Derren Brown - Messiah
I’ve written before about how our thoughts can lead us astray and how our perspective of the world depends on whether we want comforting vs. enlightening explanations of the things we experience.
Well I’ve just stumbled across someone who does a fantastic job of showing just how malleable our thoughts and beliefs can be, and how readily we’ll accept an explanation of things we see without question, even if there’s no truth in it. That someone is Derren Brown and there is a series of videos up on YouTube from a visit he made to America.
Naturally the first question one might ask while watching these videos is, “How do we know he’s not faking it?” The answer is: we don’t. However we do know that the techniques he uses are founded on natural principles anyone can learn. Techniques, such as cold reading and hypnosis, which illusionists like Derren employ to perform the same feats which others have long attributed to various spiritual/mystical abilities.
The series presents great examples of why personal experience is not a valid way of accounting for the truth of one’s beliefs.
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June 6th, 2008 at 8:38 am
“…our perspective of the world depends on whether we want comforting vs. enlightening explanations of the things we experience.”
Luckily enlightening explanations often end up to be quite comforting
July 16th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Hi Mark,
Thanks for sharing this video. I pretty much stayed up all night, watching most of Derren’s videos. It’s fascinating! I wish he went into how he exactly got people to easily convert to his ideas. I’m assuming there was much more trickery than what is shown in the video.
Hmmm where’s all your readers? I remember there were so many avid readers on here.
I still love reading all your posts. I can see a shift though lately to a more scholarly Mark! It’s going back to uni isn’t it? - ha ha!
Cheers,
Ellie
July 16th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Hi Ellie!
Thanks for stopping by.
I know what you mean, I spent most of the time watching his vids pondering how it works. From what he said, it’s hypnosis etc., and from what others have said, it looks so convincing because of the way the episodes are edited; there’s a lot that we don’t see which would make what’s going on clearer. If you look through the list of related videos there’s a few where people explain what’s going on.
Some of my readers are still around, but most are silent now it seems. Understandable since most of the ones who commented were here for a different sort of post than the more scholarly stuff :p
July 16th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Hi Mark,
Jenny and I are still here!
July 17th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Good to hear from you Erin!