| Derren Brown and the Human Mind |
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| Written by Gord Sellar | |||||||
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View a PDF of this article. Derren Brown is a British magician who practices the manipulation of the human mind. fWe human beings have a rather interesting conception of ourselves, especially of our minds. When we say, "I," we often think that we know what we mean. But people who pause to consider this word find themselves confronted with a confusing jumble of contradictions. This, of course, is common knowledge in modern society: words like "free-association," "subconscious," and "Freudian slip." Now, as a scientist, Freud has been almost completely (and well-deservedly) discredited in the fields that study the human mind, but this doesn't undo the massive change that should have taken place in the way we understand our own minds. After all, there have been people aware of the foibles of the human mind for many ages: high priests, magicians, confessors, pickpockets, painters, storytellers. Except that, somehow, we haven't learned this lesson, even now. Something within us refuses to accept that our minds are not, at bottom, rational or under control. There are many reasons for this. The stories that we are told by authors, moviemakers, and TV programs are centered on decisions, choices made by individuals. It's a central belief in our culture that actions (except among children and the insane) are the result of choice, of conscious decision. We hold this belief even in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary. For example, as consumers, we refuse to believe that our own purchases are driven by advertising--but if advertising didn't work, why would companies worldwide continue to spend billions of dollars a year on it? "Oh, it affects people," we say, "just not me." Our sense of the unassailable nature of our own minds is so strong that when we're confronted by anything that contradicts it, our first and most reliable response is, ironically, disbelief. We're willing even to accept things that we know cannot be possible--the vague, eerie possibility that someone has read our thoughts, for example--rather than surrender our own belief in the notion that it is we, ourselves, who are in control of "I." Derren Brown is a British magician who knows this part of the human mind well. Over the last few years, he has exploded into fame in Britain, but he's been excavating this part of the human consciousness for many years. He's been the star of several specials including Derren Brown: Mind Control, With Derren Brown, Mind Controls 2 & 3, a series, Derren Brown Plays Russian Roulette Live, The Seance, and Messiah which aired on BBC and syndicated in several foreign countries. Many of the programs have been released on DVD, though they are also in wide circulation on the Internet. When a performer is termed a "magician" or an "illusionist," often what comes to mind is David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear or the antics of Gob from "Arrested Development." Brown's "magic" is very different. As he, himself, states at the beginning of most of his programs, he uses a combination of misdirection, suggestion, subtle psychological reading, and sleight-of-hand to pull off most of his stunts. But he does things that constantly astound and weird out his audiences because, instead of going for the big flash of visual illusions, he explores that hinterland in the gap between our expectations and understandings of how our own minds ought to work, and the way they actually do work. In doing so, he's not only managed to bring magic back from the land of cheese, but to make it an art, once again. Misdirection In a closed room within a ghost-and-sorrow haunted basement where (according to the story he's just told) a dozen students killed themselves many years before, Brown has just finished explaining a litany of tricks that were perpetuated by Victorian mediums. He has demonstrated using a CCTV and camera to reveal how self-deceiving people can be when they enter into certain mental states. He shows a woman video footage of herself throwing a tambourine out of an enclosed "spirit box," though she cannot consciously remember herself even touching it. He explicitly notes that Victorian mediums often fooled themselves into fulfilling the needed "phenomena" to prove that spirits were in the room. The long litany of fraud and lies is exposed for all to see. Yet, for all the skepticism and doubt that he encourages, the seance progresses through an examination of photos of the supposedly dead, an eerie Ouija board session, and finally a full-on seance. During the seance, a group of young, bright, and unquestionably modern students end up shrieking in an almost medieval terror at the sight of inanimate things moving upon the seance table, shuddering in the presence of what they believe is a dead woman. A magician must be a master of the art of prestidigitation--in other words, must have quick and nimble fingers. Brown is such a master. While watching some of his instructional videos, I marveled at how skilled he was at concealing cards. However, I noticed something else, something very important; a great deal of what makes his sleight of hand work are his powers of misdirection. "Misdirection" is a word that can mean many things, so I'll be explicit here about how I intend for you to understand it. Brown's misdirection often comes in one of the two following forms: distraction and agreement on false premises. Distraction is easy to catch, if you know what to look for. This is the kind of trick kids play with one another often, pointing out the window and hollering, "Look, fish tracks!" or "Hey, I think I hear your mom calling you!" when they're cornered by bullies. Sometimes it works, and the kids manage to just barely escape thanks to a moment's distraction. Brown plays such tricks on people, as well: sometimes he attracts a person's attention to one thing and away from the site of his misdirection. Effective misdirection also depends on our tendency to overestimate our perceptiveness, as well, and this is the key to gaining agreement on false premises. This is one of the most crucial arrows in Brown's quiver, and it's absolutely dependent on his skills at distraction: when he manages to get you looking the other way, and tricks you into seeing only one card, he also reinforces this illusion by asking for agreement on the premise that there is only one card. Now, normally, when there is one card, we know this because we see only one card. But at the mercy of a trickster, we often can be tricked by standard, established techniques to see only one card, and to agree, mistakenly, that seeing is believing. Of course, there are other ways Brown secures agreement on false premises, as well; one of his favorite approaches is to discredit older tricks in traditions he himself is drawing upon, as if to say, ah, there's no such thing as magic, folks. And then he hits you with something you cannot explain, because you weren't paying enough attention to catch him out. Body Language and Suggestions Brown looks across the dinner table at the young baron across the table who's hired him to entertain his guests, counts and countesses all. The magician smiles and mentions that sometimes he can read peoples' pin numbers. He then asks the young fellow how he would react if he could tell him his PIN number. "I'd be amazed," the young man responds, shaking his head incredulously. How could someone read the PIN number from someone's mind? "Shall we do this?" Brown asks. "Yes," the count says, but he betrays his nerves, shaking his head nervously. Brown sips his water and begins the trick. He tells the baron to imagine he's put his card into the ATM, and then tells him to put his hand flat on the table, just so. The young baron's leaning forward, his hand flat down, and he's obviously trying to keep his fingers still so as not to betray anything. "The card goes in the machine, and it says 'Please type in your PIN number.'" Brown lifts a notebook as he speaks, marker in hand. He instructs the young man to type the numbers into the machine in his mind, only in his mind, and to keep his fingers still. When he tells the baron to type the first, a moment later he scrawls something onto the notepad. "The second," he says, and a moment later, he reacts with a chuckle and writes something else, quickly. The third and fourth numbers come just as quickly. The last number is punched--in the baron's mind, of course. Brown pauses mysteriously, looks to the notepad and then to the young man's face. "Alex," he says, "how would you feel if this was your PIN number right here?" "I wouldn't believe it!" Baron Alex says. "You may wish to change your PIN number tomorrow," Brown says, and with a naughty smile, he turns the notepad so the Baron can see it. And of course, it is the PIN number, and Alex and his friends are flabbergasted. One of Brown's most amazing "abilities" is his seeming ability to reach into others' minds, either to plant his own messages there, or to retrieve others most secretly hidden thoughts. Sometimes, he appears to take control of others' bodies, and at other times, he seems to transmit thoughts to another, or hear what they are thinking. Some of these tricks, as he himself has noted, depend on the fact that the old Cartesian duality of mind and body is a load of hokum. While the human mind is a complex, currently rather unfathomable construction, it most definitely functions within the context of the human body. This is something mainstream science has known for a long time. One example is the way the body reacts when we see a sexually arousing picture for only a moment. Our pupils dilate, our breathing changes, and our heart rate increases. Another example is how we physically react to a frightening image on a cinema screen. While some people scream voluntarily, for many, it seems to be as reflexive as flinching, closing their eyes, or hunching down self-protectively. A last example, and perhaps most pertinent to Brown's art, is how, sometimes, you can just tell when someone you know well is lying to you. How? Brown claims that most people, when they're lying, don't physically show a sign of retrieving memories. He says that a great deal of people look up and to the left when retrieving detailed memories and that when someone has demonstrated that they do this when remembering something, it's easy to catch them out as lying when they fail to glance this way. It's hardly surprising when, thinking of a word or name, and asked by a mentalist to "scream it mentally" (something we normally don't do) our bodies respond physically. Armed with some psychological trickery and the mouth-position necessary to pronounce the first syllable of a name, a good guesser like Brown can get us to believe he's read our minds. Another example from Brown's repertoire of tricks is reading a person's PIN number. Sometimes it's active resistance--the only finger that doesn't move is the one that his mark is working on keeping still--and sometimes it's just involuntary response in the tendons of the fingers that habitually move in this or that way when punching in the code at the bank machine. Either way, it's this obvious, normal, but largely unconscious and ignored connection between mind and body that Brown and others take advantage of when they do their work. Memory Tricks With CC-TVs and hidden cameras arranged around the casino, Brown enters under the only conditions he can: with the casino's permission, for the purposes of his show. He makes his way to the blackjack table. Four decks of cards are shuffled together, and Brown bets carefully, specifically. Hand after hand come and go, and his pile of chips grows. Nobody else's piles of chips grow like his; the dealer looks at his wager warily, and others look on incredulously. After several hands, the croupier is filled with doubts. Can this man really be lucking out this well? It's a little hard to believe. She thinks to herself that the casino cannot afford a man like this here, not tonight, not ever. But he remains at the table, plays, his luck increasing with time, until finally he finds himself faced with a decision. Almost everyone has a good hand, but he's got only an eleven. Most people would not double their wager, but he does, even though it means he can have only one more card. He sets his chips down for the wager, and then his card is dealt. And it is, of course, precisely the card he needs. It is precisely the card to bring him to 2600 pounds on a table where nobody else has exceeded a few hundred pounds in winnings. Once more, the dealer shakes her head in disbelief. There are tricks which Brown pulls off which can be explained, at least in part, by his memory training. Whether he has a photographic memory or just a very well-trained real memory is beside the point. The man, himself, has admitted that he uses mnemonics in order to carry out rather amazing feats of memory. Mnemonics are tricks which almost everyone has used. Children learning to read the treble clef in English-speaking countries universally know the "Every Good Boy Deserves Fun..." (or "Fudge", or "Favour") mnemonic, which helps them remember that the notes on the five lines of the clef are, in ascending order, E, G, B, D, and F. Students of all ages cramming for exams which demand rote memorization (whether it's the parts of an area of human anatomy for biology class, or specific points from a history lecture) cook up sentences or acronyms that help them remember specific bits of information in a specific order. If you think of the brain as a web page, then mnemonics are systems of links. You don't need all the information stored on a single page, and if you try to put all of it on one, it becomes difficult to navigate. Imagine if websites couldn't be arranged into sub-pages, and everything had to be on the front page. A bio, a resume, family photos, a blog, contact information, a message board, and guest book all crammed onto a single page! It would be a horrible mess. However, using links, we can tuck away useful but not immediately pressing information for later retrieval and use. In a way, mnemonics work like this. People have been using them for ages now. In the Near East and in ancient Greece, cultists of various religions fondled a series of rings, allowing associations to form between the information they memorized and the sensation of this or that ring in their hands. Many poets living in times before literacy became widespread embedded mnemonic devices into their poems over the ages, using formulas to make their poems easier to memorize, ending stanzas in such a way that they logically or sensually suggested obvious choices for the following stanza. This was common practice among many poets even 800 years ago. Speaking about the casino trick, Brown describes his technique in a fascinating way, claiming that, from a young age, he's been training his imagination to remember the cards through association. According to him, he has a room in his imagination which contains a whole set of items, each one imaginatively associated with one of the cards in a normal 52-card deck. This lamp or that photograph is associated with this or that card. When dealing with one pack of cards, of course, this is adequate, but when dealing with 4 or more decks of cards, the task of remembering which cards have come and gone already, or rather which ones remain in which amounts, seems Herculean. Brown claims that he simply imagines little sticky-papers attached onto each item, and removes one of the sticky papers as instances of the card show up. Perhaps this is possible for him, although it would probably take a tremendous amount of memory training. But it is almost certain that without the technique of mnemonics, Brown would not have a hope of keeping track of how many of each card he has seen, even if he has a photographic memory; to remember, and to actively, continuously tabulate memories in the state of a dynamic system, are two very different tasks. Of course, memorizing the order of 52 cards in a deck would be a difficult task. How about memorizing 26 cards? Children routinely memorize the letters of the alphabet, and while it takes a little rote work, it can be done. Similarly, Brown has on occasion presented the illusion that he's memorized a full stack of cards, and perhaps, in some cases, he has in fact memorized a full stack. But it's more likely that he's combined the memorization of a half stack of cards, staggered through a deck at regular intervals, with some other, traditional card-trick techniques. Doubtless, talent is an important prerequisite for magic, but talent amounts to absolutely nothing without good old sweat and practice. Yet most of us aren't even interested in that fact when we're dimly aware of it. We like the romance of a concert pianist being naturally a musical genius; equally seductive is the notion that a magician is doing something that he ought not by natural law or all we know of the universe, be able to do. It gives us a rush, a thrill; it is romantic. Brown is fully aware of this, and exploits it to his utmost advantage. He often chooses romanticized settings--buildings planted with rumours of hauntings, isolated barns, or even gala events. Of course, nobody can fault him for this--it is what makes his art so appealing, and so wondrous. Brown tacitly acknowledges that everything apparently supernatural that we see of his work is in some way the result of trickery--none of it is "real"--and a favorite technique of his is to debunk "magical events" from the very tradition upon which he draws. But we, of course, retain faith in our senses, and are willing have faith in him, as well. The result is that we find ourselves standing at least on the verge of belief in the unbelievable--something he explored explicitly in his televised special, Messiah, in which he secured the endorsement of several major American alternative-religious figures through wholly fraudulent (and rather amusing) means. The fact that he uses this to entertain us, instead of to recruit us into a cult, is what makes him not a monster but, instead, a true artist. Comments (0)
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