Mind Control

When I was younger, you could find me nearly every week in the Occult section at the library. I loved reading about Astrology, palm readings, past life experiences, ghosts and hauntings, psychic phenomena, you name it. Now with a husband who's a skeptic and a father-in-law who's a very good amateur magician, I'm finding it harder and harder to take at face value what I read and what I see on TV when it comes to otherworldly events. Years ago when he first came on the scene, I wanted to believe John Edwards was real (not a douche as South Park claimed on their show). But when my father-in-law demonstrated to me a cold reading and the process behind it, well, I could actually say that South Park was right about something, yet again (it's actually a brilliant show if you get past the poop and fart jokes). So now I'm constantly looking at the different angles and trying to find the simplest explanation for the supposedly psychic or paranormal events first before believing everything I see or read.

But I want to. Oh, I so want ghosts to be real and for some humans to really have the power to tell the future, read minds, and find missing persons. Which is why I continue to write about the paranormal and explore and read about it.

However, recently, I've been watching Mind Control on SciFi with Derren Brown. He's a mentalist and seems as if he can actually read people's minds and control their actions. What's great about this show is that he demonstrates some tricks that magicians use in their acts and tricks that psychics claim are real. And what I find fascinating (and somewhat scary) is how the mind works. I've always loved psychology and Derren shows how he can use some principles of that science along with stage magic, suggestion, and misdirection to aid him in seemingly reading a person's mind, changing their perspective, and predicting their actions or even lifestyles. After some of the bits, he'll briefly demonstrate the techniques behind it, for example:

• Recently, there was a stream of robberies in Russia of people on the street losing their wallets and other personal items. Were they robbed at gunpoint and pick pocketed? No. They willingly gave these items over to the robbers, not even realizing it until it was over. Derren demonstrated this technique on the streets of London and New York (where you think most people are savvy to every trick in the book). He was able to use polite conversation to misdirect the victim and through the power of suggestion get them to hand over their bottled water, keys, and even watches and then they walked away before realizing what happened.
• He went into a jewelry story in New York city and by misdirection paid for his purchase using blank sheets of paper and the clerk didn't realize it until after Derren left the store.
• He chose a random person on the street and changed their watch to a time which Derren guessed they would say. Through subliminal signals, he was able to get them to say the time he had predicted.
• He had a school teacher read aloud a poem several times and picture an image in her head while reading it. He then gave her young students paint and a large canvas and asked them all to paint on it using their hands. At the end, he asked the teacher what image she had in her mind and she said, "teddy bear." What did image look like which the students had painted together? A teddy bear. If you studied the poem, you'd see words that resembled teddy bear and even different letters up and down the lines spelling out the word. Really cool how her mind and the children's minds picked up on that even though the word teddy bear was not said in the poem.
  

Of course, his tricks don't work on everyone. And he'll show those botched tricks as well just to prove that certain people are more susceptible to persuasion than others. For some of his bigger tricks, he'll have people fill out questionnaires so he can make sure his subjects will work the best for his ticks. Really cool! And kind of scary because some of these principles could totally be used to manipulate and hurt others. In fact, throughout history they have, which is what I find so fascinating and something that I'm tying into my latest story.