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British illusionist Derren Brown does a lot of stuff with hypnosis and subliminal influencing of people ... there are a ton of 5 to 10-minute-long YouTube videos of his sketches. He never goes into what he thinks might be the science behind what he does, but some of the results are fascinating.

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Danger, danger, illusionist alert! Derren Brown is a 'mentalist', that is he performs illusions under the guise of mental tricks, psychology, the power of the mind etc. In reality this is just a guise, and when for example his professed method is hypnosis, it probably isn't, and instead misderection, slight of hand, gimmicks etc are involved. It's just another way to wow the public, and the public loves to believe it. Read '13 Steps to Mentalism' by Corrinda, it is one of the classic texts on mentalism and will get you wise to a lot of this stuff. That said, Derren is one of the masters in this field...

Most of the fun with Derren Brown stems from wondering what is a real effect and what is just elaborate trickery. He's taken that to a new level by often explaining in detail how the manipulation works--but then the explanation itself might as well be a misdirection.

He claims to use neuro-linguistic programming, subliminal messages etc. There are some videos in which he tries to explain what he does.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyQjr1YL0zg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=befugtgikMg

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