Banjo wrote:MCN wrote:abcd wrote:I remember the horse racing trick....
Very clever and you almost believed it.
I suspect with this Lottery one there will be some sort of very intricate trick involved.
Derren Brown makes no secret of the fact that it's all trickery. He usually explains how he did it, too.
That's what I love about him, he's completely honest about the techniques he uses, he doesn't try to bullshit you (at least not that much).
Actually a lot of the time he will lie about how he does his tricks. He will often say he used some form of mind control or subliminal techniques when in actual fact he is just performing a simple magic trick.
A good example is in one of the early series where he got some business man to draw something and Derren drew the exact same thing. He then explained how it was done by showing the man's taxi ride to meet Derren and all of the images he had drawn were hidden in shop windows throughout the journey suggesting it was purely subliminal thinking that had made the man draw what Derren had wanted him to draw. The reality is it was actually a simple magic trick and the taxi journey had nothing to do with it, except to make you think there were some mind games involved.
Another example is in one of the programs Derren is in a shopping centre and performing to a group of people. He needs to 'randomly' select a number between 1 and 10 so he starts at 1 and says each number getting the audience to put up their hand if it is then number they are thinking of. This is not random at all as 40% of people will think of the number 7 when asked to think of a number between 1 and 10. If you ask this question to a group of people then it becomes very close to 100% that the majority will choose the number 7. It's a simple technique that magicians have used for decades.
One final example is when he 'teaches' an old woman to play poker and beat some professionals. He supposedly teaches her how to read people and after he is finished he tests her by seeing if she can tell what cards he has by sorting them into two piles of high cards and low cards. The audience (and the woman herself) believe that she is really guessing whether these cards are high or low, but in actual fact Derren Brown is performing a variation of a classic card trick called 'Out of This World'.
I think Derren Brown is brilliant, but 90% of what he does is classic magic tricks and even if he tells you it's something else he is probably lying.