would examine every bill and test it with the marker. Come on...4500 in cash...and they guy doesn't count it or check it at all, what about the sales tax! it isn't going to be exactly 4500 dollars...I don't care who you are, there is just no way!

Derren Brown does use actors even in episodes where he claims not to. It's just another trick in his toolkit. But he does it very smart (for example he will always add one clip where his trick does not work which will be either with an actor or with just any regular person) you have to give him that much.

The trick with the change in the wallet is very simple. You steal the wallet, count the money and put it back. Another (less illegal) way is to perform a trick off camera beforehand that involves the wallet and gives you a chance to count. Counting is relatively quick: It takes only a few seconds to count the bills and if there are a lot of coins you simply take them out and replace them by a set amount.

Why do I give out the trick? Well, because you will still wonder whether that dirty, brute force way can really be the secret behind such an elegant performance. :P

Whenever someone waits on me that's chatting with a co-worker or on a personal call when they should be doing their job, I sometimes tell them I gave them a bigger bill than I did, and they always have to believe me because they weren't paying attention to their jobs. I only do it in cases where I felt my service could have been better if they had been focused on their job and not their social or personal lives. I admit it's spiteful of me, but that aside, it's distraction, not mind control, and they are the ones distracting themselves. I would think they would be easy marks for anyone who wanted to deliberately try to distract them (and I would frankly rather have faster service than the extra cash).

Untrue, if you examine the videos of "count the money in the wallet without seeing it" closely, you will see that the piece of paper that derren has "written" the amount of cash in the wallet on is in fact blank - another case of the mind sees what it expects to see. That is why the piece of paper is in an envelope and why Derren always gets it back soon after the trick is done. By then, a crew member will have already written the correct amount on another piece of paper, which is then held up to the camera in the post-trick interview.

I enjoy seeing shows and series with Derren Brown. Not only because I find it rather inspiring and fascinating, but also because I am going to start a new education soon.
I have read the threat, and I think it is totally waste of time to discuss wether DB uses actors or not. Even if he does (and even, if he says he don´t) he has skills that are unreacheable for anyone at the moment.

I am from Denmark, and in Denmark it is legal to promote and do shows with hypnotism. As far as I know, it is not in England???
Mind (what a word... in this thread), that Derren Brown first of all is an educated hypnotizer. This should stop the discussion about "mind-control or not"...
But besides that he have shown cardtricks and cardskills, that I have never seen before. So smooth and elegant, that its impossible to tell for a fact if it is tricks or just skills.
And furthermore he are intelligent and knows about both art in generel (with skills) and music.

Isn´t that enough? I find it revealing, that he in several occations tells us, that there is nothing mysterious or magical about, what he does. (well, it would allmost be easier to believe if there where...)
I can accept if accors are participating... but I must say, that I didn´t see any actors (besides the actors he actually told about). If there have been actors, they would be even more skilled, than Derren Brown himself. (IMHO)
Cheers...

...all I have to do is set my 3 children on someone and they can have them distracted to insanity in minutes.

No, seriously, I can see how distraction can be effective on trying to get change for a higher denomination bill than what you gave over...I happen to be a chatty person and I have a cashier try to give me change for a higher bill at least twice a year. Other times, the cashier will shove something in the plastic bag that didn't get rung up. It's not like I am trying to distract them, it just happens. In total, it happens several times a year. The other direction also happens: the cashier tries to charge me twice for something, or over rings or doesn't apply a coupon or discount.

Sometimes it's been so much in my favor that I wonder how much stores lose not to shoplifting, but to a brain-dead idiot running the register.

If the mistake is small and I don't catch it until I am walking to the car, I blow it off. If I catch it while it's happening, I say something. One time I had to nearly argue with the woman, and finally I gave up and let her give me $16.00 off of an item when the coupon for it was $15.00 off. She had it stuck in her mind that the coupon was for a free item...and my item was $15.99. It was good for up to $15.00 off...so she rang up the item as $15.00 so she could take the $15.00 off and give the item to me for free! This was AFTER I had corrected her about the coupon being only $15.00 off when she rang the coupon as $15.99 off....

So in these cases, I give up. But it happens way too often for me. I wonder if it's because I am a direct and chatty person. People look at me and their first impression is that I am an honest person, just by the way I look.

Con artists must really use first impressions to their advantage. Nice looking people are not always what they seem...

I just read your blog and you're a mug.

Watch the clips again. DB doesn't pay with paper at all. He pays with real banknotes. He just says he pays with paper, and because you trust him, you believe him. You never see the transactions at all - just a bit of camera-based mis-direction. It's obvious all he's doing is a normal cash transaction, but you're not seeing it because you have believed all his psycho-babble.

The only time he tries to pay with paper - to buy a hot dog from a street vendor (fancy that being the only one that 'failed'), the guy hands it straight back to him and asks for real money. Just as anyone else would.

Watch it again and think about it.

The guy is conning you and everyone else who watches this sham and actually believes it. He's not smart enough to con anyone into actually accepting blank paper instead of real money, and so he cons you, the viewer, instead.

It's cheap, it's shoddy, and it's shameless.

+100!

all he is doing in the videos is making the people lose their concetraition.he talks about the subway and then he pays with the paper and not real money.you will see what im talking about if u listen carefully when the guy goes into the jewlery store and buys the ring.

I suspect that what he does is a massive combination of things, both conning people on screen, and viewers at home. I believe that he doesn't use actors or stooges because that would come out too easily, and it is possible to do things like this, just highly improbable, without actors or stooges.

Some have suggested because it's on the Sci-Fi channel that it must be fake. In the UK he is on Channel Four, one of the five huge mainstream channels. I doubt that Channel Four could get away with a claim like that.

Anyone who has seen the System will note his idea of how he can flip a coin to come up with ten heads in a row. To this end he recorded for nine hours until a row of ten heads came up. It is improbable but possible, and probability states that it will work at some point.

In 'paying with paper' he will probably have tried this hundreds of times and shows the viewer the successful ones with a failed one (and a different subliminal message that the more observant will notice and use that as an explanation of the failure). To even get this to work once is phenomenally impressive, but I think there is manipulation of the audience at play. Paying at the jewellery shop is harder to explain, but he may have gotten lucky, or used sleight of hand, or hypnotised the guy beforehand. I can't explain it, but it is worth remembering that the impossible is seldom impossibly: just highly unlikely.