Tricks of the Mind - Derren Brown

There are not many occasions when I feel that I have to justify my choice of reading material to anybody, in fact, this is the first one. I bought this book mainly in order to annoy my friend E. As I was examining the back cover in Waterstones she came up behind me and said in her finest disparaging tones, “You’re not buying Derren Brown, are you?”. “I am now!” replied the part of my brain that just likes to be contrary. Another motive was that whilst I find Brown creepy but fascinating, my husband refuses to watch any of his TV shows on the grounds that he is “a stinking wank-pixie”. You can’t argue with logic like that. You can only quietly buy the book instead.

As well as trying to persuade my chosen life-partner to watch “Trick of the Mind”, I had also seen Derren on a number of documentaries about the paranormal, on which he was pleasingly damning about stage mediums. I was puzzled, though, by fact that he seemed to think that preying on people by pretending to contact their dead relatives was a bit think, while persuading them to knock over a Securicor van was OK.

The book is divided into sections on magic tricks, memory, hypnotism and the paranormal. For my money, this final section is pretty much redundant. I can’t help feeling that the ground covered here has been covered better already by other books (Carl Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World”, for example). Fortunately, the other sections are far more interesting, and possibly even useful...

The section on memory takes a while to get to anything useful (Why would I want to remember lists? The only reason I can think of would be to show off my list remembering abilities to family and friends. And they'd only be entertained the first time round.) like memorizing sequences of digits. I don't yet have a Hanibal-Lector-style memory palace, though. I am still trying to find all the items to remember I've placed in an imaginary version of my house amongst the clutter. I think than when using the location technique in future, I should imagine a clean and tidy version of my home, rather than an exact copy.

I was a bit disappointed to read that, at least according to Derren, there is nothing particularly magical about hypnotism and that (according to him) the trance is not even a special mental state. Apparently it works though the facts that:

• People tend to do whatever they're told anyway
• They've been told about a magical thing called hypnosis which will make them do what they're told even more.

So, in the immortal words of Thom Yorke, you do it to yourself. There was a section I really enjoyed with instructions for using some of the prnciples of NLP cure yourself, or a friend from phobias caused by traumatic incidents in your past. Alas! I have no phobias to experiment on and I can't really imagine any of my phobic friends letting me have a go of theirs...

ME: Oh, go on. I promise you, I know what I'm doing. I read a book about it.
THEM: (skeptically) Oh yeah?
ME: Yes. By Derren Brown.
THEM: Fuck off.

Possibly I should try doing the opposite to the instructions and see if I can give myself a phobia.... The bit I'm most eager to get out and practice is spotting lies, though, as I can see immediate real-world uses for this skill at the poker table.

Book Derren does not seem the same as his stage/screen personality which is heavy on the sinister, and long on black coats. Perhaps I should have guessed that nobody can spend all their time hamming it up like a pantomime villain. He's also a lot cleverer than I ever gave him credit for, but very, very pleased with his own cleverness!

As I think you can tell from that last paragraph, I want to like him, but every so often he goes and writes something so jarring that we are back to square one. I can give no better example of than in the section on pacing and using leading language during “hypnotism” to achieve a given result on your patient/client/victim: “Think of it,” says Derren, “As a seduction..”.

(Bear with me people, I'm going for an extended metaphor here.) Go to your local Chinese takeaway and buy a tub of their glutinous sweet and sour sauce. Let it go cold, or better still, chill it in the fridge over night. Now arrange to have a friend take you by surprise at some point during the day and tip the whole lot down the back of your neck so that clammy, gellid slime drips down the line of your spine... Done it? Well, that is EXACTLY the sensation I feel when Derren Brown asks me to think of anything as a seduction.

Also rather disturbing are the pictures of portraits Derren has painted, which I can only describe as Gerald Scarfe meets Max Ernst.

I have always (well, ever since The Affair of the Big Glass Box) wanted to see David Blaine and Derren Brown fight to the death. I believed that whichever it went, the winner would be society as a whole. It’s still an appealing image, but I think I’d go as far as cheering for Derren now. Maybe I’d even hold his sinister, black coat for him.

And at least he’s not Paul McKenna! I have a horror of Paul McKenna. Just typing the name makes me shudder so hard I think my muscles are trying to detach themselves from my skeleton in order to slither off to some hypnotist-free bolt-hole. I think it is because he looks a bit like alleged celebrity sex-attacker Michael Barrymore. It is one thing to be convinced to eat raw onions on stage and quite another to find yourself dead in a swimming pool with a sex-toy up the bottom.