“Where Is My Mind” by The Pixies rox… “With your feet in the air and your head by the ground. Try this trick and spin it, yeah. Your head will collapse, and there’s nothing in it and you’ll ask yourself: Where is my mind?”
Last night was a milestone in TV history as psychological illusionist/mentalist Derren Brown played Russian Roulette live on terrestrial TV. Last month he screened an advert where he asked the population to fill out an application form if they would like to be considered as his volunteer/assistant for the show. From around 12,000 applicants he whittled it down to just one person, whose job it was to load the single live bullet into a numbered chamber of his/her choice in a 6-shooter revolver. I’m sure the show pulled in a staggering number of viewers due to the incidence of both fans and schadenfreude in the population. The number of sceptics seem to overshadow the believers with things such as these and it seems that a lot of people tuned in hoping to see a live snuff event go down in history. Brown went through with it and he survived in cool fashion too, as opposed to brown trouser fashion.
Representatives from the police have criticised his controversial trick, saying that this could lead to copycats putting themselves in danger. Strange, since the only type of people who would have guns in this country (where guns are banned) are certified armourers and gangsters. But even gangsters have respect for their weapons, I’m sure. What I’m not sure about is if there are (non-drugged up, non-influenced) people out there stupid enough to put a gun to their head and pull the trigger, but if there are, please do rush them a Darwin award. People could blast Brown’s stunt (no pun intended) but we all know that stupid people wielding guns and killing each other isn’t necessarily a bad thing from an evolution standpoint.
Derren Brown is amazing and certainly the most interesting mentalist I’ve seen in a long time since the heydays of Max Maven and others from the 80s. Heheh, I keep using the term “mentalist,” but I’m only doing so because it’s the correct terminology used in the industry for those who perform feats of the mind. Derren Brown is a mentalist much different to the mentalist who parades through your town with a plank of wood on a leash, claiming to be Santa Claus. I’ve seen a lot of mentalists do their routines and I find a lot of tricks they do, especially to groups, are set up in such a way that the so-called mentalist can seemingly read peoples’ minds. But what is really happening in the so-called mentalist’s head is a simple mathematical calculation. It’s just like those “Think of a number between 1 and 50. Multiply that number by 15, etc.” tricks where you are able to “guess” the number a person has selected in their head.
Brown doesn’t do tricks like these or those dodgy mentalist tricks that David Blaine does. I don’t believe he’s using accomplices or cheating in his routines, because I do know of some of the subliminal suggestion techniques that exist and can be practised by you and I. I can see clear as day some of the methods he uses to try to plant suggestions into people’s heads, but that’s the easy part. It’s like those who surf the web. They know how to surf the web, but do they know how it works and what’s happening everytime you click your cursor over a link? With minimal practice, anyone could plant suggestions in another person’s head, but the real difficulty lies in detecting whether or not that person has taken up that suggestion subconsciously. That’s where the real skill comes in and from watching Brown, I could imagine the thought processes he’s going through when projecting suggestions subliminally, but I cannot even begin to see how he’s able to determine whether people are picking up on his suggestions. He seems to have a very good understanding of human psychology and thinking patterns, which might have served him just as well if he decided to become an attorney instead, having studied law at Bristol Uni.
No matter what kind of battle you may have, be it mental or physical, the battle will always begin in the mind. It’s the first obstable you have to overcome before turning any concept into reality. You hatch an idea and the neurotransmitters do their business on the rest of your body. I could walk down the path of questioning where ideas come from and what physiologically and chemically constitutes “an idea” but I’m going to go the other way. The mind is unarguably the most powerful organ and can be split non-physically into 2 clear cut components: the conscious and the subconscious. The conscious mind uses an inductive system of reasoning, meaning that a thought can be debated and considered before deciding whether or not to turn it into reality (e.g. you could think of moving your hand and decide whether that actually physically happens or not). The subconscious mind uses a deductive system, meaning that it is unable to reason. When a thought is passed to the subconscious and taken up, that thought is immediately carried out (e.g. once your subconscious mind thinks of moving your hand, it automatically happens). Bypassing the conscious thought processes to the subconscious is what mentalists and hypnotists try to achieve for a living, and believe me when I say that mentalism and hypnotism is not a trick but very much a reality.
A lot of mentalism relies on human psychology, average thought statistics and the widely misbelieved facts (e.g. it is generally thought that Atlas carried the world, but he didn’t. He only carried the axis of the sky). Next time you’re seated beside a fanciable person on a train or in a library, turn to them and ask them to call out the first animal they can think of that lives in the jungle. If you then reached into your pocket and pulled out a sealed envelope containing a picture of a lion, you may well have broken the ice and instilled enough mystery to the situation for further conversation and possibly a date for the evening. But don’t forget to tell them that a lion doesn’t even live in the jungle (maybe falsely perpetuated in children’s books and catchy songs with lyrics such as “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight“). Similar approaches work when asking someone to select a number between 1 and 5. The most frequently selected number is 3. Most people who select this number can be considered to be prudent and/or indecisive individuals at the time, because it’s the middle number, indicating safety and/or indifference.
I had a dream last night where I was sitting down on the pavement beside my house, surfing the web somehow from a floating terminal (that I must have purchased from the year 2013 or something). I noticed a cat purring at my feet. I petted it for a while, then turned to continue staring at the information on the screen. I felt the cat lick my toes and the bottom side of my feet. This went on for a short while before I looked down to examine my feet. This was when I realised that the cat had been licking several puncture type wounds on the flat side of my foot. I woke up this morning and whilst walking to the kitchen, I stepped on a small thorn buried in the carpet. I pulled it out of my foot and sure enough, it left a small puncture type wound. It’s bizarre enough when life imitates art, but when life imitates dreams… you have to stop and tell yourself it was just coincidence; that life is only as predictable as the weather.
[The sky on one of its "on" days (as opposed to one of its "off" days)]
