Derren Brown, "magician, psychological illusionist, mentalist, painter and skep Options

hey guys,

just wondering if anyone here is familiar with the entertainer Derren Brown? i have been recently watching some of his shows on youtube, he may be on TV where you are and he has a couple of books. he refers to himself as a magician, psychological illusionist, mentalist, painter and skeptic regarding paranormal phenomena. in his shows he claims to use a number of psychological techniques (such as subliminal influence, reading body language and suggestion) to imitate psychic phenomena, and while this is quite entertaining and illuminating, the blur between genuine psychological techniques and illusion and misdirection makes me wonder if it's all part of the act too.

i wont say much more just now, i'll put up a few links to videos that might be of particular interest, if anyone would like to share their thoughts i'd love to hear:

Derren 'punches' a Kung Fu student with nothing but the power of his mind http://video.google.com.au/videosearch?q=d...own&hl=en&emb=0

Derren Brown shows how mediums work
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=G18NfN76bAs

Derren Brown shows how psychics fool their audiences using a technique called cold reading
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=btP_vy5cQq4

Derren Brown challenges the beliefs of a New Age believer with the use of a Voodoo Doll http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=lW2yKlNFFuU

Derren uses a suggestible film-student to make himself seemingly invisible
http://video.google.com.au/videosearch?q=d...&emb=0&start=20

Derren Brown uses NLP to influence someones selection of a gift
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=befugtgikMg

and this is a longer one (23mins) but really fascinating, he teaches an 'average man' to speed-read a library of encyclopedic information and then asks him any questions and puts him in a quiz competition. the man says he doesn't know where the answers come from, but he just sees images in his mind and he can get all the answers http://video.google.com.au/videosearch?q=d...=en&emb=0&dur=3

there's many more too, but i'm sure that's plenty for now. any comments welcome!

cheers,
CosmicInferno

(editing to fix links)

This post has been edited by CosmicInferno: Aug 9 2008, 08:56 PM

Hey - signed up to reply to this.

I was a huge fan of his when I was younger. I live in the UK and he first came on our screens with Channel 4 quite some time ago. It was when showman magic was quite a big thing here, particularly stranger variations on the theme, such as Derren's. I was quite the young amateur magician myself - I learned a few tricks to entertain my uncle whilst he was in hospital - and found some of his skills intriguing. I picked a few of them up and quickly found myself convincing people the had thought of the 3 of diamonds of their own free will, and winning £5 notes from my mates by 'guessing' which envelope they were in. I think I might have even pulled off the mind punch type thing you linked to a couple of times.

The highlight of his work for me was the live russian roulette. You probably read somewhere about this but basically the first half of the show was showing the selection process for the people he wanted to assist. The second half was live, narrowing that group down to just one man, who then loaded a single cartridge into a revolver (with a device attached so that no-one could see which chamber from the outside). Derren then asked the guy "Is it in chamber 1?" wanting a "yes" answer for each. When he was sure that the man was telling the truth, he pulled the trigger with the gun to his temple.

Obviously there was a delay in broadcast in case it all went wrong, and there was some stuff afterward about tabloids claiming it was a blank, but still powerful stuff.

He does stage shows from time to time, but I'm yet to catch one.

The man really knows his stuff, and is a fantastic entertainer if nothing else.