Master mental magician Derren Brown hits iTunes

iTunes

Derren Brown, the king of mind tricks, who has in the past shocked and awed U.K. audiences, comes to America with a television series called Mind Control, featured in the iTunes television store.

1. Stooge, n: a person who is employed to assume a particular role while keeping their true identity hidden

2. Stage magic

3. Showmanship is in essence, lying, but not lying. It’s giving the impression you are doing something one way for the effect, but the audience is smart enough to know something might be deceptive, which is fine. It’s a relationship between performer and audience, where the audience suspends disbelief. I’m paraphrasing from his book, Tricks of the Mind Amazon, which I own.

4. Neuro-Linguistic Programming

iTunes show link

Brown rocked the U.K. with such sensational stunts including playing Russian Roulette on live TV, conducted a live seance, hypnotically converting atheists into “believers,” and his normal bag of tricks.

I like Brown because he makes absolutely no claims that he uses real magic, but he does claim—and I believe him—to not use actors or stooges [1]. He professes nothing more than someone using a combination of magic [2], psychology, misdirection, and showmanship [3]. He employs principles of NLP [4] to embed commands into his unwitting victims, and, other times he has you believe he’s using such hypnotic techniques. The fun is not knowing which is taking place.

More added…

Cheesy and cheeky, Mr. Brown specializes not in illusion as much as the art of disillusionment. He may seem like a tonic to Americans disenchanted with the elaborate artifices of the so-called reality genre.

Mr. Brown is a charlatan, but at least he admits it.

Read more of “Derren Brown: Mind Control”

Labels: Best of, Derren Brown, Magic, Television

Flipping out

by Tironius, created Saturday, May 26, 2007, with permalink

Derren Brown taps the king of ambigrams for the secret to his show ‘Trick or Treat’

Up is down, black is white with the master of psychological illusion

Watching my boy Derren Brown got ambigrams in my noggin. The topic arose in conversation with internationally renowned calligrapher Claude Dieterich A. and I, and Claude turned my attention to the top man in the field, John Langdon. I visit the man’s website and, lo and behold, there’s D.B. all up in my grill (er, on the front page) with his Trick or Treat cards, designed by John Langdon.

Derren's book,
Tricks of the Mind,
is a fantastic look at skepticism, agnosticism, and memory recall. It teaches all the ways people scam other people.

An ambigram is a word or letterform that, when flipped or reversed, reads the same (or a new) word.

Derren offers contestants on his magical/mentalism U.K. telly programme the choice of two cards that say either “Trick” or “Treat” as the basis for their either good or bad fate. Unbeknownst to the contestant is that the decision is arbitrary as the card will say whatever Derren want’s it to say.

Labels: Best of, Derren Brown, Design, Television

Derren Brown: 'Trick or Treat'

by Tironius, created Monday, March 12, 2007, with permalink

Master of psychology and subliminal persuasion is back

England’s incomparable master of magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship (using a varied mixture of those techniques) will have a new series on Channel 4 in the U.K., according to the website of Objective Productions, the company that produces Derren’s shows. It says:

“The controversial award-winning psychological illusionist Derren Brown stars in his brand new series, Trick or Treat. In each episode a member of the public must choose between a Trick or a Treat and, as ever with Derren, anything could happen.” From [Objective Productions Company Website][2]

Excellent. I have become recently a huge fan of Mr. Brown and his tricks of the mind. To the pounders unfamiliar, Derren Brown has had several shows on U.K.’s Channel 4. It started with his series of specials, “Mind Control,” and later included his series “Trick of the Mind” running for three seasons. (I know because I downloaded them.) His most complained about show in the U.K. was called “Seance,” where he indeed conducted one. (Most of the complaints happened before the show aired by religious nuts.) His most controversial special was named “Derren Brown: Russian Roulette,” even making [CNN news][3]. In that, he whittled thousands of volunteers down to just one, selected to place a single bullet in the chamber of a revolver gun, afterward Derren plays Russian Roulette. Derren’s job: to stay alive.

But, to me his most amazingly spectacular special was one called “Derren Brown: The Heist.” Good god, the man used cult-like techniques of hypnotic persuasion to convince members a Derren Brown seminar (so they thought) to rob an armed guard at a bank. These are not actors, but rather normal people like you and me, normal people who ventured into felonious robbery without Brown ever telling them what they should do or how to do it.

Luckily, he uses his powers for good (TV) and not evil.

He has also written a book. I bought Derren Brown’s book Tricks of the Mind, and it is a great read on the basics of some what he does. Some of it I had already read from sources like Digg, for instance the eye ‘tells,’ or the way a person’s eye moves when they, say, lie. But his chapter on memory retention is genius, and I plan to fully employ the techniques therein.

In it, in the first part of that chapter on memory, he gave a list of twenty random nouns and told me, the reader, to memorize them. I of course could only get three. Then, using a visualization technique where you link the list of items together into pairs, I was able to memorize all of them:

Telephone
Sausage
Monkey
Button
Book
Cabbage
Glass
Mouse
Stomach
Cardboard
Ferry
Christmas
Athlete
Key
Wigwam
Baby
Kiwi
Bed
Paintbrush
Walnut

I assure you all of these are correct, and that I just now typed them without looking in the book. And, I read that chapter two weeks ago. Amazing. Other chapters delve into why people are duped by psychics, religion, and other ferry tales, and I love to see more and more atheists coming forward as public figures. (He talks about his own de-conversion from Christianity quite candidly in the book.)

I plan to use his techniques to start stacking life in my favor. Mr. 19 is also experimenting with them, and we’ll both keep our Pounder brethren in the light as to our success. Nineteen had an interesting bit of magic in a bar, so I hope he tells the story here.

Labels: Best of, Derren Brown, Magic, Television