Many people see Derren Brown and think that many of his antics involve using NLP, which actually is not the case. Derren lives in the Bristol area and only ever did one NLP training back in late 1997, which was
the NLP Prac in London. Parts of this event were released on one of
the now deleted State of the Art videos and Derren can clearly be seen in the audience! I did my own NLP training (as did Tina) in March 1999 when Michael Breen a co trainer at that event commented (when being asked about Derren) "He's one of ours" which was a bit of an exaggeration (you mean NLP trainers exagerate? LOL) as he was simply one of hundreds of delegates on one single London event, known then as Darren V Brown...
Prior to this Derren had an avid interest in stage magic and sleight
of hand and many of this supposed NLP based demos are actually nothing of the sort and use more mentalism and misdirection. Many NLP forms are full of speculation about his NLP skills and although he has used NLP, its not his main tool kit.
The best example of one demo where NLPers often are "misdirected into believing that he is *doing NLP* is the betting demo shown on C4 TV, where he claimed a 100% success rate on betting
Here is the actual explanation (thanks to wikepedia)
The show was based around the idea that a system could be developed to predict the outcome of horse races with total accuracy. Cameras
followed an ordinary member of the public, Khadisha, as Brown
anonymously sent her correct predictions of 5 races in a row, before
encouraging her to place as much money as she could on the 6th race.
To demonstrate the system to the viewer Brown tossed a coin showing 10 heads in a row to prove it was not impossible, just highly improbable.
After Brown had placed a bet of £4,000 of Khadisha's money on a horse in the final race, he explained that The System didn't really exist.
He had started by contacting 7,776 people and split them into six
groups, giving each group a different horse. As each race had taken
place 5/6ths of the people had lost and were dropped from the system.
Far from Brown knowing which horse would win, he had a different
person backing each horse in each race, and it was simple logic that
meant that one individual, who happened to be Khadisha, won five times in a row. This was similar to the coin flipping earlier: rather than having a predictive technique, Brown had simply tossed a coin repeatedly until 10 heads had come up in a row, taking over nine hours to produce the required film. Brown expressed the opinion that the principle behind The System (essentially confirmation bias) is what is behind belief in spiritualism or homeopathic and alternative medicine.
After the selected horse in the final race lost, and Khadisha was
convinced that she had lost all her borrowed money, Brown told
Khadisha to look again at the betting slip in her hand. The ticket
showed the winning horse's name, meaning Khadisha kept her stake and
received winnings of £13,000. Brown explained that he had decided to
bet for a different horse when he got to the booth.
I had some communications with Derren's agent a few years ago when I
got a more detailed explanation of his views on NLP, some of which are in his recent "Tricks of the Mind" book where he is less than
complimentary about NLP courses!
He is more interested in mentalism than NLP and his first two books
Absolute Magic and Pure Effect show much of how he achieves his
tricks. Interestingly since his first TV appearance in 2000 on C4 both
books are now quite valuable and out of print...
See
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/PURE-EFFECT-DERREN-BROWN-RARE-OUT-OF-PRINT_W0QQitemZ130269833207QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item130269833207&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1294%7C66%3A2%7C65%3A12%7C39%3A1%7C240%3A1318 (BTW I have both)
www.nickkemp.com
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