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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

Anything with Derren Brown in it is fascinating as well. He's done pickpocketing, but he's also given orders to people to give him stuff.

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A lot of Brown's act isn't what you think. He uses psychology and hypnosis as his form of misdirection for regular tricks. He isn't actually using psychology tricks.

Edit: If you're going to downvote facts please explain why.

Sure, but hypnosis is awesome.

That is actually how all mentalism works. It's traditional stage magic that is sold as psychology as part of the act to lower the audiences guard. It's super effective. Reading books like Corindas 13 steps to mentalism blew my mind when he goes over all of the shtick and stage magic gimmicks they employ so effectively.

True but I've heard other magicians critique him for overstating the psychology aspect.

If you're going to make unsourced bold claims expect to be downvoted or disregarded.

Derren Brown isn't as interesting (IMHO). He doesn't mind using camera tricks (e.g. his lotto prediction) and for me, that doesn't feel very clever.

I'd have to agree with you about his magic tricks. He doea blur the lines a lot and it's hard to see what he really did. In that sense all of his act is a huge demonstration of misdirection. But when it comes to hypnosis, I've never seen anything more impressive

That's because some of the people he hypnotizes are just stooges.

Ever see his show where over weeks he hypnotized and conditioned normal people to rob a bank (The Heist)? They were actors. :(

What gets me is that anybody would even believe something like that was real.

Why wouldn't it be real? Hypnosis does work.

Hypnosis only works if the hypnotee wants to be hypnotized or feel social pressure to play along, not what lay people usually think hypnotism means.

I can't find any source for this random comment's claim that they were actors, which seems like it would be pretty easy to prove. I think you've been bamboozled.

Do you have any evidence or source for this or are we expected to believe a comment from a random person on the internet ?

No they weren't?

Go see his live on stage shows. no camera tricks there.

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