@John: This is an excellent review and thought provoking piece. Although I do not live in the UK and have never seen Mr. Brown, the points you make still stand. Kudos.
Have you had a chance to listen to the sk(c)eptic podcast “Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe”? I recommend it.

Many on this thread claim to be on to Brown’s cunning/blatant/dishonest tricks and that doesn’t means that he has nothing to teach you. The fact is that a lot of people don’t realize that they are being lied to, as highlighted to us throughout his shows. He knows people who think watch his show too. Its like he attracts a responsible adult to the conversation by saying the wrong answers to the right questions.

“He never lets on that his reveal is phony.”

That’s exactly it. That’s what I’ve spent hundreds of words trying to express. Regular magicians and mentalists attribute their effects to deliberately impossible and unrealistic things, such that the audience knows they’re lying. Brown does not do this. That’s what’s so seriously wrong about his magic.

I also honestly believe that his “skepticism” is part of his con-act. They are one in the same. There is no “good derren brown” and “bad derren brown”, and the fact that he’s actually suckered people like Randi and Dawkins is proof at his skill as a con-man. Just look at that “Science of Scams” thing. “Oh he’s promoting skepticism among kids, that’s a great thing” you may say. But watch the whole thing and notice what he says at the end. “Extraordinary things require extraordinary evidence.” An intentional bastardization of Occam’s razor. By introducing the term “extraordinary”, he implies that explanations must be fantastic (like in his mentalist shows), when in reality the explanations are VERY ordinary, and of course, simple. Again, he’s setting people up for his “NLP” mentalist crap, by POSING as a skeptic! Amazing trick, but terribly manipulative (especially when targeted towards kids).

The guy needs to be very publicly called out and ostracized by REAL skeptics.

Yes, absolutely – I’d say it’s a form of placebo. I don’t think that precludes any of the possible effects we’ve discussed, though.

The placebo effect itself isn’t very well understood – as you point out, it’s hard to test.

But…

“There’s no way to run a double-blind test with a placebo group…”

If the only way to prove anything scientifically is to do a double-blind with placebo, then you can’t prove the existence of the placebo effect itself.

Clearly there are other acceptable methods of gathering valid evidence which can be applied in this context. Yes, it’s difficult, and yes a lot of research into hypnosis seems to fall foul of confirmation bias.

I think that, in the case of “hypnotic” amnesia, “successful” subjects fall into three categories:

1.) People who are lying about the effect

2.) People who are “saying things because they think they should”

You’ve pointed those out already. These work perfectly well in a lot of contexts for performance purposes – stage hypnosis relies especially on 2.)

But these aren’t acceptable for proving my point that a hypnotist could make someone forget something.

Both 1 and 2 aren’t components of the placebo effect, though.

3.) People who genuinely believe that something is happening to them

This would be traditional placebo. I actually think that 3.) comprises quite a significant number of successful subjects. Placebo subjects aren’t “lying” or conforming to social pressure – they’re experiencing a genuine effect engendered by their own beliefs. This can even be a physiological effect – dopamine release in placebo analgesia, for example.

Functionally, truly believing you can’t remember something is the same as not being able to remember it.

So…

“Saying it because they think they should (which is 99% of hypnosis, so far as I can tell).”

I don’t agree: I’d say that’s more like 50%, and probably the less interesting 50%!

So in tests where subjects claim not to be able to remember, we’ve no way of knowing if they’re simply lying, saying it because they think they should (which is 99% of hypnosis, so far as I can tell), or genuinely experiencing memory loss. Were such results to continue to manifest in a theoretical placebo group it would help to clear that up.

So we’re left with even the most scientific tests being completely unscientific. I have such a huge problem with the acceptance of people being “highly hypnotisable”, as if such a scale has ever been demonstrated or proven. People are certainly more gullible than others. I’m not sure we should be taking the most gullible and using them as our star subjects when testing scientific neurological theory.

However, using “hypnotic” methods, it is possible to convince someone utterly that they can’t remember something, and this can be observed in a lab. I was under the impression that was basically a given. Let’s try and find something to back that up [rummages in the internet]. Try this…

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/hypnosis_memory.htm

Contains this:

“Upon termination of hypnosis, some subjects find themselves unable to remember the events and experiences which transpired while they were hypnotized (for a review, see Kihlstrom, 1985b; Kihlstrom & Barnhardt, 1993)”

So there has been research in that area for quite a long time, and a couple of literature reviews done to that effect.

The problem is that, as it’s obviously a psychosomatic effect (the subjects are just convinced that they can’t remember), it’s pretty hard to tell what the brain is doing and why it works.

That’s why researchers are poking around with MRI to figure it out…

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/01/the_resistence_of_me.html

Links to Neuron, which is a reputable journal.

Some more evidence in this review – http://bit.ly/B3a8H. Ability to forget things under hypnosis seems to correlate to how suggestible someone is…big surprise!

So, I do believe it is possible to create these effects, but also not that hypnosis is a special state of consciousness…if that makes any sense at all!

(In terms of magic, I learnt Tagged, by Rich Ferguson this week, which is both a very clever trick, and an example of beautiful mentalism.)

Taken at face value – does my brain suspend itself and go into a trance when a handshake doesn’t plan out as I expected – no, somehow I think not.