Tricks of the mind - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Derren was born in 1971 in Croydon. It was a difficult birth - his mother was in Devon at the time. A precocious and puzzling only child, he liked to paint, foster obsessive habits and once set fire to a neighbour's boat by accident. Derren went on to study Law and German at Bristol University and fell in love with the city. This was a time when marriage between man and city was still frowned upon, so rather than face public derision Derren decided just to live there forever instead. During this time he began to perform magic in bars and restaurants, and gave occasional hypnosis shows. Then in 1999 he was asked by Channel 4 to put a mind-reading programme together for television, which became Derren Brown: Mind Control. Mind Controls 2 and 3 followed and then, in October 2003, Derren caused an international furore by playing Russian Roulette live on television. This secured his notoriety with the public and a big apartment in London. Further specials have followed - Derren Brown: The Seance was the most complained about show in the history of television. He still receives several letters of complaint a week from psychics and Christians. He is sensitive to everyone's objections but knows at least the latter group will forgive him. Derren lives in London with a large collection of taxidermy and a fatalistic parrot.

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DISILLUSIONMENT

The Bible is not history.

Coming to terms with this fact was a fiddly one for me, because I believed in God, Jesus and Satan (ish). And one aspect of believing in those things and meeting once a week with like-minded people is that you're never encouraged to really study the facts and challenge your own beliefs. I always imagined that challenging my beliefs might make them stronger.

It will be hard for many of you to reconcile the image you are most likely to have of me from the high-definition image that graces your stylish front room or caravan - e.g. 'handsomely mysterious' (Nuts Literary Supplement); 'certainly not at home to Mr or Mrs Smug' (Manchester Evening Scrotum) - with the revolting vision of my late teenage self: a bouncing, clapping awfulness who could think of nothing more rewarding than to try to convert his unspeakably tolerant friends to the sanctimonious life he knew as a believer. For all you unsanctimonious believers out there, I'm sure I did you a disservice. Picture, if you require a good vomiting, a whole herd of us being encouraged to display the Pentecostal gift of 'talking in tongues' by a self-styled pastor, with the proviso that if we ceased babbling because we thought it silly then that was indeed the Devil telling us to stop. Envision, as a secondary emetic, me telling a non-Christian friend that I would pray for him, unaware of how unspeakably patronizing such an offer might sound. I would delight in being offended, and puff up with pride at being outspoken and principled. And this the unpleasant result of a childhood indoctrination followed by years of circular belief to support it.

In the last years of the eighties, the rising phenomenon of the New Age movement became a bête noire to my rather rabid pastor and many others like him. We were warned that Satan himself encouraged interest in crystals and psychic healing, and that witchcraft alone could explain the growing number of alternative bookstores popping up in Croydon. I was convinced, and accepted such things as tarot cards as profoundly dangerous. For those of you who find this laughable, please don't think for a moment that plenty of modern churches don't confidently talk of demons as real, if invisible, creatures, populating such sinful environs as student bedrooms and heavy metal music shops. Part of this man's job - a 'pastor', remember - was to convince ordinary, innocent people in his care that such things were true, so that they'd be frightened enough to cling more closely to this religion in which that still small voice of loveliness had been drowned out by a desire for sensationalism.

In the early nineties, however, a small event happened that was to prove to be my own domestic Damascus experience. A Domestos experience, if you like. I was living in Wills Hall, a student hall of residence at Bristol University that comprised mainly a quadrangle (which, as with quadrangles everywhere, we were not allowed to traverse; for grass, when grown in a rectangle, is always sacred) surrounded by old buildings reminiscent of an Oxford college. In fact, the story goes, Mr Wills, the tobacco giant of the twenties, had these and other buildings built in that grand style to create an Oxonian environment for his son who had failed the Oxford examination and had to study in Bristol. (Take heed, any of you students who feel the victim of undue parental pressure. Consider yourselves lucky that your father didn't build the university especially for you.) Any road up, I came down to breakfast late one afternoon from Carsview, the studenty, pretentious name I had given my room, to see a poster in the entranceway of my building. (If English Heritage is already thinking of a plaque, it was Block A.) A large black eye printed onto yellow card advertised a hypnotic show and lecture, to be performed and delivered that night in the Avon Gorge Room of the Students' Union. I had never attended such a thing, and it sounded more fun than the regular evening ritual of drinking fruit tea and deliberating the correct use of Kafkan over the less preferable Kafkaesque, before heading back to my room for a gentle wank.

The formal demonstration, given by a hypnotist called Martin Taylor, was followed by an after-show session back at a student's house, where he continued to hypnotize the more suggestible of us in return, I remember vividly, for a Cornish pastie and overnight accommodation. There was nothing of the Rasputin about him; indeed he was chipper, blond and open about how it all worked. As I walked back late that night with my friend Nick Gillam-Smith, I said that I was going to be a hypnotist.

'Me too,' he said.

'No, I really am,' I insisted.

I found every book I could on the subject and began to learn. There were student guinea-pigs every day to try it out on, and later college gerbils, who proved even less responsive. The exact sort of rugby bloke who had left me feeling terribly inferior at school now proved the ideal subject for this new skill I was learning, and the feeling of control over such people was terrifically appealing. I began to perform little shows around the university, or would hypnotize friends in bars so they could get drunk on water.

I had not been to church with any regularity for a couple of years, but was still a believer. I was amazed to hear from my Christian friends that by hypnotizing people I was ushering in demonic forces. At one show, the membership of the Christian Union sat at the back of the audience and talked loudly in tongues in an attempt, I presume, to exorcize the evil being perpetrated on stage. On another occasion, one Sunday near Christmas, I walked into the big student church to be greeted with 'What's he doing here?' from someone on the back pew. Nice.

I was confused. If God created us, then presumably the human mind is the pinnacle of creation (second only to Amazon.com and Philip Seymour Hoffman). And I certainly knew that I had a better idea of how hypnotism worked than these people. Still, one can't judge an entire religion on the unpleasant behaviour of a few individuals, so I shrugged off these reactions. Indeed, I was unsure of where to take the hypnosis myself. I had hired myself out for a stag night, and I knew that coming on after lesbian strippers and making grown men dance ballet was not my future. So one afternoon, spent as a true flâneur browsing through remainder bookshops in town, I came across Mark Wilson's Complete Course in Magic, an exciting and impressive-looking tome whose top hat and white gloves depicted on its glossy cover promised to teach me all I needed to know to become a competent conjuror. Never one to arrive at an acumen based purely upon my discernment of the sheathing of a set of printed pages bound along one side, ho ho, I set about the task of studying its secrets and learning the esoteric switches, shifts and moves it taught to see whether between us we could succeed.

The slow-creeping obsession of magic, from interest to hobby to grounds for divorce, brings with it an unavoidable fascination with trickery and fraudulence in the world of the paranormal. The tradition of magician-debunkers is almost as old as the debunkees they pursue, and will probably always tag along behind the unavoidably more sensational and popular line of psychics and spiritualists, the exposers embittered and bored by the fact that desperate people seeking easy answers are rarely interested in being told that those answers are lies or that the seekers might be being exploited and manipulated. This, coupled with my love of suggestion and the techniques of the hypnotist, led to an interest in how we might come to believe in such things as paranormal ability, and how we might be convinced by the apparent efficacy of the various New Age practices, which were becoming hugely fashionable among white middle-class people at the time, who presumably felt vaguely guilty about being white and middle-class. Certainly it was clear enough to render the worries of 'ushering in demons' as frightened nonsense. The world of the paranormal is, I feel, a fascinating and at once depressing and oddly life-affirming mixture of self-delusion, placebos and suggestion, charlatanism and exploitation. But there is certainly no need to talk of demons.