How about someone who advocates using NLP? Someone who claims NLP is effective and useful? I would consider those NLP adherents, even though NLP has not been clearly defined.
Uh, Dex Sinister posted as the OP:
Bolding added.
So there you have right there someone who claims to have studied NLP and is and NLP advocate who is claiming that Darren Brown uses NLP. Is one example sufficient, or would you like others?
From that wiki cite:
Bolding added. So here is a cite in your own reference stating that NLP proponents claim their techniques can shape a person’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions. That sounds like suggestion and manipulation to me.
I’m not sure of any other way to say that I agree with you. The trick is accomplished using mentalist techniques alone. Everything else is stage dressing. I am interested in the stage dressing.
I think that is an excellent definition and-- unless there are objections-- I’ll accept it as the definition for the purposes of this thread.
An NLP adherent is someone who advocates using NLP and claims that it is effective and useful.
Do you think one example is sufficient? If so, I will accept that as well for the purposes of this thread.
I would ask, however, if you, personally, knew of one doctor who claimed that people should chew sugarless gum, would you believe that all doctors believe people should chew sugarless gum? Would you believe that all people who believe people should chew sugarless gum are doctors? Based on one example?
Also, I notice that this is another of those threads where the OP has vanished and cannot speak to the issue. The other apparent NLP advocate (paging NLP-DK) says: NLP is not about deception or manipulation. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
First, the semantic argument: Shaping a person’s thoughts feelings and opinions can mean anything from advertising to parenting. In reading that article I find a lot of descriptions of the concepts related to NLP and only that sentence that hints at what you seem to want it to mean.
A more dicey argument-- since I have to admit my own difficulty reading that article-- is that it sounds to me as though the United States National Research Council led by Daniel Druckman assumes what the claims of NLP are (for the purposes of their study).
In searching the rest of the article for the term ‘eye movements’ the next instance I find is:
The wiki article on social influnce does not seem to indicate manipulation or suggestion as terms of primary relevance.
If you look for terms that one can interpret to mean something like suggestion and manipulation I’m sure you can find them, but that does not seem to be the gist of the NLP doctrine. Unfortunately, there isn’t a strong NLP doctrine.
I don’t believe that is a fair representation of my statement. Let me try to clarify.
You posted that you think the people that are responsible for promoting the idea that NLP is the basis of Darren Brown’s performance, and also that NLP is about changing how other people think, are not the proponents of NLP, but rather other people who have not studied NLP.
Now I will grant you that the original question to Cecil came from someone who does not know what NLP is, who had only heard the common understanding of what it is (it is about predicting/influencing people’s thoughts) and the claim it was used by Darren Brown, and wanted to know from someone trustworthy. But the OP of this thread came from someone who claims to be an NLP student and claims that NLP is effective. That makes him an NLP adherent to my mind, which I think we have agreed. And this person, Dex Sinister, has made the claim that he recognizes NLP in Darren Brown’s work, and that other NLP students and advocates would also recognize the techniques. So I think that is a fair refutation of your statement that the primary people responsible for the claim that NLP is part of Darren Brown’s act comes from non NLP people.
Backing that up, we also have NLP-DK, another NLP advocate, also claiming that Darren Brown uses NLP. So again, the two identified NLP advocates in this thread agree that Darren Brown uses NLP techniques. Although neither one responded to a request for examples of the NLP techniques in question. Admittedly, 2 is a small sample size, but the original point was that the ones claiming Brown uses NLP were not NLP advocates, so here are two examples in this thread from NLP advocates saying Brown uses NLP. Whereas I don’t see any posts in this thread from non-NLP advocates who say Brown must be using NLP. Though that, perhaps, is also not fair, given the membership of this site.
The second claim is about whether NLP techniques are actually useful for influencing people’s thoughts, doing “mind control” tricks, etc. This is where we are on fuzzier ground. I agree with you that when most people hear “Neuro-linguistic programming”, they think that means “programming people’s thoughts through some neuro-linguistic technique”. Furthermore, I think you may be correct that the actual intent of the term was “understanding the underlying programming that our brains use for creating language from the brain structure” or some such. I.e., it is about having an understanding of how the brain works.
But what do NLP advocates want to do with this understanding? They want to make you change your own behavior, and they want to be able to make other people change their behavior and thoughts, and they want to be able to predict what other people are thinking and feeling. Which is the essence of “mind control” is all about – knowing what others are thinking and feeling and subtly influencing those thoughts and feelings without the other realizing that you are doing so. Admittedly, mentalism is about dramatic demonstrations of effect - reading what someone wrote on a piece of paper, guessing a name from their mind, IDing a card they picked - whatever. A mentalist is trying to create the effect of mind reading or mind manipulation. Of course, NLP sounds like it is also related to perceiving what others are thinking and trying to influence those thoughts, so it seems logical that NLP might be related to what mentalists are doing.
Now do I think that NLP advocates are the only ones promoting NLP is part of Brown’s act? Of course not. I am sure there are plenty of people who have heard that assertion and are passing it along. But where would non-NLP advocates get the idea? Surely they would have to have heard of NLP and have some idea of what it is about in order to connect the two. So do we have a small crowd of people who have limited knowledge of what NLP is, decided they don’t advocate it, but then go on to project NLP onto Brown’s act? And a larger crowd of people repeating that claim, because they heard it from someone? Or do we have a modest crowd of NLP advocates seeing Brown’s act and thinking they recognize NLP in what he does, and spreading that he uses NLP because his results are so dramatic and thus demonstrate the effectiveness of NLP, and then that forms the basis of the rumor spreading? Or is it a combination of those?
I certainly don’t know. But I would bet that on the whole, it is the NLP advocates that started and promote the rumor, precisely because Brown is so dramatic with his results that it would make NLP look very effective.
I wasn’t trying to put words in your mouth, but I do appreciate such a comprehensive response.
I said I would be willing to accept one example if you were and it appears you are indeed willing. I would say I am a man of my word, but that would be an outright lie. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this thread I will concede the issue. I know where I would put my bet too, but that is another thread entirely.
So for those who think that NLP had nothing to do with how Derren Brown actually did the trick (which I agree with), could you please offer an explanation as to how he actually did it?
I’m still hoping ianzin will offer his thoughts at some point.
OK, I think I can provide some guidance. First up there is the Derren Brown angle. That can be summed up as: take a well known, tried and tested mentalism trick - usually a prediction type of trick - and dress it up, not as prediction but as mind control. If you realise this what is happening you can deconstruct the trick. And also recognise the trick as something identical to one you may well have seen before by a different magician. Part of Derren’s act seems to have become the fake explanation of how the trick was done. But it really is fake. It isn’t how the trick works.
I have found three mind control acts on You Tube that Derren has done. Each has much the same structure - an impossible prediction - and an explanation that the subject has been subliminaly coerced into the action that brings about the result. But the result is always a well known predition trick, or a variant of it.
I have mentioned earlier the basis of how the mind control of selecting the BMX bike was done. But to outline the idea as I see it end to end. One, Derren needs to know ahead of time that Simon Pegg has written “Red BMX Bike” on a sheet of paper that is placed in the envelope. He can know this in a number of ways. We assume that it was a totally free selection by Simon, since all we know was that Derren and Simon had discussed things over the phone. However we don’t hear what the conversation was, and although we assume that Simon has totally free choice, he may have been encouraged to select from a set of options that were designed to lead to one possible choice (“forcing” the choice.) Mentalist acts do this all the time. There are also a heap of remarkably mundane tricks that can allow the contents of the envelope to be known. All the way down to picking his pocket days before.
Then we get the charade of the conversation between Simon and Derren. This is simply stagemanship. It ends when Simon is given his BMX bike.
If the trick stopped here, and Simon opened his envelope to reveal a piece of paper with “Red BMX Bike” on it, we would all be slightly amused, and assume that there was a simple trick involved. The artistry in Derren’s work is that he takes it one step further. He switches the contents of the envelope. (And no, I’m not going to say how, although I have read enough now to have a pretty good idea how to.) So it then appears that Simon really has been controlled because, there for all to see, is the fact that before he came onto the set he had really written “Leather Jacket” on the paper. Simon is confused all the more, because he was sure he had written “Red BMX Bike”. He should be confused, because of course, he had.
The other two mind control tricks I have seen are: controlling two advertising designers, and a live on stage control of a subject to choose a certain word out of a newspaper. Both of these involve different core magic tricks, both well known. Neither involve the slightest bit of mind control, and the afterword where the trick is explained as subliminal control totally false.
Search for Derren on You Tube. Until this thread started I had never heard of him, but I must admit I really warm to him. In addition to his artful magic he has done a lot of exposing of fakery. In this he is very much on the same level as James Randi, but the sincere ethical underpinings of Derren’s work really impressed me. There is a good interview with Derren and Richard Dawkins on this subject too.
There is one superb segment where he exposes spiritual readings, and explains the nature of cold reading. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btP_vy5cQq4
As part of reading and researching this stuff I ran across Ian Rowland’s book on cold reading. (Since ianzin has already been outed as Ian’s alias on SDMB in another thread, I guess he won’t mind me making that connection again.) £30 well spent. I finished reading it Saturday night. What Derren does in that clip is exactly what Ian describes in his book. There are other clips on You Tube where Derren explicitly mentions Ian, and his book. I think you can take ianzin’s word on his relationship with Derren.
Irishman. This seems to be one of those threads where confusion can arise even regarding what various posters agree on or disagree on. I sincerely doubt this post of mine will achieve anything, but I’ll give it a try.
There are some people who don’t know much about mentalism (Derren Brown’s field) or much about NLP. Sometimes, some of these people will parrot the line that Derren achieves some of his effects wholly or partly by using NLP. They may even think that DB himself has made this claim. He has not.
There are some people who know a lot about NLP and who sincerely and honestly believe that, when they analyse some of DB’s work, they can see clear evidence of him applying NLP techniques in order to achieve the results that he does. There are two possible things going on here. In some cases, I grant you, DB may make passing references to NLP jargon, such as ‘anchoring’. He may even do some things that are intended to allow people to make this false connection. But this is window-dressing and presentation. It has nothing to do with how the trick is actually done. And in some other cases, it’s just NLP experts seeing castles in clouds, or seeing what they want to see.
There are some people who know a little bit about mentalism or who may have dabbled in magic. Some of them may well imagine that NLP accounts for some or all of DB’s results. I know, because sometimes they approach me to ask for advice about learning to do the same. They are mistaken.
There are some people who know a lot about mentalism. None of them thinks that NLP is anything to do with how DB achieves the results that he does. This is because they actually know the facts, for real, about how he does what he does. I am one of these people. I can justly claim to be an expert in the field of mentalism, and if my credentials are really important to you or anyone else, I can provide them. What’s more, I was very good friends with DB long before he ever got on TV or became famous. The reason I don’t think NLP has anything much to do with how DB does what he does, and is at most just a bit of window-dressing, is because I know the actual methods he uses.
Am I going to divulge these methods? No. Why not? First of all, because I think that spoils the fun, the artistry and the entertainment value. To me, it’s like DB and his team have created a beautiful painting, like the Mona Lisa or something. I am not going to go and scribble a moustache all over it, just for fun. I respect the creation, and I’ve no wish to spoil it. Secondly, because you couldn’t do anything useful with the information even if you had it. You wouldn’t be able to do go out and do the same things, because knowing the secret is a very small part of being able to perform mentalism. There’s a lot else you need to be good at as well, things that you can only get good at with many years of performing experience. Thirdly, because it wouldn’t make me very popular with all my many friends in the magic and mentalism world.
Oh, and BTW, if you want to know if I know my stuff and if I’m any good, ask C K Dexter Haven and Ed Zotti. They saw me perform when I was last in Chicago!
Francis Vaughan’s post was very good, and was mostly on the money.
And I don’t mind people knowing that ianzin = Ian Rowland. In fact, this has been made perfectly clear on one or two ‘Staff Reports’ that I’ve helped with.
Let me be clear, I don’t think NLP has anything to do with Darren’s act other than possibly a bit of set dressing. And I think your assessment of who asserts NLP is part of his act largely agrees with my own.
With regards to his actual methods, I certainly don’t expect you to reveal his techniques. I certainly enjoy learning the hows rather than just experiencing the results - I actually get frustrated by not knowing. But I understand your position and am not trying to convince you otherwise.
And I am familiar with your reputation from long-time activity on this board.