Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists

It should come as no surprise that many great magicians are also skeptics. Harry Houdini was a skeptic. James Randi is a skeptic. Penn and Teller are skeptics. And a more recent and popular example is Criss Angel Mindfreak. Magicians tend to be skeptical because they know how easily it is to fool people. (Similarly, psychologists tend to be skeptical because they know how easily people can fool themselves.) To them, a psychic is simply a dishonest magician.

Derren Brown is an English magician and mentalist, and he is part of the great tradition of skeptical magicians. Watch: he’s really good.

I shall begin this by saying we should all be careful of thinking that we know what is going on. I’ve heard that magicians often have a much easier time fooling people with more education. This is because people with more education tend to think they can figure out the tricks, when really they’re no better than anyone else. Therefore, it’s best if I admit right away that I have no clue how Derren Brown does it.

But watching the above video, I was rather dismayed. I still don’t understand how he did it, even after he explained it. I’m not convinced that he’s doing this the way he says he is. Just because he drops a bunch of hints doesn’t guarantee that the person will think he wanted a BMX bike. I know I didn’t want a BMX by the end of the video. I guess he could have thoroughly pre-screened the person, or shown the single successful attempt out of many failed ones. But still, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had simply dropped a bunch of subliminal hints to make it look like that’s how he does it, while using some entirely different trick.

Of course, the Youtubers are claiming that his method is NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), which I really don’t believe. Derren Brown is actually critical of NLP, and has never claimed to use it (see Straight Dope). More generally, I think NLP is New Age bunk. On the other hand, something like hypnosis is much more plausible to me, since it’s empirically a real phenomenon. Many of Derren’s tricks look like they could be hypnosis, not that I know how to recognize it.

That was a single example where Derren Brown explained his trick. Usually, he doesn’t bother explaining (see more examples here, here, and here). It’s maddening. Derren says he mixes “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship” and the only things he doesn’t use are actors and stooges. But I cannot figure out for any single trick whether he’s using some crazy psychology, some crazy conjuring, or a combination of both. I guess Derren intended it to be ambiguous. But because it’s ambiguous, there are so many unanswered questions. Obviously, the tricks don’t attest to anything supernatural, but do they attest to any naturalistic amazingness? Or are they the kind of tricks you’d slap your face over? Do the tricks require conscious knowledge of the performer? Or is it like cold reading, in that the performer can fool even himself into thinking he’s psychic?

Personally, I think this is what’s going on: