Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown
January 10, 2007 by Alun
Richard Dawkins might say that religion prevents reasoned decision making and progress. Sam Harris would tell you how religion is a threat to society. For Derren Brown in Tricks of the Mind, religion is one of those things that humans do because they’re prone to cognitive illusions, and there’s many other ways of exploiting these same illusions for fun and profit.
If you’ve not heard of him Derren Brown is a magician based in the UK whose act is based on “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship”. It’s this last word in particular that is important. David Blaine had the idea that sitting around in a box doing nothing would be entertaining, which says a lot about the standard of American entertainment. Derren Brown, in constrast appears to play Russian Roulette live. It wasn’t, but nonetheless, from a British perspective, it was much more interesting than watching someone stay still for record-breaking lengths of time.
He also has a healthy view of magic as entertainment. In the book on page 19 and 20 he talks about how magic is showing off “Look I can do something you can’t” and how it leads to problems.
Magic, I feel, more than most performance types, requires genuine self-deprecation on the part of the performer, and classically it is the one area we never find it. How many magicians can you honestly say are particularly likeable characters? Or who didn’t become annoying after a promising start? Any you genuinely don’t think would benefit from a hard smack? (You may include the author of course.)
The rest of the book plays to this stereotype. Despite this, this isn’t entirely a how to do magic book, but also an interesting discussion of how the mind works.
The first section is Disillusionment which is semi-autobiographical account of how he came to explore magic. The next section of the book is titled Magic. In it he gives away the secret to magic, which is showmanship. It’s the difference between a gimmick and an experience. It’s also about rapport, building a relationship between you and the mark. It’s therefore that the early chapters are also about building a rapport between the author and the reader. It plays to his public image. You get a couple of tricks so you feel secrets are being revealed and then a couple of example of suggestion, to suggest there will also be deep psychology. It’s written well enough, but if the book were all like this it would be rather dull.
Memory is a far more interesting section and worth reading again, though maybe it’s the one section you shouldn’t have to. Another aspect of magic is knowing things that the audience doesn’t. Brown discusses the loci system and scores extra points for mentioning the tale of Simonides from Cicero’s De Oratore. This leads to the more useful Memory Palace and Peg systems. From personal experience Memory Palace works. It’s similar to the system used by Michael Gruneberg in language tuition. Peg is a system I hadn’t come across before for handling numbers. It’s a clever system and works well I think. Together Brown gives a system that allows you to memorise otherwise difficult information like FA Cup Finals. I now know that Manchester United drew against Crystal Palace 3-3 in 1990, though Manchester United won the reply. Alas, I now can’t stop remembering it. The memory systems are tricks, but useful tricks regardless of their application and they’re explained well.
Hypnosis and Suggestibility was also interesting. Brown discusses what hypnosis is. His conclusion is that just as magic isn’t one technique but a catch-all term for different effects, so is hypnosis. He also comes down on the side of the behaviourists in saying that hypnosis is social suggestibility rather than an altered state of mind. This should kill the mystique of hypnosis, but instead he still takes it seriously. In particular he talks at length about the ethics of hypnotising someone. Even if they only think they’re hypnotised there’s still a duty of care not to put the subject under stress. He also tackles Neuro-Linguistic Programming in this section. It’s something I haven’t spent a lot of time with. After looking into it I wasn’t that impressed. Derren Brown’s looked a lot deeper and harder at it than me and consequently is correspondingly less impressed than I was. There is a killer anecdote in this section about gaining co-operation in a hypnosis stage show, but I won’t share it as it’s like giving away a major plot point. It had me laughing for most of that morning.
I have to admit I struggled with Unconscious Communication. It’s not a skill that I desire. I’m not sure there was anything new in this chapter. It’s about keeping your eyes open and paying attention to your subject, but if you’re trying to communicate with them perhaps you should anyway?
Anti-Science, Pseudo-Science and Bad Thinking is the final major section. It opens with a discussion of what science is. There is one major point in this chapter which is that there’s an attempt in science not only to know, but to ask how we know. There is a danger to conflate science with scientists. Science may seek ways of proving a pet idea wrong, but scientists are human and so come with their own flaws and biases. Brown generally stays on the side of discussing Science, but he does tackle the problems with scientists to some extent. He then moves on to alternative medicine and homeopathy comes out very badly. He tackles the problem of a different way of knowing by asking how should things be known. How would you test the effectiveness of a product? This gives a brief explanation of why the double-blind method is often a good idea. This section doesn’t sit entirely with the rest of the book but, particularly in the part on mediums, you can see this as part of the same cognitive mistakes being exploited ‘in the wild’.
This is what he brings out in his Final Thoughts. The theme is, as he says, the tricks the mind plays on us. This I think is a firm but sympathetic approach to poor reasoning. Arguments of faith whether they be in gods or psychics aren’t put in a dock and put on trial. They’re connected to the wider world and other faults in reasoning and perhaps explain why the need to question faith-based positions as you would question any other isn’t just a discussion for Sundays.
Having minds leaves us prone to making mistakes. Our own expectations lead us in ways we’re not always aware of. He gives the example of a seance. A group of students sat around a ouija board with the knowledge that one of them knew a recently deceased person who lived in the house. They asked if anyone was there, and the glass moved to yes, giving them confidence that it was working. As Derren Brown asks, who thought the spirit was ever going to guide it to no?
You can visit his site at www.derrenbrown.co.uk or read his mind with a RealPlayer video clip from the Channel4 site.
Simon Singh has an interesting article questioning Brown’s use of the word Psychology, which Brown seems to agree with.
Technorati Tags: Derren Brown, magic, pseudoscience, antiscience, skepticism, scepticism
Did David Blaine have much of an audience? I missed it. I’d list everything I find to be popular in the US now before you get to David Blaine, but it’s such a long list, and I suppose the details are not important.
What is important, I think, is how well this illustrates Derren Brown’s point about how the mind works. We are indeed suckers for anecdotes and are not good at all at integrating all the anecdotes and whatever more substantial information we have into a rationally comprehensive opinion.
On top of that nature is a wiser part of us that through experience and education is more cautious about the oversimplification and overgeneralization through which people are constantly making intellectual errors. Apparently biological evolution didn’t care about our having that error prone trait. I suppose people reproduce perfectly well without the training that overcomes our foolishness, and the cultural benefits of such training are debatable as well. Personally I’m glad I know better than my intuition, but maybe I’d be happier if I didn’t, maybe more popular. Perhaps that smarter part of you was active in knowing that it was only tongue-in-cheek that David Blaine tells you anything about America. Perhaps not, it’s so hard to tell from mere words. Either way our capacity to say foolish things does surface regularly.
The thing is that this foolishness is not just limited to theists. All dogma sounds alike. People are forever oversimplifying and overgeneralizing from any position in the spectrum of opinions, political, religious, anything. Recently I was amazed at a site for progressive Christians where two people briefly quarreled over whether or not Jesus was gnostic. One said adamantly yes, because of the gnostic gospels. One said adamantly no, because of everything else. Neither could see anything beyond their own opinion. People get like that, atheists, too, and it’s so often about opinions where no one is in a position to see the ultimate reality. I wish I could live long enough to see what genes make us that way.
I know science. I’ve considered the possibility of metaphysics through which science would be an illusion, but no one believes that, so I don’t bother questioning that part. Traditionalists try to argue that “real” science is on their side, in which they make huge mistakes, transparently, because of prejudice and because of this human trait where people can take one pseudofact about evolution and negate everything else, saying, “See, it doesn’t work,” even imagining up an atheist conspiracy with the help of so many like-minded people confirming that for them. Now that’s crazy, only it’s not. It’s ordinary humanity expressing its prejudice.
Yet it’s also crazy that atheists are so sure that life is completely materialistic. The challenge of the scientific revolution is that science has shown no need for God to micromanage anything, if the principles of causality and empiricism are indeed true, if God doesn’t change all the rules tomorrow to show a different metaphysics than we scientists thought is the case. That doesn’t mean there’s no God, especially when people so rarely define what God they mean. So the Bible’s wrong. So is the church and tradition, and one can detail that in lots of ways. I’m convinced there have never been physical miracles. There are other possibilities, but that’s the conclusion I trust from both my intuition and my intellect. Yet I’m quite sure there’s God, even if God is just the better part of me that the kindest sort of atheist would say He is, not the God who created the universe, knowledge about which is beyond me. God to me is whoever answered when I prayed, “God help me!” And someone did answer and kept on going, as did I.
Anyone who dismisses that is just speaking out of his or her intuition, not wisdom. Natural folly can take us in any direction, not just toward a traditional God. It takes some to God just because they’re conformists. Some of us have better reasons for coming to a different God. Some of us are both good scientists and good theists, yet atheists ridicule the religious part and traditionalists ridicule the science. People come to their foolishness naturally. I’m all for understanding that better, but understand no one is immune from that analysis.
I’ve been looking at websites about Derren Brown. I didn’t find much more about the cognitive vulnerability of human beings in their natural environment, but he does do some interesting things, doesn’t he?
I’ve admired the many professionals who can simulate the supposed ESP of cold reading and predicting drawings. I wonder how much practice it takes to use one’s words so strategically. I think I like being free in what I say too much to work at fooling people this way, but I’m glad there are some who can say such things are suggestion and ordinary perception, not magic.
The thing is that not everything Brown does is so controlled. I was especially interested in his show Messiah from 2 years ago where he induces people, dumb Americans of course, to be “slain in the Spirit”. Brown and anyone else can wave a hand and say, “You see, it’s all suggestion.” But how does he know that? It’s one thing to do cold reading and say here’s how I did it, and I can do it again any day of the week, showing that I’m not extraordinary in any way by being able to do this. Talking people into being slain in the Spirit, though, isn’t all contained in Brown’s head. Something has to happen in his subjects. What? With cold reading, it’s understandable how people are fooled. With being slain in the Spirit, I don’t understand it at all, and I’m a neurologist.
Do people really just lean themselves back semi-voluntarily and let go? Is that it? I don’t think that’s sufficient explanation. I think that’s our natural tendency toward oversimplification to see it that way.
I’ve visited charismatic churches when there was a wave of people being slain in the Spirit, along with the “holy laughter” craze in the mid-nineties. It was an amazing sight. The response in the congregration, more than a hundred people, was so complete that at the end of the service the only people standing were the pastor and me. I tried it once. I was open to letting happen whatever would happen. I wasn’t going to push myself back. I wasn’t going to resist. The only thing that happened was I had a sense from the Spirit that lives in me that was something like, “We don’t need this.” OK, I’m not in charge here. The person with his hand on my forehead tried fairly hard. Eventually he gave up. Most of us know we’re not in charge of the whole damn world eventually. It’s too bad. I could have done so much more marketable research if I were in charge of my subjects’ responses.
But Derren Brown sees himself as being in charge, and his subjects as being mere objects. It’s not necessarily so. Yes, people can be fooled, but then what? How many people’s lives are actually run by their cognitive abilities? As frustrated as I get with the prejudice in people’s opinions, most people behave much better than the malice that comes out of their mouths. There are a lot of variables at work there, even spiritual ones if one has an open mind.
Do people let themselves be slain in the Spirit? Why? What are they looking for? Is there in fact something that helps us both in surrendering and in where to go from there? Is it outside of us or is the only God contained strictly within us, as some say? God tells me it’s not all me. That’s not science, but it’s not showmanship either.
I thought I’d put up a long-ish reply to this, but it’s not here.
I like Ian Rowland’s approach to psychic debunking. He doesn’t say that he can disprove psychic powers, but he does say that he can show non-psychic techniques which produce effects which are at least as good. Similarly Derren Brown’s stuff cannot disprove the Holy Spirit, but it does show that subjective experience is not conclusive evidence for a Holy Spirit. I’m going to try and find the time to blog about this article in New Scientist, which is about the power of subjective experience, so I’m not discounting it as a serious phenomenon.
I’d also disagree about Brown seeing his subjects as mere objects. Despite the hypnosis section being extremely critical of the notion of an altered state of consciousness, Brown prefaces his section on how to perform hypnosis with a long section on the dangers and ethics of working with other people. It’s precisely because people are not objects and not simplistic that he sees hypnosis as a potentially dangerous activity. Even if it is all suggestion you’re still leaving your subject vulnerable and exposed. Other places in the book make it clear that people are not open books.
If I give the impression that Derren Brown has a simplified model of the mind then I’ve done him a disservice. To a large extent he has no overall model of the mind, at least not in this book, but what he does have is an appreciation of its complexity.
Let me illustrate what I mean by treating subjects as mere objects. I don’t mean someone is being immoral by doing that. I mean someone is oversimplifying.
During my career I had occasion to suggest some patients out of their hysterical paralysis. I was trained by doctors who took pride in doing that as fast as possibile, to keep patients out of the hospital and save them other side effects of being paralyzed, so I did what they did, which is to quite frankly manipulate the patient, to use their ignorance of how a paralyzed limb is supposed to flop around and show them how they are in fact demonstrating strength by holding some position, then encouraging them to push that particular strength further. One keeps it up until they have functional strength again, even if they are still somewhat nuts.
That’s treating my patient as an object. I’m performing on them as surely as if I were doing surgery. I am the one doing something. They are a very predictable object. I am depending on them to want to get better. Some want that more than others, but everybody wants it some, so assuming that is not assuming too much. Assuming that I am the one who is manipulating someone into being slain in the Spirit, though, is something else. I know how I manipulate someone into being strong. It’s a very mechanical thing to show people their strength and ask for more of the same, even predict more of the same as the patient comes out of his or her mind’s decision to be weak. What am I doing if I talk them into being slain in the Spirit? As I said, “suggestion” is not enough of an explanation that I am doing this, not the Spirit, whatever the Spirit is.
What is it people are looking for when they are slain in the Spirit? They want to give up something to God, power, life, something. They’ve seen others do it. They want the same, but only if they can believe it’s real. OK, so someone comes along who encourages them to be slain in the Spirit. Is that person doing it? Derren Brown sees it that way, as if to say, “look, I did this, not the Holy Spirit”, because he thinks his performance does it, just as I think my performance lets people drop their hysteria and embrace their strength. I’m a catalyst. So is Derren Brown. But is that the whole story, that I did this to someone else?
No it’s not. People wanted it done. That’s the most important factor. I objectify my patients in seeing myself as knowing how to help them. Derren Brown objectifies his subjects in seeing himself as knowing how to fool them. But it’s not the whole story.
What makes people be slain in the Spirit? What makes people speak in tongues? I don’t know that. I know how people move muscles strongly if the appropriate pathways are intact, even if hysteria has them temporarily ignoring them. Spiritual experiences are something else. I’ve had many spiritual experiences, but I’ve never fallen down and never spoken in tongues. I related my experience with the former. With the latter I’ve been curious to fake speaking in tongues, but I can’t keep it up as I’ve seen others do it. It’s not authentically spiritual, though it is authentically the best I can do faking it, which makes me doubt that large numbers of people fake it, which was something I wanted to know. I wanted to know it’s not just a person’s will. I’m also confident from watching the process in myself and in others it’s not something that someone else does to them as an object.
How do you or Derren Brown know that the Holy Spirit wasn’t using him to let people feel what it was like to be slain in the Spirit, something I bet wasn’t fully reversed by “de-converting” them after the show? You don’t. It’s only if you objectify the subjects and say Derren Brown did this to them, not the Spirit that you can make the claim that this experience is meaningful about the possibility of God or the Spirit. What’s going on in the subject that makes him or her more than a piece of furniture in this process?
Evolutionary psychologists describe a number of needs we have for God. I haven’t seen one call this a God-shaped void, but I like calling it that. It’s no proof for God. In fact it might make it easier to see spiritual experiences as something natural that the brain does rather than supernatural that God does. Something in us reaches for a God that either is there or isn’t. Theists say see, there must be a God because we reach for Him, yet that God might be contained entirely in my mind. Atheists say see, someone like Derek Brown fools people. There’s nothing there. Or similarly with whatever other foolishness people do for religion. None of that is evidence either way, except that the answer to what best fills our God-shaped void is not an easy one.
It takes a trained examiner to tell the difference between hysterical paralysis and paralysis due to brain damage. The existence of one doesn’t negate the other, but says that there’s more than one way weakness happens. Likewise it takes training to tell the difference between hysteria and conscious faking or a problem in the brain and one in the limb.
I wasn’t saying that Derren Brown was oversimplifying in pointing out how people take an anecdote about a Ouija board and stake their belief in a spirit on that. That is exactly what people do, on many subjects, including what it means that some spiritual experiences can be brought out in situations where someone is just following a script. It isn’t simple.
It is a really interseting book well worth the read.
http://hypnosis-nlp-1.blogspot.com
omg it sounds like a realy good book would you please send some on the internet so i can learn some of the tricks lots of luv connie