This is how an illusionist targets your unconscious mind | Derren Brown | Big Think

When you work, I think with any sort of magic, you become a very good applied psychologist just in a very niche area, which is why it’s generally magicians that are brought in to kind of test for psychic claims and that kind of thing to sort of debunk or look for that kind of evidence.

Because scientists get fooled very easily, like the rest of us, magicians are just very good at understanding how that sort of thing can work and be fooling. So, you’re working with conscious and non-conscious processes.

For example, to take an idea of just a card trick, say you start a card trick and the deck has to be in a special order in order for the trick to work. But there’s a point halfway through the trick where it’s safe for the person to shuffle the cards, but if they shuffle at the beginning it would ruin the whole trick.

So, maybe at the beginning you shuffle yourself as the magician, but it’s a false shuffle—you’re not really shuffling the cards but it looks like you are. Halfway through the trick, you hand them the deck and you say to the spectator, who so far has not shuffled the cards, “Shuffle the cards again but this time do it under the table.”

Now, that doesn’t make any sense because they haven’t shuffled the cards before, but in as much as they’re now taking the cards and shuffling them under the table and following that instruction, you’re starting to play with the memory of what actually happened in the trick.

So, now you’re essentially planting a false memory that they had shuffled the deck before. It’s not a guaranteed thing, but when they start to narrate the trick afterwards, you start to see how these false memories are fitting into play.

A big part of performing any sort of magic is controlling that narrative afterwards by playing with things like false memories, so any magician becomes very good at doing that sort of thing.

My toolkit is the ongoing experience of both the audience and the people that come up on stage, so I use rapid hypnotic induction techniques with people that come up on stage and they vary in efficacy from night to night, but generally, they work.

So there, for example, I would be using an unconscious process of using bafflement and bewilderment to my advantage. If you imagine that somebody comes up to you in the street and says it’s not 7:30, your reaction isn’t to go, “Oh yes, I know it’s 20 to two,” your reaction normally would be to feel baffled and thrown by that like you’ve sort of missed something.

And when we are baffled, we become hyper-suggestible because we’re looking for a way out; we’re looking for a clear steer, a clear direction out of that towards information that makes sense, so I use that a lot.

Politicians use it a lot; they give you a bunch of statistics that you can barely follow and then they say, “So therefore…” and you’re much more likely to then accept that information than if they’ve started off with that information because it’s relief from the sort of bafflement of the figures that they’ve just given you.

So, I use it when people come up on stage—they are naturally disoriented by the experience of suddenly being in front of 2000 people that they can’t see because it’s just dark and it’s odd, and they’re suddenly looking to me for directions.

That’s a very powerful position in terms of influence. It’s great because from the audience it doesn’t necessarily look any different; I mean, someone has just walked up on stage, but you don’t quite appreciate the level of sort of confusion that that person can then be in.

So, I hypnotize through a handshake. I go in for a handshake and then halfway through the handshake I interrupt it, which again is just adding another level of bafflement because now you’ve got this automated process of a handshake that’s suddenly interrupted, which leaves us completely flummoxed.

So, then an instruction to go to sleep, or to, you could stick someone’s feet to the floor. You could maybe take their voice away. There’s a whole lot of things that you can do at that moment because you’ve created this sort of maximum responsiveness that gets in at a level that seems to bypass the normal conscious filters.

So, I’m using that sort of stuff a lot. And then the whole show is really structured around those kinds of things. I’m filtering for suggestibility, filtering for people that are going to respond well to what I do.

It’s sort of a constant juggling of the conscious things that we are appreciating and the unconscious things that are guiding how we are appreciating them.