Derren Brown Mind Control

Whilst watching Derren Brown playing blackjack and winning thousands of pounds at a casino tonight, I heard him remark that he used a >Memory Theatre to do it:

“I have a big Florentine house, and upstairs is the card room, and in the card room there are fifty-two objects, and as each card comes up I attach a sticky label to one of the objects – so all I have to do to keep track of the four packs of cards is to go from object to object.”

Funnily enough, even as he was speaking I thought he might be lying … that he’d read about memory theatres somewhere and thought it would be impressive to have one. It’s hard to see how it would really help, but maybe I’m being too suspicious. It seemed to me to resemble the rest of his technique of indirection, distracting you from the main objective in order to leave you open to his machinations.[*]

[D. Jennings, ‘Boob-tube Review’, TV Times (17/9/03), p.16]

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[*] See >Short-term Memory Impairment.