There are permanent links to pages on the left, as well as smaller posts on various things below.
If you want to get involved then please leave your own comments, anecdotes or thoughts by clicking on the 'add a comment' bit at the bottom of the relevant section. You can also contact me directly if you wish to. Enjoy the site!
I have just finished work on a new site offering portrait sketches. This is following a recent creative outburst which has had me drawing a few actors on big A2 sheets. I love the peculiar sensation of recognising a portrait sketch - its not exactly a photo - but its enough to fire off your recognition neurons.
Since starting sketching again, I have come into touch with a few others who used to be creative, but then stopped. So if this includes you - get started again! You might be surprised at how much you enjoy it, once you get going.
I often think that the true masters of psychology (and certainly psychological persuasion) aren’t the psychologists, therapists or academics. They are the con artists (and not far behind, the magicians, salesmen, marketing gurus and advertisers).
Con routines are frightening in their vicious sense of shrewd exploitation, but equally fascinating in terms of the psychological dynamics. I was once conned out of $40 on a game on ‘Monty’ in New York, at the time it annoyed the hell out of me, but since has provided lots of food for thought.
Everyone else was a stooge. I was the mark. As I pass by, I am fascinated by the hands offering and taking wads of cash from the main guy, playing the cups and ball routine. People are winning every time, and he’s handing out cash, everyone’s enjoying themselves. As I watch, I am now unwittingly involved. Suddenly, no one is betting, yet to me its obvious that the ball is under a certain cup. The guy doesn’t seem to care about the money anymore - he asks for random guesses. With nothing to lose - I point out the cup I think its under. He nods yes! Well done! And suddenly - hes offering a handful of money! Wow, this guy really is a good guy, I haven’t even bet! I automatically reach out to take the money - but hold on - he remembers that I haven’t put anything up of my own. So he declines, and asks me to prove that I had the money to bet. I take out $40. He takes it, as if suggesting he is just about to offer me the money with his other hand - but then pulls both hands back, including my money. He lifts the cup - obviously I was wrong, I’m the mark, the sleight of hand escaped me. Everyone sighs “aw, bad luck!” someone slaps me on the back, all suggesting “there is nothing you can do now”. Confused, I walk away, going over in my head what just happened, and wondering how I lost $40 (which in hindsight I realise was minimal). I realised I was conned - but by the time I look back - they have all disappeared. I have met people who have a very similar story to tell of how the same thing happened to them. The routine was explained on “The Real Hustle” (pictured) with a detailed account of all the subtleties.
Do you have a story to share of how someone tried (successfully or not) to con you? If so - please provide all the details, it would be great to share the story.
Scent is relatively neglected in terms of how much research and attention the other senses receive. More recently, research has been showing up all sorts of interesting things about smell, such as how our noses adapt to chemicals in the air within twenty minutes (i.e., we can’t smell them anymore).
You have likely experienced the strange phenomenon of having a whole era of your life come flooding into memory when you pass someone with a particular perfume or whiff of hair shampoo. Scent is more entwined with our emotions and memories than we give it credit for, and it operates largely on a purely subconscious level. This is why scent is now becoming a hot area in marketing research.
The picture is for Tom Tykwers movie adaption of Patrick Suskind’s novel, Perfume: Story of a Murderer. More information about the research of scent can be found here.
IF YOU’VE SEEN THE SHOW then please leave your analysis, ideas, observations, reviews etc in the forum / blog bit below, ESPECIALLY if you were chosen for anything!!
If you HAVEN’T seen the show, just go and see it (its worth it) then come back and read the comments. The point here is that the comments may obviously contain spoilers!
My Review of the show:
Personally, Derren’s recent work has been a bit too tricksy for my liking - the frenetic running about with clipboards, envelopes, pens etc just screams ‘mentalism’ and doesn’t capture the psychological intrigue of his earlier work. In fact, I would go as far to say that Derren has broken the rule he spelled out in Pure Effect, the need to convince the audience of the ‘process’ you are pretending to use for that sense of wonder. E.g. the first stage show I saw felt full of wonder, as if the whole audience was together with it. Ever since Something Wicked This Way Comes, I don’t think “wow - he’s reading their body language!” I just think “oh - its a trick”. The first half of Enigma was tricksy, the usual running around reminding the audience of whats happening, frisbees, marker pens, and then gasps of delight as various things are turned around to reveal something. As well as the virtuoso showmanship (not just the usual charismatic presentation but the acting, deception etc) I love the humour of these shows, in fact they could be classed more accurately as comedy magic than psychological magic. Many moments had me laughing out loud. The tricksy-tricksy was redeemed in the second half, where Derren surprised the hell out of me by using genuine hypnosis (as opposed to the pseudo ‘bow your head, look hypnotised and write something on this clipboard that I can use as a trick’ hypnosis that hes used in stageshows before.) Surprising because he hasn’t done it on stage before (at least to this extent) and also because there are laws in Britain about public hypnosis acts that he somehow sidestepped. A spirit cabinet routine similar to seance was excellent as live entertainment, very visual and interesting, I still have no idea how it works. The problem here is that Derren’s rushing about strips it of the potential wonder and intrigue it could have had - had he framed it more patiently, it would have been a lot more eerie. On the whole though, although slightly flawed and annoyingly tricksy in places, its very funny and interesting enough to make it worthwhile. Anyone yet to see it, he is selling his new as-yet-unreleased Portraits book for £25 in the foyer.
- I’m never going to bother getting front seats again - I honestly think being towards the back is more beneficial in terms of your chances of getting a frisbee (they are all thrown far), and being able to see the rest of the audience (rather than twisting around whenever something is happening behind).
- On the morning of the show, I had been listening to the Goldberg Variations whilst doing a sketching of Hannibal Lector. On the way up in the car with my friend James, one of the songs we listened to was New Order’s Blue Monday. Coincidentally, both of these were used in the show!
Blessed are Fox Broadcasting for knocking out another belter of a show. Lie to Me stars Tim Roth (Mr Orange in Reservoir Dogs, an excellent British actor) and follows the endlessly interesting day job of an expert in body language and lie detection. Puzzles are solved in a format similar to CSI, your first impressions of a situation gradually evolve during an episode to reveal an unpredictable twist of events. Its based on the work of Paul Ekman, whose books Telling Lies and Emotions Revealed are recommended for anyone interested in observational psychology. I love this show - not quite as much as Dexter but its getting there.
In my Exeter Hypnotherapy practice I met a lot of clients with problems of anxiety, life confusion, panic attacks etc. Underneath the surface of confidence, contentment etc, most lives are anything but. I found this article quite interesting.
Dr Neil Cox of Exeter County Chiropractic did a great talk on 19th March called ‘Think Well’ as part of a series on being more aware of the body, mind and nutrition for better health.
I was grateful to contribute a part about how our minds influence our states, focusing on the mental movies of our subconscious imagination. For those who attended and would like to know more, and anyone else, more information is on the Magic of Mental Movies page here!
I am reading a good book at the moment called “Strangers to Ourselves” by Tim Wilson. Personality theory has normally focused on how to measure ‘personality’, with predictability of behaviour being the only really output of any research results (and the results were never particularly strong in that respect because personalities are more dynamic than lab tests can seemingly account for). Tim theorises on the idea of a conscious personality, and an adaptive unconscious personality, which can be quite different. The research is staggering. For example, a persons conscious ideas about his or her beliefs and prejudices can often be completely contradicted by their automatic actions or responses in a situation. It comes down to that difference between who we think we are, and who we really are. Our automatic responses account for a majority of our behaviours, yet they are the bits we filter out as part of our big defensive campaign to reinforce our ’self beliefs’. Its all very interesting. The more I learn about the automaticity of the mind and the unconscious, the more it dovetails with my experiences of hypnosis and hypnotherapy. Will Williams, Exeter.
Mind control is always an interesting area - The Manchurian Candidate, hypnosis, Derren Brown, the CIA’s secret MKUltra brainwashing program in the cold water and all that kinda stuff.
But the most powerful form of mind control must be to control your own mind, not others. Having self awareness, the ability to recognise when you’re thinking doesn’t make sense. Having the discpline of directing your own mental energy, and actions, to get things done more effectively. Being able to let go of things, whether people, places, objects or old beliefs about things. And also, having the control to reliquish control when need be, and to not live your life in fear of it.
Whilst experience is valuable, having the initial awareness of knowing how to make the most of experience is also vital. This prevents your experiences from just solidifying and reinforcing your mind rather than freeing it up. This is what self help hypnosis is all about.
One morning, a casual looking guy pulls out a violin and starts busking to people emerging from a tube station to go to work. Six classical pieces and 43 minutes later, over 1000 people had passed. Would you have stopped and listened? Probably not - who does? The difference here is that the busker was actually Joshua Bell, a world famous violinist, once a child prodigy, playing on a $3.5m Stradivari, three days after filling Boston’s Symphony Hall for over $100 a seat. Its a perfect experiment to test the strength of recognition, genuine appreciation and values in a different context, with some conformity pressure thrown in too (if everyone else is passing by… then there’s no reason to stop, right?)
I often think that the true masters of psychology (and certainly psychological persuasion) aren’t the psychologists, therapists or academics. They are the con artists (and not far behind, the magicians, salesmen, marketing gurus and advertisers). 
Scent is relatively neglected in terms of how much research and attention the other senses receive. More recently, research has been showing up all sorts of interesting things about smell, such as how our noses adapt to chemicals in the air within twenty minutes (i.e., we can’t smell them anymore). 
IF YOU’VE SEEN THE SHOW then please leave your analysis, ideas, observations, reviews etc in the forum / blog bit below, ESPECIALLY if you were chosen for anything!! 
Blessed are Fox Broadcasting for knocking out another belter of a show. 
I am reading a good book at the moment called “Strangers to Ourselves” by Tim Wilson. Personality theory has normally focused on how to measure ‘personality’, with predictability of behaviour being the only really output of any research results (and the results were never particularly strong in that respect because personalities are more dynamic than lab tests can seemingly account for). Tim theorises on the idea of a conscious personality, and an adaptive unconscious personality, which can be quite different. The research is staggering. For example, a persons conscious ideas about his or her beliefs and prejudices can often be completely contradicted by their automatic actions or responses in a situation. It comes down to that difference between who we think we are, and who we really are. Our automatic responses account for a majority of our behaviours, yet they are the bits we filter out as part of our big defensive campaign to reinforce our ’self beliefs’. Its all very interesting. The more I learn about the automaticity of the mind and the unconscious, the more it dovetails with my experiences of hypnosis and hypnotherapy. Will Williams, Exeter.