How Derren Brown Remade Mind Reading for Skeptics | Hacker News Reader

How Derren Brown Remade Mind Reading for Skeptics

newyorker.com

38 pointshhs9 comments

Brown's standard patter starts with him saying he performs a mix of "magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship." He is very good at what he does. I suspect most of his tricks are of the more traditional magic variety (misdirection and showmanship) but dressed up as if they're psychology and mentalism, but that's ok.

More than this, he seems to be a good person, and has a deep disdain for people who use similar techniques in fraudulent ways to take advantage of vulnerable people rather than to entertain, and has worked to educate people.

I came across his work years ago and adore it. He's really carved out a niche for himself. I also recommend his book "Tricks of the Mind" as a gift for young nerds: https://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Mind-Paperback-DERREN-BROWN/dp...

It's a nice combination of charm, trickery, and skepticism. Bits about his life, teaching techniques he uses in his mentalism, and interesting items from his work. For example, he goes into this trick in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haP7Ys9ocTk

For those who don't watch it, he pretends to be an astrologer and gives a group of people a reading. They are shocked at how accurate it is. He then has them randomly trade readings and try to guess who the reading applies to. It turns out that he gave them all the same reading, making use of the Forer effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect

In the book, he explains how he constructed it and gives the text of the reading. It was a pleasure to read through and see how artfully it was done.

A very elegant stunt he did was play simultaneously against 9 chess players, some of them at master level, and end up with a positive finish. The trick was that he paired eight players into four groups of two and simply reproduced the moves one made on the other member of the group. The eight masters were essentially playing against each other, with a neutral finish. The ninth player was the weakest one and Brown simply beat him normally.

I admire the level to which he’s mastered his craft, on stage or in one of his specials.

I’m also quite frustrated with people who watch him and believe he’s shown us something about ourselves, especially those who believe he demonstrated that 75% of people would commit murder if in a real situation like the elaborate sequence in The Push. But it’s difficult to explain the difference between participating in a hypnotic/suggestive guided scenario (unwittingly or not) and real life with its hard edges and unsuspended moral convictions.

> those who believe he demonstrated that 75% of people would commit murder if in a real situation like the elaborate sequence in The Push.

There's also the fact that there was a screening process. They didn't pick people at random, they filtered for people with high suggestibility.

It was pretty amusing to watch that conformity test where they put an applicant in a room with actors pretending to be applicants, where actors would all stand up/sit down at regular intervals, with no explanation.

Yes, that one was, and I think I would probably have conformed too! I participated in an exercise once designed, through rhyme, to get an entire room to say the wrong answer to a basic math problem. I knew I was saying the wrong thing as it was happening, but I couldn’t stop myself. It’s just that there is a difference between that and finding oneself taking a bullet, committing murder, etc.

I talked to a career magician (lives in Vegas, travels across country often for shows) last week about Derren Brown.

Take it for what you will: he said the guy is mostly showmanship and light on psychological tricks. Looking back at the videos of his that I watched a decade ago (and the guys who took him seriously), I believe it’s largely a show. But I could be wrong!

I love Derren's shows, he's honest about his methodology and eminently entertaining. This show exposes some of the scams run by "faith healers"[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuP5uOI7Xwc

He’s not at all honest about his methodology. Particularly all of his talk about suggestion and NLP is just patter. He’s done standard mentalism tricks using 100 year old methods. He barely even does cold reading.

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