What if instead of reading “NLP”, you read “psychological techniques in the vain of anchoring or subliminal suggestion towards the subject (and not the viewer.)”
The problem that Big T has is that Derren brown claims he achieves a result by manipulating the subject using some psychological technique. But actually this is false, and he is instead using some trick.
I posted an example above, where he claims to use the technique of photographic memory, but in fact he does not.
There are many other examples like this, where he claims to use a certain technique, but doesn’t. Derren Brown doesn’t call any of the techniques “NLP” as such, but if you just ignore that Big T used that specific word, I think his point is valid.
I would post more examples, but the thing is that I am not absolutely sure in which cases he is actually using the “NLP-like / psychological” (or whatever I should call it) method he claims, and in which cases it’s explained by an unrelated trick.
And that is the problem.
In that photographic memory case am I fully certain that he is not giving us the true explanation though, and I’m also sure that this is the case in many of his other tricks.
He hasn’t promised not to give us false explanations to his feats, so it’s not exactly lying I guess. But then the problem is that he hasn’t promised that the trick is even possible to see as a tv viewer. The trick might be performed off-camera, he hasn’t promised not to do that. And then, as a tv viewer, what’s the point?
Well I’ve seen him live, and it’s incredibly impressive. He does pretty much all of the “street” magic you see on TV, right in front of you. He doesn’t, of course, do the big pre-planned things with elaborate set-pieces.
Things went wrong during some of the tricks, but then all the ‘mistakes’ were resolved towards the end. Whether these were just clever get-outs or whether it’s all planned is completely unclear, which is part of the brilliance.
The night I went, one of the guys who went up on stage was known to my companion, so definitely not a stooge. And even if one or two of the audience participants were stooges, the method of selecting them - via frisbee thrown multiple times by the audience - would be worth the price of a ticket.
He’s released a DVD of live shows, too. Here’s some of Something Wicked This Way Comes, which is of similar standard to what I saw myself - judge for yourself.
ETA: and here’s an ‘NLP’-like trick. Is that really speed hypnosis, or something else? If it was, had he prepped the guy before the cameras started rolling? He said in his book Trick of the Mind that he thinks most of NLP is bunk. But then he said he thinks hypnosis is bunk as well. So maybe the book is a trick too…
I just watched the Assasin and the Guilt Trip and now I want to watch everything I can find with Derren Brown. This stuff is pretty amazing. I don’t think it’s unbelievable, because he obviously goes to great lengths to find the most suggestible, perfect candidates for these experiments. If it’s fake, they’ve fooled me.
Me too! I remember seeing him on TV in America years ago, back when I was a teenager, and interested with magic, and he blew me away. I never forgot it. I had no idea he was so famous in the UK, but I’m planning to get my hands on a couple of DVDs.
Derren’s a great showman, and a great entertainer, and that’s what’s important. The whole point of magic is getting swept away in the illusion, and every trick loses something when you find out how it’s done.
So in reading about his new series, I stumbled across an interesting discussion which strongly suggest he hires actors to perform in his “experiements” (a misnomer if I’ve ever heard one.) Apparently, the woman who was hypnotized in one of his shows actually listed that performance on her IMDB page as “Vudu (sic) girl.” After being discovered by a blogger, it was removed from the page.
This post explains the situation well, and you can look further back in the discussion for more details:
Furthermore, I believe there was some discussion up-thread about if Derren Brown lies or not. Well, he does:
He clearly lists “split-screen” (which is quite obviously how he did the trick) as a “conspiracy theory,” before going on to offer a pseudoscientific explanation.
Derren Brown is an entertainer. His sole objective is to entertain. To believe these are actually experiments is no less silly than believing it were magic. Presenting something as science doesn’t make it so.
