Derren Brown is a firm favourite in this house by now. He’s a great showman, of course, but also brings fascinating insights into the world of hypnotism, clairvoyance, and – grit your teeth for this one – a lot of what is seen as Christian experience. A new series of his has begun on Channel 4 and it started with a bang.

Bobby Kennedy
The challenge he set himself for the first show was to see whether he could manipulate someone to the extent that that person would assassinate a given target – in this case, Stephen Fry. And that’s exactly what happened. Poor Stephen Fry lay ‘dead’ on a stage floor having been shot three times by Brown’s manipulated member of the public. In going through this process Brown was attempting to show that the claims made by US presidential candidate Robert Kennedy’s assassin were in fact true. Kennedy’s killer still claims that he had been hypnotised by the CIA and manipulated to shoot Bobby. Though Brown succeeded in his task of getting Fry ‘shot’ I’m not sure he could claim to have proven the Kennedy theory – since there is a considerable difference between someone being secretly hypnotised by the CIA and someone taking part in what is a TV programme. Surely at no point did Brown’s audience member believe anything truly bad or illegal was going to happen – and hence could fully relax into his hypnotised state. Whatever. It was a great show.

Belief
For me, however, the highlight was the point at which, during the process to see how susceptible to hypnosis he actually was, this guy was dipped semi-naked into a bath full of ice-cold water. So cold was the water that staying in it for too long would have killed him and sure enough the monitors set-up to watch his heart showed that his heart-beat was slowing to a dangerous level – at which point he was taken out. But under a hypnotic state this guy was totally unaware of how cold the water really was. He was quite content to sit up to his waist in it. While his mind believed the water was warm, his body and heart were displaying the true temperature.

Last week I mentioned the report about those who appeared inebriated even though they had only been drinking a placebo. How powerful the mind can be. Under certain conditions we can believe things where there is no substance to that belief whatsoever. Fascinating.


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