Derren Brown Show

[Bob Klase]

I'm more than convinced that no stooges are used. Copperfield however...

Depends on how you define stooge. Copperfield may have occasionally used stooges in the sense that they're in on the trick and actually make the trick work. He more commonly uses plants for tricks that don't require a stooge at all, most likely because when you're charging $100 a ticket to your show you can't afford to have too many unknowns- like complete strangers from the audience who will act like kids at a birthday party trying to screw up everything the magician does.

Copperfield may use a lot of plants. Criss Angel uses a lot of stooges.

 

[Azrael 5]

*snip*Also, he's extremely patient. One of the things he did on his show was flip a coin so it landed 'heads' 10 times in a row - without camera tricks. He admitted it took him many hours to get that footage, as he had to flip thousands of coins to get that to happen (odds were against him, after all). Those two tactics can yeild surprising results.

Hahaha. Even what he says is misdirection.

 

[yairhol]

Have you seen this?
http://www.martialdevelopment.com/blog/darren-brown-proven-real-afake/

nonsense.

 

[edd]

What exactly is nonsense? Certainly some perspectives on what happened are nonsense. This does not make what actually happened nonsense.

 

[Bob Klase]

What exactly is nonsense? Certainly some perspectives on what happened are nonsense. This does not make what actually happened nonsense.

You could start with this part:

Force contains information, and the transmission of force is a form of communication. Every transmission requires two parties, a sender and a receiver.

So if a tree falls down in the forest and no receiver is there, not only does the tree not make a sound, it can't even fall down. If everyone turns off their television then TV stations are no longer transmitting.

 

[edd]

You could start with this part:

OK, the text on that page is clearly rubbish. I just thought the page was posted for the video. Since that's the content DB actually had a hand in.

 

[yairhol]

What exactly is nonsense? Certainly some perspectives on what happened are nonsense. This does not make what actually happened nonsense.

All of it is nonsense.
I'd like to see him fight the yellow bamboo guys. That should be most amusing.

 

[edd]

Erm. Your attitude makes it sound like you think he claims something different to what he would actually claim to be doing. I don't think DB would claim to be using chi or anything like that, like yellow bamboo people would do. It's more a replication of the circumstances that lead to people falling (quite literally in this case) for this variety of woo. In that sense, it's not nonsense.

 

[Senex]

I cannot see the youtube links "In my country",I know what the blank paper effect is but what is the other one being mentioned with 3 women?

You mean the Youtube video with the college girls and all that nudity with magic being thrown around?

I wish I could say it was overrated

 

[themagicwand]

It's more a replication of the circumstances that lead to people falling (quite literally in this case) for this variety of woo. In that sense, it's not nonsense.

I find it amusing that someone like Derren Brown, who in the UK is much courted by the skeptical community and seen as a leading light, can find himself being regarded on these forums as "nonsense".

HOWEVER - I do applaud you, because it IS nonsense. Derren Brown does not use NLP, hypnosis, or body language techniques at all. He uses good old fashioned magic tricks. The same magic tricks that in ye olden days the performer would have dressed up as "psychic". Only these days, for a 21st Century audience, Derren Brown uses the body launguage notion as his hook rather than the psychic hook.

Both fibs. And if you don't like fibs, both equally immoral.

Me? I like fibs. After all, Arnie wasn't really a robot killing machine you know. Well, at least I don't think he was...

 

[edd]

I find it amusing that someone like Derren Brown, who in the UK is much courted by the skeptical community and seen as a leading light, can find himself being regarded on these forums as "nonsense".

HOWEVER - I do applaud you, because it IS nonsense. Derren Brown does not use NLP, hypnosis, or body language techniques at all. He uses good old fashioned magic tricks. The same magic tricks that in ye olden days the performer would have dressed up as "psychic". Only these days, for a 21st Century audience, Derren Brown uses the body launguage notion as his hook rather than the psychic hook.

Both fibs. And if you don't like fibs, both equally immoral.

Yes, his early TV material I find quite uncomfortable for how misleadingly it is presented. More recently, the way it's pitched is something I'm much more comfortable with, saying it's (something like) "a mixture of psychology, trickery and showmanship", and I think his skeptical nature is more widely recognised now.

 

[c4llum]

I'm hearing so many different things. Is it woo, or not? does he use stooges? Does he use NLP? Is it plain magic? Let's get things straight.

He can do 'tricks' which he claims are NOT supernatural (duhh ), aren't done with the help of stooges but with "a mixture of psychology, trickery and showmanship".
So, should we believe him and accept that he's really good. Or believe that he's lying to us and uses stooges, camera tricks, etc.
The last options, seems to me as the obvious choice. However, he is a skeptic himself and more importantly, he can do what he claims to do live, infront of an audience without stooges, as explained by The Skeptics Bible. (at the end of page1)

Now, he could ofcourse be doing both. Use stooges on tv but not on stage. But that still means that what he does on stage is 'real'. whether you call it magic or psychology I don't think really matters. What I do find important is that he can replicate what the modern psychics do.

 

[pjh]

I'm hearing so many different things. Is it woo, or not? does he use stooges? Does he use NLP? Is it plain magic? Let's get things straight.

99% (or even 100%) of Derren's tricks are traditional mentalist tricks, he can't *really* do the things he does, but he can 'trick' an audience into thinking he can - and that is the heart of a magic show.

Magicians don't really cut women in half and put them back together - however they can create the illusion they can. Derren can't really tell what hand you have a coin in, or make someone pay up on a losing betting slip, however he can create the illusion that he can!

He doesn't use NLP (it doesn't work) and he doesn't use hypnosis.

Now as for stooges, you need to distinguish between straight plants, ie someone in the audience in collusion with magician and 'instant stooges'. Instant stooges are normal audience members who during the trick are co-opted to the magicians side. In front of a live audience this is risky and needs skill to communicate with the instant stooge.

It's also worth pointing out that Derren makes a lot of use of "Dual Reality" a technique were the audience hears something different from the volunteer or target, again impressive to do on a stage with a live audience, with technology on TV less so.

As for TV edits, whereas the trick itself if pulled off clean, there are clear examples of TV trickery being used as part of his reveals, for example the famous ad-men ride in a taxi, where Derren 'shows' how he influenced them to draw his picture, on careful viewing you can see that the images have been merely cut into the taxi trip. Another example is in Messiah, the so called NLP force ""let some ideas sail into your mind", then the woman drew a boat, however the so caused "forces" have been added in the edit suite.

So to sum it all up, it depends what you mean by 'stooge', and depends on what you think of his use of TV edits, not to achieve the trick but to fool the audience as to how it was done.

 

[themagicwand]

99% (or even 100%) of Derren's tricks are traditional mentalist tricks, he can't *really* do the things he does, but he can 'trick' an audience into thinking he can - and that is the heart of a magic show.

Magicians don't really cut women in half and put them back together - however they can create the illusion they can. Derren can't really tell what hand you have a coin in, or make someone pay up on a losing betting slip, however he can create the illusion that he can!

He doesn't use NLP (it doesn't work) and he doesn't use hypnosis.

Now as for stooges, you need to distinguish between straight plants, ie someone in the audience in collusion with magician and 'instant stooges'. Instant stooges are normal audience members who during the trick are co-opted to the magicians side. In front of a live audience this is risky and needs skill to communicate with the instant stooge.

It's also worth pointing out that Derren makes a lot of use of "Dual Reality" a technique were the audience hears something different from the volunteer or target, again impressive to do on a stage with a live audience, with technology on TV less so.

As for TV edits, whereas the trick itself if pulled off clean, there are clear examples of TV trickery being used as part of his reveals, for example the famous ad-men ride in a taxi, where Derren 'shows' how he influenced them to draw his picture, on careful viewing you can see that the images have been merely cut into the taxi trip. Another example is in Messiah, the so called NLP force ""let some ideas sail into your mind", then the woman drew a boat, however the so caused "forces" have been added in the edit suite.

So to sum it all up, it depends what you mean by 'stooge', and depends on what you think of his use of TV edits, not to achieve the trick but to fool the audience as to how it was done.

Good answer.

 

[Lothario]

How do you guys explain this one?

youtube.com/watch?v=Yr-QtNE9k84

It does look like he's setting NLP anchors and playing around with them. What's the trick here?

 

[Kaizen]

He's never claimed to be a psychologist, although he does claim to utilize NLP (which we all know is bogus). That's all part of the misdirection.

NLP is difficult to define since there's really no governing body watching over it. Some of the stuff is found in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a recognized science. Things like anchors are taken almost directly from Pavlov's conditioning study. So to say outright that "we all know" NLP is bogus really doesn't say much. "What specifically is bogus?" is a legitimate question for that assertion. Again, because NLP is constantly changing its techniques, the only way to really pin it down and call it's claims false is to speak about specific claims.

 

[Lothario]

I have little knowledge of psychology, but taking an experiment that used dogs and applying it to human beings seems like a huge step to me. In a way, we all create these anchors spontaneously. We associate places with people or periods of our lives, for instance. But anchoring confusion by merely touching one's arm a couple of times seems a little farfetched.

 

[Kaizen]

I have little knowledge of psychology, but taking an experiment that used dogs and applying it to human beings seems like a huge step to me. In a way, we all create these anchors spontaneously. We associate places with people or periods of our lives, for instance. But anchoring confusion by merely touching one's arm a couple of times seems a little farfetched.

The case of anchoring confusion should probably be tested clinically before one goes off to say that it's valid. But the Pavlovian study showed a much more than merely associating people, places and times together. It showed a physiological state change, presumably through the autonomic nervous system and that you can instill these changes through various methods.

 

[MikeSun5]

to pjh: Good post. Thumbs up.

to Kaizen: here's a quote from http://www.skepdic.com/neurolin.html

It seems that NLP develops models which can't be verified, from which it develops techniques which may have nothing to do with either the models or the sources of the models. NLP makes claims about thinking and perception which do not seem to be supported by neuroscience. This is not to say that the techniques won't work. They may work and work quite well, but there is no way to know whether the claims behind their origin are valid. Perhaps it doesn't matter. NLP itself proclaims that it is pragmatic in its approach: what matters is whether it works. However, how do you measure the claim "NLP works"? I don't know and I don't think NLPers know, either. Anecdotes and testimonials seem to be the main measuring devices.

New Age nonsense is bogus.

 

[Kaizen]

to pjh: Good post. Thumbs up.

to Kaizen: here's a quote from http://www.skepdic.com/neurolin.html

Let me start by saying that I'm not trying to show that NLP is a valid system. I've read that article long ago and am well aware of the criticisms of NLP.

New Age nonsense is bogus.

You get no disagreement from me with that statement. In fact it doesn't appear that you read what it was that I said.

I was merely saying that there are aspects of NLP that are taken from or are consistent with credible sources or lines of study. If you want to address how that's not the case of the two examples I gave, then feel free. Otherwise, your post says nothing.