DERREN BROWN IS A MAGICIAN
He can’t tell you his secrets!
One of the joys of Christmas is the giving of gifts, and I’d like to give you, hypno-seekers, one of the greatest gifts I ever can. The gift of a better map than the one you have! Imagine you’d lived all your life to this point using a map to get around (or a map app on your phone, I guess) that was just plain wrong, scant on details, and purposefully misleading. Imagine how happy you’d be if I gave you a better map? You’d be able to find the pub, the library, and your local expert, without ending up in dead-ends, or having to cross uncrossable roads.
Well, the better map I offer is that Derren Brown, as the title of this post states, is a Magician! Yes I know I know that you already received that memo. But did you? Really? I mean, I know you know he uses magic to achieve some of what he does, but are you also of the belief that most of what he does is psychology, persuasion, manipulation, showmanship, and hypnosis? Because if you are, then here! Take this map! It’ll help immensely. He’s a magician. Honestly, he is.
What am I saying? Well, while you’re all a bunch of Muggles (or grockels if you’re from the Dorset area), Amy and I are Members of The Magic Circle – the real one (the one for magicians, rather than lawyers) in London. Allegedly, The Most Prestigious Magic Club In The World (or something like that – I like to imagine Jeremy Clarkson announcing “In The World!”). It doesn’t make us smarter than you, but it does mean that we probably have magic knowledge that you don’t have. We’ve probably read books you don’t have. We’ve probably attended lectures you literally couldn’t buy your way into. We’ve probably had lunch, dinner, drinks, and late night horror shows with people you’ve only ever seen on TV. Let’s just say, we happen to have some insider knowledge when it comes to where magicians hide their sponge balls. How they warm up their magic wands. And how they rub their favourite cards (the answer is “safely, sanely, and consensually”).
Now, it would be remiss of me to claim that we know how Derren Brown does all of his “stuff” (I’d like to call them “effects” like he does in the book Pure Effect, but “effects” is such a horrible term for these things of beauty) because Derren hasn’t told anyone how he does his “stuff”. But I can say we are really really really sure of how he does some of them, Because They Rely On Published Magic Tricks To Work. Yes, some of these are the mental things, like appearing to predict or control someone’s next thought. Obviously, we don’t know he definitely uses these published tricks, but if it quacks like a duck, then often it’s a Gressingham dressed up in its fanciest attire (and one of the “mental” things he did on TV relied on a very mechanical thing that an acquaintance dreamt up and gave to him, which some of us can now buy).
And by “tricks” I don’t want you to think I’m being artistic and alluding to some hypnotic skit or routine. I mean tricks. Like the tricks that people bought me as a child, branded with Paul Daniels’ name and face. As a nine-year-old, I would tell people I could control their thoughts; I’d do some magic incantation, then I’d give them a supposedly fair choice to make, and then I’d show them that I had predicted that. I – seemingly – had controlled their minds to make the choice I wanted them to make. And being sporting adults who had probably had a few sherries by that point (and wanted to get back to watching the Formula 1 or some other TV-du-jour) they would agree that I had done so too.
The secret, dear reader, is that I hadn’t really controlled their minds, and they knew it. They might not have seen or worked out how I’d arrived at the same choice as they had, but they knew nine-year-old Kev wasn’t a mystic, Sha-child (or even child of a Shaman), neo-wizard, or holder of a certificate of competence from the Central Intelligence Agency’s MK-Ultra programme, circa 1950.
They didn’t really need to know how I’d done it. They just knew that what I’d done was impossible. And that was it. As Derren himself has written about extensively, that made me a poor magician, a trickster, a puzzle-provider, a crappy wand, a silly sponge, a funny fudger. Clearly, nine-year-old me didn’t have the gravitas, goatee beard, cloak, bejewelled staff, years of training, manual dexterity, concentration, memory, sociability, dedication to a singular cause, or simple ‘magical ability’ that Derren has.
But what if I had? What if I was in my thirties when I did that? Well, all hell breaks loose. People literally believe that these things are real. Well, most of them do. I’m unsure whether it was their lack of magical knowledge, or their naive belief that a stranger wouldn’t lie to them, or the fact that Derren Brown was on TV doing very similar (but clearly more spectacular) feats, or the simple idea that they would just like it to be real, or even that a part of them might actually believe, unprompted, that this sort of thing was possible. But they believed and all hell did indeed break loose. As a person of science and reason, it was terrible [Ed. ‘awesome!’] to be tricking people like this. I just had to see if it worked in order to understand the credulity [Ed. ‘beliefs’] that people bring to a Derren Brown show.
And people do bring a lot of credulity to his TV shows and his stage shows. I can understand this – his tricks are very difficult to see through, and he mixes a lot of performance methods together. He might use playing cards in one moment (and I hope we’ve all seen enough wedding magicians to know that playing cards are the tools of the trickster), but in the next he may appear to use no props at all, or maybe just a pad of paper and a pen. If, as a child, you learned a few card tricks, then you might be able to make the mental leap from the crappy do-this-then-that card trick you know how to do, to the ridiculously complex and creative card trick that he does. But if you never did “propless” magic, or did magic with pen and paper, then how are you supposed to know that such things are possible?
And if you don’t know they’re possible, then what recourse do you have? The easiest path is to believe what Derren tells you – or more commonly what Derren implies – and believe that he is indeed magical, that the feats he’s pulled off are because of his knowledge of psychology, misdirection and persuasion, rather than some devious and complex magical manipulation right under your noses.
And so we arrive at hypnosis and suggestion. Derren’s on the record (in Tricks of the Mind) stating that hypnosis doesn’t really exist and that trance isn’t real, so what are we to make of his hypnotic feats? Well, we’ve seen all of his stage shows and can say, absolutely, that he uses imaginative suggestions very effectively. People get their hands stuck together; they forget their names; they do weird – and I mean weird – things as a result of imaginative suggestions. Hell, even my PhD supervisor, the one and only Zoltan Dienes, has appeared on one of his TV shows.
Nobody is saying Derren doesn’t use hypnotic suggestions. But if you arrive at the conclusion that a particular “effect” (God, I hate that word) was constructed around hypnosis and relied inherently on suggestion, and you’re not an accomplished mentalist (more so than just an accomplished magician – you’d be surprised how many magicians I know who don’t understand a single thing about mentalism – or how many hypnotists I’ve met who think mentalism is anything other than a branch of trickery) then you’re probably wrong. I say that as someone who has worked with TV magicians and has hidden hypnosis and suggestion behind the scenes so that their magic appears more magical.
I also, as I alluded to above, know how to make a magic trick look like hypnotic suggestion. And if I can do that, then I am absolutely sure Derren can. It’s great that so many naive hypnotists and hypnotherapists credit Derren with such mystical skills and keep him up there in popular culture, but I think we need to be honest with ourselves that most of it is actually Up His Sleeves rather than Manipulated Inside Your Mind.
As an end note, I’d like to call out all the hypnotists who use magic and mentalism – under the guise of hypnosis – in order to make their use of suggestion appear more powerful. You know who you are – one of you made a key turn (magically) in their hand; another made a card appear blank when it wasn’t (then it was). If you’re not presenting as a mixture of magic and suggestion (you weren’t – you were teaching ‘hypnosis’ at the time) then I think you’re tricking your customers. Call them your ‘audience’ all you like; pretend there is a good reason for tricking them; and take your ill-gotten (but woefully small) gains to the bank all you like. I’m not here to stop you or call you out by name (apparently honesty is a questionable trait in hypnosis) but I will suggest to everyone else that perhaps, just perhaps, there is a significant difference between being tricked and entertained by a wonderful and magnificent performer such as Derren Brown; and a two-bit, charlatan ‘hypnosis’ ‘trainer’ trying to scratch a living by deceiving their customers.
In short, everything is more complicated than it appears. That can be good and worthwhile, or limiting and questionable. These things need thinking about.
[These AI-generated images were created from a photo prompt I received from Death and Pestilence over in Oslo on 9 November 2023 and are called ‘Wicked Game’. Good luck with it, darling! Ed. 🎠🎠🎠]