I know a little bit about cold reading, but in this video, he doesn’t seem to be using any identifiable tricks, like saying vague, right for everyone sort of statements to a group, then getting someone to respond to that. They’re very specific statements made to specific individuals without too much banter. Now, apart from being interested by the trick’s obvious usefulness(if it’s possible, which I doubt, and even then I’m sure I would never be able to pick it up), I actually am baffled at how he does it. Are the girls actors, does he try this a number of times with a stock set of replies and then only televise the successful attempt, does he actually read cues off the girls? What?
Well I don’t know specifically how he does it, because I’m not privy to his methods.
I do know that one way to do it is to do research before hand. He or his minions ask the girls or their friends the relevant questions to get the proper answers. But they do this clandestinely, casually, and in the past so as not to arouse suspiscion or in such a way the mark doesn’t make the connection.
For example: Standing in line to get into the Psychic Show. You casually carry on a conversation with the audience member next to you…You mention why you are there, what you drive, your poor dead mother’s illness (all the while, not realizing the person you’re talking to is working you for useful details).
My guess is that there was a ‘pre-interview’ where the useful information was casually given and promptly forgotten as being revealed.
I’ve done it a bit myself; but on a much less attractive scale. People will tell you things, then forget they told you. OR they tell someone else and don’t realize the psychic is connected to the person you told.
Yeah, I don’t know any more than I read in ianzin’s marvellous book, but I think “warm reading”.
At least from what Wikipedia tells me, warm reading is the use of generic statements that’ll fit anybody. While ‘sense of humour’ may qualify, the other two don’t seem to, unless he does this with multiple people and only televises the successes.
It has bee a while since I saw that particular clip.
As jjimm alludes to, Derren uses a lot of cold reading techniques, and Ian Roland’s book on cold reading is a very good start, especially as Ian taught Derren much of his cold reading skills.
Derren comes up here reasonably often. He uses a range of techniques in his presentations. The core of these encounters seems to be very good wrapping of cold reading techniques. Watch some of the other clips, and you start to see the pattern. Part of his art is to wrap it up in unfamiliar guises, which are more modern, entertaining, and diverting. He is also very good.
He also uses a range of mentalism magic tricks, as well as stage magic tricks. But his slant is to use them in unfamiliar ways that totally bury what is going on.
In the chatting up girls clip he does seem to make use of some aspects of cold reading. One aspect is that the lines he looks for are not exactly difficult ones. Seriously, vacuuous models, so: astrology, sense of humour, these aren’t hard. The last one is clearly much harder. We don’t know how log he had been talking before with the girls, nor indeed, if he had used an accomplice to feed him additional information. None the less “would be good for” isn’t out of the blue either. So the idea of starting with a limited set of lines, is good. What one suspects with Derren is a well developed ability to read people as he talks to them, and start to narrow down the possibilities quickly. Whilst he is talking he is watching very carefully and the patter is designed to allow him to follow the signs quickly without apparently miss a beat. That takes skill and practice.
Keep in mind that this is a TV show, so there is really no way to know how much research Derren did before the actual shooting, nor how many misses got cut out of the final product. My guess is that it was Hot Reading.
Ah, sorry, faulty terminology.