Mind-Bending Tricks, Derren Brown and the Human Machine

Posted on November 24, 2007
Filed Under Awareness, Fake Culture, Society, Consciousness |

Now and again I spend some time watching Derren Brown. For those of you that haven’t heard about him, Derren is somewhat of a celebrity in the UK; he specialises in human psychology, and his skills essentially come down to mind-manipulation and mind-programming. Getting people to do whatever he wants them to do.

He is extremely good at what he does – in honesty you really have to watch him to appreciate his talent. In the short clip below – he makes people forget what subway stop they are getting of at, simply by telling them to forget:

In another case has spent time in America pretending to be a psychic. His aim was to visit various ‘professional’ psychics and convince them that he is legit. In every case he succeeded. Of course he claims this means all paranormal phenomena is fraudulent or imaginary.

And that is the one thing that always gets me about his work; he has an unshakable faith that all spiritual and paranormal experiences are merely the result of odd psychological phenomena.

Whilst I agree that many such phenomena can be replicated or experienced via those means, it doesn’t necessarily follow that all such experiences are psychological. At least not in the manner Derren expresses…in that regards it could be said he has become a victim of his own success.

There’s a great clip where Derren tricks a guy into believing he wants a particular ‘present’ for his birthday, when all along he wanted something else. The video shows a lot of techniques that Derren uses, although at the end he explains it is only verbal clues he uses. But if you look – and you don’t even need to look that closely – there is a lot of subliminal content, and physical cues going on. Not to mention trickery and mis-direction.

In the end this is all about understanding the human machine, and that we are very much that machine. But on another level we are the consciousness that resides within that machine. Is that consciousness just another trick of the mind? Or is there something more real to it? It’s an age old question – and one which I think science confounds in more ways than it actually helps to answer. Nonetheless this sort of thing is always great because it shows a great deal about how our minds work.

And of course the other part is that Derren Brown quite often tricks the viewers of his shows – it isn’t all psychology – much of it is showmanship and trickery. What we are seeing isn’t really what he is telling us. It’s not always that easy to realise when we are being put through the mind-bender.

I always find myself wondering about the nature of these shows which always try and dissuade the viewer from belief in the metaphysical. Mind-bending all round then…