So tonight sees Derren Brown predict the national lotto numbers live on tv. As far as I know he plans to then revel on he did so on Friday.
Derren, who I am a fan of, has for a long time been doing a fantastic job doing what he does. He dresses his tricks up as amazing feats psychological manipulation when in fact they are no more then “simple” street and stage magic. When he starts his shows saying he uses a mixture of "magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship", he's setting you up. He's being honest in the techniques he uses but the ones he wants you to pay attention to our in bold. From there on out, he disguises nearly all his tricks as those of a psychological \ suggestion kind.
One of the best examples of this I can recall off hand would be from his last televised live show. He gets several audience members to join him on stage. He asks them all to think of an object. What then takes place is a series of “twenty questions” but in Derren's style. So more like three.
He puts the same questions to all audience members. What he does as he asks these questions is look the audience member up and down, making it look like he's getting a read on them. In one instance he asks to see a one guy's hands. He looks at the back and front, and proclaims he's thinking rugby ball.
Of course Derren's right and you think, “wow, how did he do that?”. Was it the size of the lad, his clothes and maybe his hands, when Derren inspected them, looked like that of a rugby players. Add them all up and you think that Derren has made a educated guess based on information gleamed from his mad skills at reading people. Or maybe he somehow “forced” the rugby ball idea into the lad's head through some mad suggestion skills.
No.
As the audience members were approaching the stage they were asks to write what they were thinking down on a white board. The white board in question is on of those electronic wi-fi bad boys that can be hooked up to a computer. One of Derren's lackeys will then feed the information to Derren via his ear piece.
What happens when Derren dresses his tricks up as “psychological” is he separates himself from normal magicians. We see him as highly skilled practitioner of a science. We look at what he does and believe that he is one of a few that can pull these tricks off – unlike a standard magician, whose tricks we know are simple tricks, ones that can be bought in a box, ones we believe, if we knew how they are done, we could do them ourselves. When in fact he is no different to a Paul Dainels (who is an absolute legend anyway).
Even his feats of memory are not beyond us mere mortals. He does not have a photographic memory, no such thing exists. He says as much in his book...
“There is very little evidence to suggest that the popular idea of a photographic memory really holds. While there are a few savants who are able to hold in their minds very complex, highly detailed after-images of a scene ('eidetic memory'), it typically does not hold for long, and tends to be prone to subjective distortions rather than being photographically perfect. Moreover, most of the studies on extraordinary memories seem to show that these gifted individuals use rich mnemonic strategies...” - Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind p62
These mnemonic approaches to memory are something I wish to write about in a latter post.
It's also worth pointing out that when, on T.v., he shows how a trick is done, don't always believe him. This, sometimes, is just more dressing up. Giving you a “plausible” solution that revolves around suggestion or psychology when in fact it was “mere” slight of hand or something we might consider a little less exceptional...
"I am often dishonest in my techniques ... I happily admit to cheating, it's all part of the game. I hope some of the fun for the viewer comes from not knowing what's real and what isn't" - Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind p341
So, back to the show tonight. How is he going to “predict” the lotto numbers?
He might do the thing where he'll write them down as they're announced, and then write them behind each time. eg the first one is blank, then before the second he writes the first, before the third is read out he writes the second.
It could also be done where the lottery was played behind him, but it was delayed ten seconds, and he'll have an ear piece telling him what each number was just before it came out. (I've been told this was in an episode of Jonathan Creek.
Well, there's a few other ways he could do it but either way I'm sure it'll be entertaining.
