Guess I'll be designing uplinked stuffed toys then? or get that job at LEGO I've always wanted... I can live with that.

Also, this will only work until people become immune to psychological hacking... By buying the Norton NLP package?

[edit] also, Videosift should be fine in the future then? lovingly crafted Pavlovian bondage engine that it is.

It probably helps a great deal that the police officer was forced to give directions in a language that's not his primary language. The NLP techniques that he used are VERY basic, and were clearly memorized for the purpose of this little scam (and similar encounters). If he was actually hypnotizing the cop, it wouldn't have looked quite the same as what he does in the video.

I *know* this will be long. But understanding things should never be allowed to be reduced to sound bites and short sentences.

Police raided a school as an exercise? Not even some warrents? Sounds like some individuals whom need to be held accountible for their jobs. Which could be fines, jail time, lose of job, and so on. People make mistakes, and do dumb things. Can you honestly say you haven't done dumb things in your life so far?

The narrator is trying to use fear, to get the proper response out of you, the audience. To some degree, as with posters above, he succeeds at the task. He uses a collection of words and phrases, and links them to imagery, sounds, and even old pictures. In ways, this concept is known as NLP, or, Neuro-logical programming (look it up in wikipedia, its both fascinating and scary stuff).

Police have to keep up with technology and tactics, as their duty in our country, is to up hold the law. The legistators create laws, the executive signs such law in to effect. Its the law enforcement (i.e. the police, FBI, and other local/state/federal agencies) whom maintain the law. The justices decide on whether the laws are within Consitituional limits, or if they breach them. All these sets of checks & balances do not work, if the citizens of the country let in to the fear this narrator wants you to feel. I know the police in my town. Friendly bunch whom work very hard to keep things normal and safe. They are very much studied and watched. We pay them very well, and make sure they have the proper tools to do their job correctly, honestly, lawfully, and to be responsible.

The 'police state' effect, that the narrator talks about, did come in to effect during the Bush Administration. The US Patriot Act was passed in to law very quickly, shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. One of its passages allowed the goverment to circumvent the 4th Amendment, allowing the White House to 'spy' on over 300 million Americans. This was conducted in an effort to catch and eliminate "...those whom are a threat to our country." This narrator does not hold Mr. Bush, nor the White House accountible to each and every time, this action took place.

If I recall the issue of military 'APC's for Waco, Tx correctly. The Branch Davidians were holed up in a central structure compound with numberous fire arms. Now, this by itself was not illegal. The agents conducting the warrents and arrests initally were met with the civilian sold version of the Barrett M82A1 'light fifty' rifle. This weapon, to my knowledge, is a single shot weapon (the military version can fire rounds from a magizine....I think?). I'm sure the gun nuts on here could inform us, of the gun's name. Anyways, this weapon, like its military cousin, could blow holes through armored police cars. The APCs were used to conduct operations and hopefully bring the matter to a non-violent conclusion. As the history books show, this did not happen. But the police, and FBI, did not racket up their skills and tools in a vacuum. After the event was over, there were a number of studies on the issue, and people held properly (depending on one's viewpoint I guess) of their actions and inactions that led to the events.

If you, the citizen really are consern about the nature of the police or law enforcement, then why not go visit the police. Talk to them, become active in your community and seriously look at how a police state could be formed, and take proper, legal, honest action to oppose it. Believe it or not, the police I know, are AGAINST a police state. And they are in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (since, some of you conversatives think us Mass residents are all commie, liberal, socialistic, islamic happy, tree hugging, yuppy, homosexual liking, religios hating, psych-paths....did I leave anything out?). In fact, thsoe whom are liberal REALLY are against the police state. We voted to remove Republicans at the federal level, out of office (since the Bush admin *IS* Republican).


Finally, recall its Thomas Jefferson that said, (paraphrasingly) that if we are afraid to speak our minds in pursuit of our nations freedoms and equalities, then we allow tyranny to win.

His use of 'NLP' in the majority of his tricks is a running joke among magicians. It is the 'trick' behind most of what he does only in the sense that he is performing conventional sleight of hand and other tricks, but covering it with talk of NLP. It's much like magicians in the 40's talking about black magic or African voodoo being behind the sleights they are performing. The thing is that Derren Brown has just done an exceptionally good job of making it look like NLP is the only explanation for the effects he performs.

One example would be his trick where he gets a person to pull a coin out of their pockets and hold in their fists while Derren's back is turned. He then names the year the coin was printed. He doesn't succeed everytime, but most of the time he gets it dead on or very close. He has revealed though that real trick though is that he somehow came to know that 1992 was by far the most printed year for a specific coin in Britain. All he needed to do was select people who had that particular coin and bias them to choosing that particular coin. Pure chance from that point was enough. By all appearances to everyone though it looks like an impossible task without some kind of bizarre explanation like NLP or reading body gestures.

These kinds of parables are nonsense, and people just tack on at the end their favorite causes... "and what happens with the monkeys is the same reason why liberals support multiculturalism."


A couple of years ago in a neurolinguistic programming (NLP) lecture that I sat in on, the lecturer told an absolutely retarded parable that she claimed was true.

She and her husband were at a zoo, and they saw some polar bears that were walking around in only half of their enclosure because there used to be a fence there. Once the fence was removed, the polar bears were so used to the fence being there, that they didn't realize they could walk farther now.

Her husband jumped into the enclosure and showed them that there was no fence there, but then jumped out in a hurry after they realized they could attack him... ha ha... get it? It's so inspirational.

I later learned this is just a story that a number of NLP lecturers tell as if it happened to them.

^The situations you suggest are created by Brown. I should have mentioned in my previous post that he is a showman, and a former conman. All of the "this is a unique situation" and (if you've seen it) the Russian Roulette bit is set up. The participants are screened without their knowledge, and often groomed for weeks. What's great is that Brown is upfront about these fact. But the setup is only what creates the drama, and not what seals the deal itself--that's the NLP.

I understand the skepticism, but if you read some actual NLP literature (eg. rapport, anchoring and reframing) and try some of it for yourself, you'll get the idea pretty quickly that theses techniques are responsible for the effects you see in Brown's performance.

>> ^RhesusMonk:
>> ^SaNdMaN:
But how can he be so confident that this would work? It seems like one of those things that would not work on everyone. What if he does the trick and it fails on live TV?

This is called Neurolinguistc Programming (NLP) and is based strongly in Gestalt psychology and a huge amount of statistical data produced in the 1970s and 80s concerning how human brains associate speech, concepts and sensations and what the testable results of those associations are. The actual origin of the phenomenon/heuristic is fascinating (literally a combination of psychology and math), and is a must-read for people interested in how humans influence and are influenced. For a long time it was used as a kind of quick-fix psychotherapy a la behavioral modification in clinical settings (patients would be imparted with associations of sensation and cognition without conscious awareness in order to relieve symptoms). These days, it's used in board rooms and at card tables as well. Not all of it works all the time, but unless you're performing tricks for an audience, no one is even going to know you're trying, so failure looks the same as doing nothing at all. Derren Brown is not just a practitioner of this art, he is a major contributing pioneer; he is, as he mentioned, aware of the risks of failure, and he has even stated that this awareness, imparted to his subjects, is immensely influential in getting the tricks to succeed.


I'm aware that it's NPL, but NPL doesn't work with everyone, just like hypnosis doesn't work with everyone. Yet he supposedly uses this technique in situations where he can't afford for it not to work. That's why I think he's using some other trick and just says that it's NLP.

>> ^SaNdMaN:
But how can he be so confident that this would work? It seems like one of those things that would not work on everyone. What if he does the trick and it fails on live TV?


This is called Neurolinguistc Programming (NLP) and is based strongly in Gestalt psychology and a huge amount of statistical data produced in the 1970s and 80s concerning how human brains associate speech, concepts and sensations and what the testable results of those associations are. The actual origin of the phenomenon/heuristic is fascinating (literally a combination of psychology and math), and is a must-read for people interested in how humans influence and are influenced. For a long time it was used as a kind of quick-fix psychotherapy a la behavioral modification in clinical settings (patients would be imparted with associations of sensation and cognition without conscious awareness in order to relieve symptoms). These days, it's used in board rooms and at card tables as well. Not all of it works all the time, but unless you're performing tricks for an audience, no one is even going to know you're trying, so failure looks the same as doing nothing at all. Derren Brown is not just a practitioner of this art, he is a major contributing pioneer; he is, as he mentioned, aware of the risks of failure, and he has even stated that this awareness, imparted to his subjects, is immensely influential in getting the tricks to succeed.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Derren Brown, mind reading, tricks, psychic' to 'Derren Brown, mind reading, tricks, psychic, NLP' - edited by RhesusMonk

This is stupid. His observations on body language are somewhat correct, but you don't need NLP to make them. They're pretty basic and sometimes they cross over to simple pop psychology or outright bullshit (and let's not even get into the matter of his melodramatic delivery and language). Basically, he's showing off the cold reading side of NLP: pseudo-objective and unnuanced interpretations given as facts to make you think he can see through anyone. I like Korzybski's idea of a non-Aristotelian system of thought, but NLP is not it. NLP is to non-Aristotelian thought as Scholasticism is to Aristotelianism, i.e. a convoluted and unnecessary dead-end.

But what ticks me off the most is that the guy is trying to debunk Fox News, which is run by a bunch of idiots, by defending someone even more idiotic, namely a conspiracy theorist nut disguised as a professor (or more accurately, former university lecturer and teaching assistant). The first thing a "professor" should do is say that he doesn't believe the conspiracy theories because there isn't sufficient conclusive evidence, but that the real important thing is that Muslims believe in them. Thus he would bypass even Hannity's brain dead "questions" and could talk about his course (because Hannity hates Muslims and would love to make fun of their conspiracy believing ways). The fact that he didn't do this and chose to go on about how this little minuscule piece of possibly relevant information was somehow a big boost of conspiracy theories shows one of two things: either that he simply is a general idiot and thus is unfit to teach in the first place; or that he really believes his "evidence" makes a strong case for the conspiracies, which fact proves him to be an idiot and thus unfit to teach anyway (at least on the topic of anything related to 9/11 and other conspiracy theories). From his Wikipedia article, the latter seems more likely.

Did some googling and those zones don't seem to agree with the NLP explanations.. http://www.nlp-practitioners.com/interactive/nlp-eye-access-cues-game.php - interesting though

You only see a short clip here - chances are he'd already auto-suggested the card to choose to Fry a long time before he did the trick. Take a search on the Sift for more of Derren (see the Subliminal Advertising or the NLP trick on Simon Pegg on YouTube) for more on how he does this.

BTW, if you like Derren and/or his tricks, get his book "Tricks of the Mind" as he explains a lot of what he does and even helps you learn some of those skills!

BrknPhoenix: I'm have a big geek-on for Derren Brown, so I have to correct you on the NLP thing. Although he acknowledges that there are some good general concepts in NLP, which he makes use of now and then, Derren knocks it in his book for being too rigid in its application of those concepts (as well as massively overstating its own effectiveness).

Some of the main techniques you'll see in this show are cold-reading, reading (and sending) body language, and hypnotism. However, over and above all of these is the art of showmanship. You'd be amazed how much of this stuff works purely through getting the people involved to believe it will work...

Kraz, as far as the mechanics involved, look up something called NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming). Wikipedia has some stuff on it.

Amazing how powerful NLP can be.