Derren Brown Explained!

Have a read of this. Read without prejudice and try not to second guess where the words have come from or why they have been presented to you...

You are a person prone to bouts of real self-examination. This is in sharp contrast to a striking ability you have developed to appear socially very engaged, even the life and soul of the party; but in a way that only convinces others. You are all too aware of it being a facade.

You will often be at a gathering and find yourself playing a part. While on the one hand you'll be talkative and funny, you'll be detaching yourself to the point where you will find yourself watching everything going on around you and feeling utterly unable to engage. You'll play conversations back to yourself in your head and wonder what that person really meant when he said such-and-such - conversations that other people wouldn't give a second thought to.

How have you learned to deal with this conflict? Through exercising control. You like to show a calm, self-assured, fluid kind of stability (but because this is self-consciously created, it will create bouts of frustrated silliness and a delight in extremes, or at least a delight in being seen to be extreme). You most easily recognize this control in how you are with people around you. You have learned to protect yourself by keeping people at bay. Because in the past you have learned to be disappointed by people, you instinctively keep people at arms' length, until you decide they are to be allowed over that magic line into your group of close friends. However, once across that line, the problem is that an emotional dependency kicks in which leaves you feeling very hurt or rejected if it appears that they have betrayed that status.

Because you are prone to self-examination, you will be aware of these traits. However, you are unusually able to examine even that self-examination, which means that you have become concerned about what the real you is. You have become all too aware of facades, of sides of yourself which you present to the world, and you wonder if you have lost touch with the real and spontaneous you.

You are very creative, and have tried different avenues to utilize that ability. It may not be that you specifically, say, paint; it may be that your creativity shows itself in more subtle ways, but you will certainly find yourself having vivid and well-formed ideas which others will find hard to grasp. You set high standards for yourself, though, and in many ways are a bit of a perfectionist. The problem is, though, that it means you often don't get stuff done, because you are frustrated by the idea of mediocrity and are wearied by the idea of starting something afresh. However, once your brain is engaged you'll find yourself sailing. Very likely this will lead to you having considered writing a novel or some such, but a fear that you won't be able to achieve quite what you want stops you from getting on with it. But you have a real vision for things, which others fall short of. Particularly in your work situation, you are currently fighting against restraints upon your desire to express yourself freely.

Partly this is because there are ways in which you have been made to feel isolated from certain groups in the past - something of an outsider. Now what is happening is that you are taking that outsider role and defending it to the point of consciously avoiding to be part of a group or who exhibit any cliquey behaviour, and you always feel a pang of disappointment when you see your 'close' friends seeming to follow that route. Deep down it feels like rejection.

For all that introspection, you have developed a sensational, dry sense of humour that makes connections quickly and wittily and will leave you making jokes that go right over the heads of others. You delight in it so much that you'll often rehearse jokes or amusing voices to understand yourself in order to 'spontaneously' impress others with them. But this is a healthy desire to impress, and although you hate catching yourself at it, it's nothing to be so worried about.

You're naturally a little disorganized. A look around your living space would likely show a box of photos, unorganized into albums, out-of-date medicines, broken items not thrown out, and notes to yourself significantly out of date. Something related to this is that you tend to lack motivation. Because you're resourceful and talented enough to be pretty successful when you put your mind to things, this encourages you to procrastinate and put them off. Equally, you've given up dreams a little easily when your mind flitted elsewhere. There are signs of an excursion into playing a musical instrument, which you have since abandoned, or are finding yourself less interested in. You have a real capacity for deciding that such-and-such a thing (or so-and-so a person) will be the be all and end all of everything and be with you for ever. But you'd rather try and fail, and swing from one extreme to the other, than settle for the little that you see others content with.

Conclusion: You present something of a conundrum, which won't surprise you. You are certainly bright, but unusually open to life's possibilities - something not normally found among achieving people. You would do well to be less self-absorbed, as it tends to distance you a little, and to relinquish some of the control you exercise when you present that stylized version of yourself to others. You could let people in a little more, but i am aware that there is a darkness you feel you should hide (much of this in the personal/relationship/sexual area, and is related to a neediness you don’t like). You have an appealing personality – genuinely.

How accurately did it describe you? Did certain phrases ring true? Did it bring a wry smile to your face? Could you see yourself in those passages? You probably could – and you wouldn’t be alone.

The words themselves were written by Derren Brown. During his Tricks of the Mind series for Channel Four (i have referred to this ‘trick’ in past blogs), Brown invited a mixture of students in three different countries to participate in an experiment. Deliberately choosing a mish-mash of believers and sceptics, Brown asked them to anonymously provide him with their dates of birth, a personal object and to draw around their own hand. Using this information he would produce a reading for them in an attempt to accurately predict their personality. In an additional twist, the participants were from three different countries: England, Spain and USA.

Having been presented with their readings, each subject then gave an interview for camera, describing the accuracy of their evaluation and awarding it a mark out of 100. Of the fifteen participants, one in each country were less than impressed and awarded half the available marks or less. The remaining twelve were effusive in their praise, awarding the readings extremely high marks for accuracy. One girl awarded 99%. Another suggested that Brown might have accessed her private diary before reading her.

Having established the accuracy (or otherwise) of the readings, Brown then invited the students to swap their results with each other so they could work out whose reading belonged to whom. It was at this point that they realised they’d been had – the readings were all identical (and identical to the one you read earlier). They’d also been written weeks in advance of meeting any of the participants.

So how does it work? Firstly, it was written with people between the ages of twenty and thirty in mind. If you’re reading my blog, you will largely fall into that age bracket (and if you don’t it will remain our secret). Chances are you’re also fairly intelligent – why would your enquiring mind be directing you to a blog about how the mind works if it were not at least curious!?

So the first thing the fake reading does is to prey on the insecurities of the audience it was designed for. It assumes that people from its target demographic will be pretty self-involved, searching to ‘find’ themselves, prone to introspection and, quite probably, aware of the contradictory aspects of their personalities. The way these insecurities are preyed upon is devious indeed – it prevents them as statements which are almost impossible to refute. In order to achieve this it takes two opposite traits (such as ‘introverted’ and ‘extroverted’) and suggests that the reader is likely to fluctuate between the two. Which, of course, almost everyone does at one time or another. But to say, “Sometimes you’re introverted, sometimes you’re extroverted,” would convince nobody. The strength here lies in burying those messages among many others, deliberately building an elaborate profile which uses an awful lot of words to say very little. The many meanings hidden to greater or lesser degrees within the text also ensure that the subject can pick and choose which aspects they remember and apply to themselves and which they can sweep under the carpet.

A specific example of this can be seen in the statement, “you’ve given up dreams a little easily when your mind has flitted elsewhere”. Of course it bloody has. One day you wanted to own a sweetshop, the next day you wanted to be a fireman: your dream died and was replaced by another as your youthful mind wandered. Equally inane is the statement, “You instinctively keep people at arms’ lengthuntil you decide they are allowed over that magic line into your close group of friends”. Seems obvious to me – most folks only open up to people once they’ve befriended them. People who spill their guts to strangers seem slightly unhinged to most of us.

Newspaper horoscopes use a similar technique, although they’re even less specific. Interestingly, a number of the students admitted that they were expecting to get something vague and general from Brown, only to be astonished by the accuracy of his reading.

Of course, Derren Brown is not the first person to conduct this experiment. Originally described by Bertram R Forer (http://www.skepdic.com/forer.html) as part of a genuine psychological study, it has also famously been performed by uber-sceptic James Randi, Penn & Teller and many others.

Sadly, Channel 4 have blocked YouTube footage of Brown’s version, so instead, here’s a clip of him discussing it with another legendary sceptic, Richard Dawkins...



Oh, and here's a footnote courtesy of my wonderful researcher, Shirley Farkles:

In 1979 the French astrologer Michel Gauquelin placed an advertisement in Ici-Paris offering free personal horoscopes. Of those who received the horoscope, 94% subsequently rated it as accurate. Unfortunately, they had each been sent the same one, that of Dr. Petiot, France's most notorious mass murderer.