> None of his claims would pass an Amazing Randi challenge.
"So, yes, what I do is real" means that his act really is mental (intuition, suggestibility, etc), as opposed to non-mental (confederates, well-placed mirrors, trick pens, etc). He wasn't claiming to have psychic powers.
Oh, but it IS an act of non-mental tricks (confederates, research, etc). From the comments on the link you provided, and do note this person is appreciative of the showmanship of it all:
> "Notice how the letter F was clearly not random and he specifically chose that girl from the audience. What also wasn't random was that he asked specifically if she had any pets. He did research on one of his audience members beforehand and decided upon this girl and mind-reading a pet name - because she had her pet name on one of her social medias. What makes this even better is that they probably would have chosen a social media account she hadn't used in ages or a post from years ago to maximise disbelief. It wasn't mind-reading or looking intently at her face for plosive sounds or anything. It was just audience research and epic showmanship and story-telling."
Now, I like a good trick and I enjoy magic acts. But this has nothing to do with intuition or suggestibility or mind-reading of any kind.
I admire your confidence; I don't claim to know how any of his tricks are done. But certainly he has done some that unambiguously rely on hypnosis and/or psychological manipulation and some that unambiguously don't.
edit: But since you're explaining things, I would like to know how the trick he does with Matt Lucas is done!
Surely, Derren Brown's team talked to the lady, asked her a few questions like her name, her age, her dogs names etc, and fed that information to Derren. It's very easy with a few pieces of information like that to completely narrow it down to one person. You can see in the video, he asks for all the Fs to stand up, and he selects one person.
I'm sure there's more to mentalism, like reading body language but it feels like 90% magic (lots of prep work + hard work + presenting / misleading) and 10% improvisation.
A mentalist can also remember the name of everyone in a theatre, using memory techniques. Theatre tickets are sold out months in advance. TV shows too. Names and addresses are given.
Many people have open Facebook profiles. People love talking about their pets, and about their upcoming visit to see a famous performer. I imagine a team might compile the list that a mentalist has to remember. Seat numbers can also be memorised, etc etc...
> mentalist can also remember the name of everyone in a theatre, using memory techniques.
It doesn't need to be _everyone_ in the theatre, or even most of them. He asked for "someone on the balcony" and then picked someone in the front row thereof.
One part of Derren Brown's act involves getting people to say things that aren't true at all -- playing with suggestibility in groups and cohesiveness.
Like, he'll do a quickfire guessing thing, going through audience members, guessing, "did I guess right?" thing, ramping up the speed, and he knows for sure people will say yes when they want to say no.
> I perfected another where I asked a person to think of a loved one, and then I guessed their loved one’s name
I don't see how you do this one sans psychic powers unless you're at least somewhat familiar with the person and their loved ones. Guessing common names would work every once in a while, but nowhere close to the majority of the time.
Now perhaps if you research the person ahead of time, maybe frame your question in a way that they're more likely to think of a particular type of person (e.g. mention age or old times so that they're more likely to think of grandparents as opposed to younger relatives), I could see that working, but that's not what he said. "Hey stranger, think of a loved one" -> "I know their name" is impossible without telepathy.
Similarly:
> Having someone merely think of a drawing, then taking a pad and duplicating their vision perfectly?
No, you can't do this without psychic powers unless you're adding a lot more context around the type of drawing before they do it. "Hey stranger, do a drawing of something, anything" isn't gonna work. Even if you assume there's a handful of common objects that people are likely to draw -- a house, a car, a dog, a flower -- you're still gonna be wrong more often than right.
It's supposed to look like it can't be done without telepathy - that's the whole point of the trick! And yet, it is done, successfully, on stages large and small, by people who are definitely not telepaths.
I'd be willing to change my mind if a person was able to demonstrate this ability while just walking around a randomly chosen part of a big city, going up to strangers and just straightaway asking them to think of a loved one's name, with the recording stuff and people-choosing being done by a known skeptic.
Having it done in a stage environment controlled by the performer in question obviously offers the ability to do research on audience members beforehand, or even have plants in the audience.
Change your mind about what? The performers aren't trying to convince you they have psychic powers, they're trying to convince you to buy a ticket to their show.
Anyway, think this through. Derren Brown claims not to use stooges, and has been doing tricks like these on stage (per his wiki page) for 19 tours each averaging 50-100 nights. If he's using stooges, he's going through an awful lot of them, isn't he? Including his TV work, there must be thousands of people in the UK that could go on TV and blow the lid on the whole thing. I ask you, which is the more impressive feat of mentalism: keeping all of those people quiet, or guessing that an audience member drew a picture of a cat?
With his "The push" show he either uses stooges or uses "mentalism" to turn people into murderers and risks giving the victims severe trauma and PTSD.
If the show is real the abuse carried out by Derren far surpasses the abuse of other cancelled shows like Jeremy Kyle. This is why I think its most likely the killers in this show are actors. If he's willing and able to use actors in this show its likely he has used them in others too.
I think you're underestimating how bad people are at keeping salacious secrets about celebrities.
Remember when Bear Grylls had to apologize for the "stranded on a desert island" show, after people on Reddit claimed to have worked on his production staff and revealed that he spent the night in a hotel and had help collecting the material for the shelter he built? If Derren has been using stooges throughout his career, it beggars belief that the same thing hasn't happened to him.
> If the show is real the abuse carried out by Derren far surpasses the abuse of other cancelled shows like Jeremy Kyle.
Yes, he has been roundly criticized for many of his hypnosis stunts, e.g. [0]. Are you now suggesting that those people are all stooges too? Do all stage hypnotist acts rely on actors?
That's pretty much the opening of every medium's act, right? Have you ever seen one? It would save a lot of explanation, and I'm sure you'd see through it pretty easily.
I'm not saying the "trick" cannot be done. Magicians employ tricks and misdirection in their acts, to great effect.
I've watched magic acts and been awed by them. I'm not a heckler.
I'm just saying, 100% magic acts are misdirection, trickery, confederates, and dexterity. It's "psychology" in the sense they know how to misdirect. The same with mentalism. This doesn't detract from it; if it's fun entertainment, and the mentalist doesn't claim to have actual extraordinary powers of perception (or supernatural powers), then everything is fair and ok to me!
But unnatural "perception" powers, mental powers, etc? Nope. Mentalism is a trick, not some exercise of wondrous mental powers. The latter claim wouldn't pass an Amazing Randi challenge.
> The latter claim wouldn't pass an Amazing Randi challenge.
Randi's challenge was for people making claims of genuine supernatural powers, i.e. the mentally ill. I don't see how it's relevant here.
> 100% magic acts are misdirection, trickery, confederates, and dexterity.
I assure you that cold reading has been done for hundreds of years (without foreknowledge, which would be called "hot reading"), and can only suggest reading up on it. Wikipedia has a good overview.
I contend that Randi would also have been against the claim that a mentalist uses extraordinary mental powers of any kind (except normal brain power, of course). Not just supernatural powers.
This is just trickery and misdirection. You seem to be under the impression that I don't appreciate it, but I do! I love a good spectacle. I just take issue with it being called some display of specially trained mental powers when it is not: it's just trickery, misdirection, confederates and sleight of hand.
PS: I recommend you read user fooblat's comment. They claim to also own a bunch of books on mentalism, and it's 100% deception and trickery, of the same kind of magic tricks. The claims of "heightened powers of observation", etc, etc, are all misdirection to make the act more appealing.
You're making this much more grandiose than it needs to be, bringing up Randi and the supernatural and all that. We're not arguing about what's physically possible, we're arguing about whether performers do certain tricks or not.
Take for example the trick where a volunteer is asked to draw a simple picture on a pad of paper, and the performer then names it (or draws a similar picture). This can be done with a gimmick (e.g. a carbon transfer paper in the clipboard you ask them to write it down on) or without (just go up and guess). What you're saying, by "it's 100% deception and trickery," is not that the latter is impossible, just that no one does it.
I think they do. For one, I went to some open mic nights in college, there were definitely some people who believed every blonde woman will draw a cat and choose the Queen of Hearts, and who sweat a lot when they don't. Second, I've seen routines where (I believe) the performer did a prediction, missed it, and then pivoted in to what looked like a fallback trick. It seems safe to presume that, when the performer gets the guess right, the trick ends differently.
(And if you were in the audience on those nights, you'd say, "That feat can't be done reliably, it must be a gimmick!" To which I'd reply as I did originally, "...or it can be done unreliably.")
Of course, a lot of mentalist tricks are indeed gimmicked. If you want an example of one that I think isn't, search youtube for any of the routines where Derren Brown cold reads strangers wearing clown makeup. I'm sure those could be gimmicked, but why would they? It would be a lot harder than just doing genuine cold reading. (You do agree that exists, right? If not, what's your theory to explain the wikipedia article? More confederates?)
Grandiose? I'm just saying it isn't grandiose but mundane, and that the entertainer's skill is what makes it seem something that is not.
Not sure what the claim about guessing means. Guessing is a probability game. You can guess some of the time through blind luck, but unless you don't stack your chances in some way or the other, it will make your show less amazing.
As for unreliability: indeed, that's my point. Wikipedia on Cold Reading states most performers have several "outs" for less reliable acts; they simply can react to or discard what misfires, and play with probabilities so that there will be some hits among the many misses. That's probabilities and misdirection, precisely my point!
Note I don't claim to know how tricks are performed. I'm incapable of explaining most magic tricks (though a magician performer who's a friend of mine explained some basic tricks to me; I think he broke some kind of magician code and now the secret cabal is out to get him).
How do you explain user floobat's assertion that in his stack of mentalism books everything is about trickery and misdirection?
(If you feel urged to reply "why should we trust what someone on the internet claims?" my reply would be... "indeed")
Edit: I re-read your examples, and in every single one you describe tricks and misdirection (like when you describe how a performer will "pivot" when an act fails, and none will be the wiser). That's actually... a magic trick. That's not some major feat of psychology or detecting subtle body signals, that's simply a trick and very good showmanship to be able to handle failures. I honestly don't understand what you're trying to debate with me anymore.
By "guessing" I meant the opposite of "trickery". The latter, I remind you, you described as meaning, "basically, already know the answer." I hope you'll concede that "guessing" means not already knowing the answer. I'm not using those terms to prove a point or persuade you of anything, just for convenience: "guessing" saves me from typing out the phrase "psychological skill, manipulation, perception, or other mental techniques" and "trickery" for "gimmicks, trick pens, hidden cameras, confederates, sleights-of-hand, etc."
So, what we're (I think) arguing over is whether any mentalism tricks rely on "guessing" as opposed to "trickery". Obviously, they all typically claim to be based on "guessing", that's sort of the definition of mentalism as opposed to other kinds of stage magic. But my position is that some subset of such tricks really are based on that, and I believe your position is the opposite, that they're all what we're calling "trickery." If I've misunderstood, please feel free to clarify.
I looked for a few more examples (all by Derren Brown, not because I think he's unique but because he is prolific and practically all of his stuff is on youtube). One I already mentioned; another is the routine he does with Stephen Merchant; another is the one where he does the "Russian scam" on strangers; and a fourth is the bit where he tries to buy jewelry with blank paper rather than money. My understanding of your position is that these must involve "trickery" - the people involved are actors, there was sleight-of-hand the camera didn't show, or some other gimmick. I think he really is just conning those people.
As for the books: compare to difficult-but-not-impossible sleights, like a perfect Faro or dead-cutting the Nth card. How many magic books have a trick requiring a Faro shuffle? Not many, because it takes a lot of practice to do reliably. And yet, there are (I think!) tricks being performed on stage which do rely on it. Same thing here, except that, unlike Faros and dead cuts, tricks based on "guessing" generally can't be practiced without an audience. "Go perform this pick-the-envelope trick in restaurants and shitty nightclubs, over and over, failing repeatedly, getting booed off stage, until you finally learn to do it reliably, and then there you are!" would not be very useful to the budding mentalist! But it doesn't follow that it cannot be done.
And as for why we're arguing, well, I just like the kind of discussion where a casual belief of mine (something I think is true, but haven't done any particular research in to) is challenged - I think they are useful and good and worthwhile. I'm not angry or trying to show you up or "win", whatever that might mean in this context. Totally ready to update my own beliefs on all this. There are at least two tricks I used to think were probably "guesswork" before this thread, which I re-watched with more skeptical eyes and now believe are "trickery". But as I listed, there also still others that I think aren't.
I see -- we are using different definitions. Let me provide mine:
"Guessing" is also a trick, just like "dexterity handling cards" or "pulling a rabbit out of a hat". It's a trick because the guess is stacked in a way it will result in a hit with high probability or the performer has mastery of showmanship in a way to pivot away from a failure and turn it into a win (discreetly disregarding misses, making them seem as hits, etc). That is, the key aspect is misdirection, i.e. trickery, just like any other kind of stage magic. The article you quoted from Wikipedia on Cold Reading confirms this!
An example of "guessing" that is obviously a trick: carry a card with you, say a Queen of Hearts (somebody else mentioned this trick, it's not my invention). At parties, approach girls and have them choose a card. If they pick Queen of Hearts, you show it to them and wow them... "how on Earth did he do this!?". If they pick something else, you improvise some personality reading and move on. Do you see how this is trickery and misdirection and also guessing? Guessing is not special, it just requires showmanship and an ability to pivot... just like a stage magician!
What I am arguing AGAINST: that mentalism requires some sort of extraordinary power of observation, picking up subtle signals, hypnosis, extreme mental powers of deduction, etc. That's false. I don't have to know how a particular mentalism trick is done to know it's a trick, just as I don't have to understand how a trick with cards works to know it's a trick. So I suggest you stop sending me links to Derren Brown's acts; I'm sure I'll be impressed, because he is a top-notch showman, but they will prove nothing.
The Amazing Randi even mentions Derren Brown in his talk ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRqlvqHBVCg ). And he asserts 100% of mentalism is misdirection and trickery (which guessing is a form of). Which coming from Randi is a compliment, since he sure appreciated a good trick!
> I see -- we are using different definitions. Let me provide mine...
You misunderstood that whole section, so I'll try again. Those words are just labels, it doesn't matter what they are but it very much matters that they be used consistently. You said, in essence, that magic tricks are always done by using X, never Y - that whole section was me trying to define what X and Y are. I used "trickery" to mean X because that's how you used it, in your first comment:
> "But there's no way to reliably cold read a name, so it has to be done via trickery..."
Remember? You started by drawing a distinction between cold reading and trickery, and now you're saying that cold reading is trickery. Either definition is fine, but you gotta pick one, as I'm less sure than ever of what the X means. This doesn't help:
> What I am arguing AGAINST: that mentalism requires some sort of extraordinary power of observation, picking up subtle signals, hypnosis, extreme mental powers of deduction, etc.
...because of all the subjective qualifiers. How am I to know what you consider extraordinary? Take the Stephen Merchant clip, in which Derren Brown appears to dupe a guy into guessing wrong. If I claim that it was done purely with with psychology, I have no idea if you'd disagree ("No way, that would require extraordinary mental powers so there must be some gimmick!") or agree with me ("That only requires pretty good mental powers, so no gimmick required").
It seems like you're just redefining X to include anything that can actually be done by a human, and to exclude only supernatural abilities. This is illustrative:
> I don't have to know how a particular mentalism trick is done to know it's a trick.
If you don't need to look at a trick to know it's X, that would suggest that your position is tautological: "All magic tricks are X, because I've defined X that way." Well, fair enough; we certainly agree that magic tricks are indeed magic tricks, as opposed to psychic powers or space aliens or whatever.
But I don't think your position started out tautological. I'm pretty sure you began this discussion because there are real mentalists doing real tricks that you think must've been done with a gimmick and I think could've been done with skill and practice. That's why I thought it would be helpful to cite examples! But I agree that if your position is tautological, there is no point in looking at them (other than perhaps the natural curiosity about mentalism that I imagined you might have, based on how long we've been discussing it).
> "If you don't need to look at a trick to know it's X, that would suggest that your position is tautological"
No, it wouldn't. Also, don't misquote me.
Please, this is getting embarrassing. I encourage you to watch the Amazing Randi's talk I and others linked to. He specifically singles out Derren Brown as someone employing misdirection. Also, re-read Wikipedia on Cold Reading: it's all tricks.
Between Randi and you, I'll stick with Randi.
PS: I don't know what a "gimmick" means in this context, I never used the word. Please don't argue with me about words I didn't introduce.
Actually, don't bother replying: we are going nowhere and I don't like your debate tactics.
"So, yes, what I do is real" means that his act really is mental (intuition, suggestibility, etc), as opposed to non-mental (confederates, well-placed mirrors, trick pens, etc). He wasn't claiming to have psychic powers.
> Where's the proof this even happened at all?
Guessing names is a very common stage trick; here's Derren Brown getting the name of someone's pet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1IV_kkh1Xs