Derren Brown: Tricks of the Mind. (4 books. £18.99.)
There are not many popular entertainers and TV celebrities who declare themselves atheists and sceptical about happenings said to be paranormal. The magician and “mentalist” Derren Brown is an exception. His book opens with the words “The Bible is not history” and ends with a passage from The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. As a teenager he was an evangelical Christian, but is at pains to explain that his book is not meant as a rant against religion and claims for the paranormal and alternative medicine. And it isn’t.
He sets out to explain some of the tricks that he and others in his trade employ, even if some of the others claim rather to be exercising special powers. It’s not the magicians who make this claim but the mind-readers, hypnotists and self-styled “psychics”. Magicians do not claim to be practising magic in the literal sense; they are and see themselves as entertainers who entertain the public by what they themselves call “tricks”. Brown explains the sleights of hand by which some of these tricks are done and how to memorise things and invites his readers to learn them as their party piece. It is the self-styled “psychics” who are the problem. In his TV and stage (and private) shows Brown performs the same tricks as them, but doesn’t claim any special powers; which is why he calls himself a “mentalist” rather than a psychic.
In explaining how he – and they – do it he effectively shows that, in so far as they claim special psychic powers, they are frauds. That does not mean that they are not skilled practitioners. It is not easy to master the techniques involved: getting people to be relaxed and responsive to suggestions as in hypnosis (Brown argues that this is not a special state of mind); detecting what people are really thinking from their facial and other bodily movements (he thinks there’s a bit, but not much, in neuro-linguistic programming); and cold reading (you need to think and react quickly to be any good at it).
People who have mastered these skills can be good entertainers, though Brown has – surely rightly – no time at all for those who take advantage of the bereaved to make a show of pretending to contact the spirits of the dead (let alone those who con such people out of their money in private consultations).
In the final chapter (on “Anti-Science, Pseudo-science and Bad Thinking”) Brown comes out as an eloquent and witty defender of the scientific method and critic of the post-modernists, New Agers, alternative therapists and pill pushers, and paranormalists who challenge it.
Adam Buick
No comments:
Post a Comment