Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown

Richard Dawkins might say that religion prevents reasoned decision making and progress. Sam Harris would tell you how religion is a threat to society. For Derren Brown in Tricks of the Mind, religion is one of those things that humans do because they’re prone to cognitive illusions, and there’s many other ways of exploiting these same illusions for fun and profit.

If you’ve not heard of him Derren Brown is a magician based in the UK whose act is based on “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship”. It’s this last word in particular that is important. David Blaine had the idea that sitting around in a box doing nothing would be entertaining, which says a lot about the standard of American entertainment. Derren Brown, in constrast appears to play Russian Roulette live. It wasn’t, but nonetheless, from a British perspective, it was much more interesting than watching someone stay still for record-breaking lengths of time.

He also has a healthy view of magic as entertainment. In the book on page 19 and 20 he talks about how magic is showing off “Look I can do something you can’t” and how it leads to problems.

Magic, I feel, more than most performance types, requires genuine self-deprecation on the part of the performer, and classically it is the one area we never find it. How many magicians can you honestly say are particularly likeable characters? Or who didn’t become annoying after a promising start? Any you genuinely don’t think would benefit from a hard smack? (You may include the author of course.)

The rest of the book plays to this stereotype. Despite this, this isn’t entirely a how to do magic book, but also an interesting discussion of how the mind works. The first section is Disillusionment which is semi-autobiographical account of how he came to explore magic. The next section of the book is titled Magic. In it he gives away the secret to magic, which is showmanship. It’s the difference between a gimmick and an experience. It’s also about rapport, building a relationship between you and the mark. It’s therefore that the early chapters are also about building a rapport between the author and the reader. It plays to his public image. You get a couple of tricks so you feel secrets are being revealed and then a couple of example of suggestion, to suggest there will also be deep psychology. It’s written well enough, but if the book were all like this it would be rather dull.

Memory is a far more interesting section and worth reading again, though maybe it’s the one section you shouldn’t have to. Another aspect of magic is knowing things that the audience doesn’t. Brown discusses the loci system and scores extra points for mentioning the tale of Simonides from Cicero’s De Oratore. This leads to the more useful Memory Palace and Peg systems. From personal experience Memory Palace works. It’s similar to the system used by Michael Gruneberg in language tuition. Peg is a system I hadn’t come across before for handling numbers. It’s a clever system and works well I think. Together Brown gives a system that allows you to memorise otherwise difficult information like FA Cup Finals. I now know that Manchester United drew against Crystal Palace 3-3 in 1990, though Manchester United won the reply. Alas, I now can’t stop remembering it. The memory systems are tricks, but useful tricks regardless of their application and they’re explained well.

Hypnosis and Suggestibility was also interesting. Brown discusses what hypnosis is. His conclusion is that just as magic isn’t one technique but a catch-all term for different effects, so is hypnosis. He also comes down on the side of the behaviourists in saying that hypnosis is social suggestibility rather than an altered state of mind. This should kill the mystique of hypnosis, but instead he still takes it seriously. In particular he talks at length about the ethics of hypnotising someone. Even if they only think they’re hypnotised there’s still a duty of care not to put the subject under stress. He also tackles Neuro-Linguistic Programming in this section. It’s something I haven’t spent a lot of time with. After looking into it I wasn’t that impressed. Derren Brown’s looked a lot deeper and harder at it than me and consequently is correspondingly less impressed than I was. There is a killer anecdote in this section about gaining co-operation in a hypnosis stage show, but I won’t share it as it’s like giving away a major plot point. It had me laughing for most of that morning.

I have to admit I struggled with Unconscious Communication. It’s not a skill that I desire. I’m not sure there was anything new in this chapter. It’s about keeping your eyes open and paying attention to your subject, but if you’re trying to communicate with them perhaps you should anyway?

Anti-Science, Pseudo-Science and Bad Thinking is the final major section. It opens with a discussion of what science is. There is one major point in this chapter which is that there’s an attempt in science not only to know, but to ask how we know. There is a danger to conflate science with scientists. Science may seek ways of proving a pet idea wrong, but scientists are human and so come with their own flaws and biases. Brown generally stays on the side of discussing Science, but he does tackle the problems with scientists to some extent. He then moves on to alternative medicine and homeopathy comes out very badly. He tackles the problem of a different way of knowing by asking how should things be known. How would you test the effectiveness of a product? This gives a brief explanation of why the double-blind method is often a good idea. This section doesn’t sit entirely with the rest of the book but, particularly in the part on mediums, you can see this as part of the same cognitive mistakes being exploited ‘in the wild’.

This is what he brings out in his Final Thoughts. The theme is, as he says, the tricks the mind plays on us. This I think is a firm but sympathetic approach to poor reasoning. Arguments of faith whether they be in gods or psychics aren’t put in a dock and put on trial. They’re connected to the wider world and other faults in reasoning and perhaps explain why the need to question faith-based positions as you would question any other isn’t just a discussion for Sundays.

Having minds leaves us prone to making mistakes. Our own expectations lead us in ways we’re not always aware of. He gives the example of a seance. A group of students sat around a ouija board with the knowledge that one of them knew a recently deceased person who lived in the house. They asked if anyone was there, and the glass moved to yes, giving them confidence that it was working. As Derren Brown asks, who thought the spirit was ever going to guide it to no?

You can visit his site at www.derrenbrown.co.uk or read his mind with a RealPlayer video clip from the Channel4 site. Simon Singh has an interesting article questioning Brown’s use of the word Psychology, which Brown seems to agree with.

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