Maybe you should use more subtle powers of suggestion and other mysterious awesomeness to convince people that Derren brown is a charlatan.

You don’t need to do the 6 thing before asking them to name a vegetable. It’s just one of those strange things – ask people to name a vegetable and most people will say “Carrot”.

Similarly, if you ask people to name a fruit, most people will say “Orange”, and if you ask people to pick a number between 1 and 10 most people will pick “7″.

Try it. The majority of the time you’ll be able to “magically” predict their answers.

Admittedly yes, it is new scientist, but does contain references to actual science type papers, and since I’m not a neuroscientist I can’t speak to the level of acceptance of the theories presented.

Also a nice video to watch, which you may have seen already,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voAntzB7EwE

A quick google scholar search turns up this,
http://pages.pomona.edu/~rt004747/lgcs11read/Schacter87.pdf
Fairly dense, I admittedly phased in and out for most of it, although the bit starting on the second page about implicit memory was interesting, as was the section beginning page 6, regarding repetition priming effects, also illustrates the point I’m trying to make. The gist I got from it was that stimulus events considered to be too brief to consciously perceive are still processed at a fairly high level by the brain, to nearly directly quote the paper. Things you don’t notice at the time can still affect your perceptions and decisions. I’ll admit I swiftly lost the plot after that point, so I may be wrong in my opinion!

Another article, which I sadly can’t find, but am convinced of having read was an analysis of how pickpockets and illusionists could manage to take peoples possessions so successfully. It turns out that the best ones had learned how to move their hands in arc shaped lines, as opposed to straight ones, as well as the art of total misdirection. The arc shapes were important as they didn’t register that well with the victims/audience members eyes, I think the reason was something to do with micro-saccades, the tiny movements the eye makes constantly. You may have to take that on faith though, unless I can track the paper down.

Apologies for length, I got a little carried away researching it, and also managed to stumble onto an interesting article about Korsakoff’s syndrome and its effects on spatial memory, which is odd, as it was only this afternoon that I was reading the article on RPS about Korsakovia. Bizzare. Also, apologies for crap linkage.

Having said that, I take issue with the your conviction that people cannot be manipulated into thinking things, or taking actions, against their will. Normally, I’d cite a bunch of studies and things, but I’m a bit hungover and can’t be arsed to trawl the nets for them, so feel free to ignore/belittle my opinion. Having said this, I remember one specific test in which a group of participants were shown different texts in advance of a moral choice type test. The texts were the ten commandments, a chapter of an Ayn Rand novel (if I remember correctly) and a childrens story book. I think. I may be misremembering. The ten commandments were definitely in there though, and are relevant because the people who read them made more conscientious choices on the test, whether they were religious or not. Which struck me as odd. Another test, I think it was a basic aptitude/IQ affair, was printed on different coloured paper. Red caused people to do worse. Statistically, sports teams who wear red are more likely to win than those that wear blue.

What I’m saying is that there is a host of evidence (which admittedly I haven’t provided), that people can be influenced by things that they are not conciously aware of, and I don’t think it too great a stretch to assume that Derren Brown has some way of using this to his advantage.

A nice example is one I was shown in a pub, so it comes on high authority – get someone to write down the number 6 for a while, saying it out loud and stuff and then ask them to name a vegetable. Odds are they’ll say carrot, and if you’ve written this down on a piece of paper previously then you’ll look like a magician too. I have no idea how this trick really works, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that carrot has 6 letters and the subjects brain has been primed to think about 6 letter words.

Still, who knows? Neuroscience is a young discipline, and we may never get to the bottom of the brains gooey secrets.

It was hilarious watching him using the “wisdom of crowds” idea on the lottery. Sure, with his given example of guessing the weight of a cow I can believe that the average of a series of guesses would produce a reasonable outcome. But clearly the difference between that and the lottery is that you have some information on which to base your guess. Any talk of looking for “patterns” in a series of (uniformly distributed) random numbers is clearly ludicrous.

What a tool.

Someone else said that averaging a load of people’s random guesses produces something as random. It doesn’t, it produces something less random. A mode average would be random, sure, but he even specified he ‘used’ a mean average, which would simply create a lot of guesses near 25. If you took his logic that the larger the group the better, and averaged 100000 people’s guesses, every ball would be guessed as 25 exactly with overwhelming likelihood. Even with 24 people, the chance of a 2 being predicted is very very low indeed.

For the stats/maths types amongst you, he’s used a mean on discrete data. It’s just complete nonsense. Argh. As a mathematician, that some people are believing and even trying out this explanation is extremely infuriating :P

I think that’s where I have to differ with you John. We all know Derren is a magician (if you don’t you really haven’t been paying attention). If we know he’s a magician then we know he will lie (and he admits it explicitly at the start of every show), so there’s nothing violated in this performance contract; I don’t buy into there being some point in time where we all agreed a magician could lie but not about how he did the trick.
The reveal show was terrible yes, but only because it was devoid of spectacle and Derren’s usual knack for weaving tricks into a fresh, engaging narrative.