WHAT WAS HEAD HACKING?
A delve into the past to understand the present
I’ve always been a computer hacker, since I received my first computer when I was nine. I would type in programs from books, and soon realised that if you changed them, you could change the way the game (as they were almost always games) would work.
By fiddling, I learned; and that is the essence of hacking. Soon I would be searching through machine code to find a way of getting ‘infinite lives’ (meaning my game characters couldn’t die, or would always come back to life), and from there I eventually ended up hunting for security-relevant bugs in real software as a professional ‘ethical’ (*cough*) hacker.
Kev and Anthony Jacquin in New York, 2011. Photo courtesy of Tim Cummins – with thanks.
In my first job out of university, I worked for a large defence contractor making supposedly secure computer systems for the Ministry of Defence (and other maybe-friendly nations’ armed forces). It was during this time that Derren Brown appeared on television in the UK, and I first saw his show probably around late 2002.
He appeared to be able to say magic words to strangers and make them do things, apparently against their control. My immediate thought was that if he could do that, then he could probably demand people tell him their passwords; and if he could do that then everything we were doing to try to make computer systems secure was pointless.
I just had to find out if it was real, and if so, how easy it was to do.
I was always of the opinion that if I could just understand how hypnotism worked, then I would be able to apply it in numerous different ways, each tailored specifically to the situation at hand. But the books and training courses available back then only taught what to do and not why it worked. It took a while to understand that this was because the majority of hypnosis writers and teachers did not actually know how hypnotism worked. It took such a long time to appreciate this because they were so good at actually using it! My first major realisation related to hypnotism was that you don’t need to understand how it works in order to be good at it.
I, on the other hand, wanted to know how it worked as well as wanting to be able to do it. The ‘why’ wasn’t contained in any of the books I had been referred to (I read so much Erickson, Elman and Estabrooks) and it would have to wait; in the meantime, I learned how to hypnotise – a skill taught to me originally by Jonathan Chase. Now, Jonathan doesn’t know how hypnotism works, although he probably has more of an idea than many of his contemporaries.
Learning how to hypnotise in absence of knowing how it worked set me off on a different path – I started working with hypnotist, Anthony Jacquin, and we developed (some say created) ‘street hypnosis’.
Products and references from Head Hacking’s old website homepage.
Anthony and I had worked on a television project together where he would attempt to obtain all the things he needed to exist – food, clothes, lodgings, etc – without ever handling money and all through the use of hypnotism. A ‘taster reel’ was created, called ‘Hypnosurvival’, that showcased him hypnotising members of the public in order to steal their stuff. While this project itself didn’t go any further, it did open a lot of doors for us. Anthony wrote a book about how to use hypnotism in this manner, called Reality Is Plastic, and together we created a training course to teach street hypnotism to magicians.
Running over a weekend, we taught impromptu hypnosis, following the approach that Anthony laid down in his book, and embellished with routines and methods that magicians could use. We took the (so far as I can determine) unprecedented decision to take the students out to organised venues and events on the Saturday night, so that they could practice what they had learned in a safe and secure environment.
The training course took off! We had requests to teach it in Germany, France and Austria, and we also received an offer from our favourite magic shop to make a DVD of it. It became their fastest-selling pre-order at the time (maybe it still is?) and it was very successful. Believing that we had done something interesting with a growing following, we created Head Hacking as a vehicle for our performance hypnosis work, from training courses, to products and performances.
We started getting requests from non-magicians to attend the course – which, of course, we could never allow for secret magical reasons – so we developed ‘The Trilby Connection’ street hypnosis course instead. The first day of the weekend mirrored that of the course for magicians, albeit with all the magic removed – well, not the magic of hypnosis! Just the magic that is held dear by magicians and can’t be revealed to the lay person for fear of spoiling the tricks.
Kev modelling a coveted Head Hacking t-shirt. Photo courtesy of Tim Cummins – with thanks.
The second day, however, featured the kinds of routines that non-magicians wanted to perform, from stealing items, to amnesia and hallucinations. We quickly produced our own DVD of the same name and sold it through our Head Hacking website. If anything, that course and DVD were more popular than the one for magicians, and it took us around the world – we taught in places as far apart as Las Vegas and New York in the US, to Sydney in Australia, as well as all around Europe, and even in Malaysia.
During these exciting times we would receive all manner of opportunities, and some of them we were able to entertain. We made pilots for two television game shows, obviously both featuring hypnotism as a central theme. The first was with hilarious comedian Patrick Kielty, and the second with television personality and all-round-great-guy, Rufus Hound. We made a short series of Christmas adverts for the clothing brand Diesel, and we launched our own multi-disciplinary annual hypnotism conference in London. At some point I met one of my heroes, the famous magician and super-skeptic, James Randi!
We had big aims for the hypnotism conference (‘change | phenomena’) and invited academics to speak, as well as our industry peers, respected trainers and performers. Through our contacts, we learned how to access the published science of hypnosis and suggestion. It blew our minds! We knew the science was controversial but we hadn’t realised by just how much.
Professor Irving Kirsch became one of our heroes – due to his thorough testing of long-standing assumptions about hypnosis and suggestion – and we were lucky enough to have him speak at our second conference. The videos of that year’s conference couldn’t be released at the time, but Irving gave permission at the end of 2019 for me to publish his talk on YouTube. As I state in the introduction to it, I believe it is one of the most important lectures on hypnosis and suggestion available.
Photo taken by Amy shortly after meeting Kev of the badges on his jacket.
Through researching the science, we accidentally came up with a potential model for how hypnosis and suggestion work. We were discussing the science on the long return journey from one of our training courses, and hit upon the idea that if the imagination could cause behaviour, it should also be able to produce amnesia for the act of imagining, and thereby create phenomena seemingly without awareness of the cause. This crazy idea was mostly in jest, but we tested it when we arrived at Anthony’s house.
Neither Anthony nor I were (are?) particularly good hypnotic subjects: we’d never accepted suggestions for anything beyond simple physical effects. That night, within 10 minutes of starting (I have an audio recording of our tests), Anthony hallucinated and I achieved amnesia! Both with the sense of involuntariness and automaticity that traditionally accompanies hypnotic phenomena. Had we found the Holy Grail? We certainly tested it informally at every opportunity we had and it appears to work. We called it ‘The Automatic Imagination Model’. We wanted to test it formally but, at the time, had no means to… but now: watch this space!
Head Hacking wasn’t just a hypnotism training company, or a hypnosis performance company, or a suggestion product company. It was a collective made up of magicians, hypnotists, amateur researchers and interested hobbyists. We made friends, we met our heroes, we travelled the world, we performed, we played, and we developed ideas. But like all good things, it had to come to an end – we parted as friends, and, in Anthony’s words, “killed it before it died”.
Head Hacking also brought us into contact with some amazing people, including my wife, Amy, with whom I run this blog!