talkmagic.co.uk

I was talking to a friend about Derren Brown yesturday and it got me thinking.

I don't really know much about mentalism (I am hoping to buy some material when it's my birthday) but I was wondering

Does Derren Brown hypnotise people (don't expose anything)?

AND

Is there a difference between powerful suggestion and control to affect the mind. Are they both hypnotism, neither, one or the other?

Cheers...

I'm reasonably sure that Derren's on record as saying that he feels there's no such thing as hypnotism .

Brown does sometimes use posthypnotic triggers to produce effects, yes.

Hypnosis is technically just a state of mind in which the critical faculty of the mind is deliberately inhibited, so that suggestions pass directly to the subconscious and become part of your model of reality. I don't know how you're defining "powerful suggestion" and "control" but basically, any technique that slips a suggestion in past the critical faculty will do.

Stage inductions use a wide range of techniques to convince the participant that they are helplessly under the power of the hypnotist (in other words, to get this particular suggestion past the critical faculty). This may include taking people into trance, but it may not. It all depends on the presentation (that's the difficult bit).

you don't have to hypnotise someone to get them to accept whatever you're saying, however. To prove it to someone, I once convinced a friend that there was a gang of hoodies going around piercing cats' ears and leaving the poor things dripping in cheapo diamante. It slipped past her critical faculty because she wanted to believe it was true. So, if you use what's already in someone's mind (even their prejudices) this bypassing process becomes very easy indeed. You can trigger responses like that too.

Derren Brown uses a combination of anchoring and forcing amongst other things, not hypnosis as such. However he does get things into your unconscious mind without you noticing he has done it so to a certain extent it could be named hypnosis however it would be a misnomer I feel.