Wednesday, January 2, 2013

This Secret Was Hidden Until Exposed By Derren Brown's Psychic Powers



Derren Brown produced a television special “Messiah” to demonstrate that people can be conned into believing anything.
The first port of call was Sedona, Arizona. According to Brown this is a place of beauty, tackiness and big business and twenty-five per cent of the residents in Sedona think they are psychic.
Brown hires the Creative Life Center to conduct his experiment and this gives the impression that the psychics participating in this experiment are actually part of the center, when in fact they are not.
The participants are a man who looks a little like Ram Dass, Abby Haydon and two other women, who are apparently psychics. Brown tells them that his name is Daniel Owen and he develop psychic abilities ten years earlier when hit by lightning.
Abby Haydon ran a newsletter, which at the time of writing has been discontinued. She is basically into anything that goes, although her expertise is supposedly in channeling, psychic readings, vortex tours, color healing, and sound healing. Abby has the motto: that if someone comes and asks her to do something she must be able to do it—but as far as I know, nobody has told her she has the power to rise from the dead and then fatally shot her.
Because Abby claims the ability to channel and is willing to participate in Brown’s experiment—she is already getting exposure in this article—she is the one who is going to draw the pictures in another room with which Darren is going to demonstrate his ability to read her mind or psychically pick up her thoughts.
Abby draws four pictures and Derren Brown, the brilliant man that he is, gets them nearly all correct; so impressively that Abby exclaims, ”I am going to be out of job.”
How does Derren Brown, the skeptic, the trickster delude these psychic marvels?
People are puzzled. I mean this guy is impressive. However, I am also a skeptic. I like truth. Don’t you? So I carefully perused the video to see what I could learn.
Derren uses autosuggestion.
The first pictures drawn by Abby were a Star of David and a shrub or tree. However, before Abby went into the adjoining room to draw the pictures there was a little banter and Derren was sowing seeds of people making life changing decisions, vivid images, I am going to get you to quote: “Draw a picture. All I say keep it. Do keep it relatively simple. Don’t make it too detailed. Messup. [sounds like Messiah] Step into it. Imagine it is vivid and real, and I will try and get these to write down whatever impressions I get. Focus on the picture. Step into it a little bit. Nice large and clear on one sheet of paper.”
Derren Brown then makes out he is trying to read Abby’s mind, but this is just a bit of illusory caper from the illusionist.  He claims he is picking up something that is abstract, religious and simple like a cross or a tree or maybe a shrub.  The psychics are impressed. He got the religious content right, and she did draw a shrub.  He was trying to implant the idea that it would be a cross that is made out of a tree and was covering his bases a little by including a shrub. Still the autosuggestion worked.
Just before Abby draws a sailboat on water, Derren calls out “…different images sail through your mind. Don’t go overboard on detail.”
The psychic who looks like a young Ram Dass claims to be a professional and a teacher who helps people develop their psychic gifts. He exclaims, “As a person who trains psychics I would have them watch that film and say this is how you do it.”
The reality is psychics are just gullible people fooling other gullible people. This lot did not even know they were being stooged at all; so much for their acclaimed abilities.

2 comments:

Jim said...

It's a pity the conversations were edited, I would like to hear how he influenced the drawing of the banana and sun. Also, how many places did Derren visit where the people failed to be influenced, and were not added to the movie?

Kevin Cease said...

"Ok so imagine anything and just draw it onto a piece of paper, any image that comes to FRUITION in the mind. It DOLEsn't matter if it's RIPE or not. Just let it form in your MONKEY of a mind and BANANA it on the paper."